MANY of us make stern resolves at midnight on 31 December, often to abstain from substances associated with celebrations. Sadly, many of these resolutions will be forgotten by the morning, and most of the rest wonât be fulfilled. So begins yet another year plagued by guilt and a sense of failure.
But Feedback is here to help you succeed. Our research suggests the resolutions that arenât kept are those made on the spur of the moment, often at the last minute on New Yearâs Eve. Another big mistake is negative absolutism: âI will never do X againâ is, it seems, a route to failure.
So our seasonal competition asks for your resolutions in good time. What offbeat project, described in a sentence or two, would make life more fun in interesting or exciting ways? One of Feedbackâs colleagues, for example, is resolving to discover how fellow commuters judge food safety, in the hope of educating them in the basics of probability. Another will save a language by learning Tariana (31 January, p 44).
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You may submit up to two entries per person by letter, fax or email: please put âFeedback competitionâ in the subject line or above the postal address. Thanks to the generosity of Penguin, 10 lucky winners will receive a copy of So Shall We Reap, Colin Tudgeâs look at the future of food. And we resolve to get a bottle of something pleasant to accompany it.
The winning entries will be chosen for their wit and originality. All entries must reach Feedback by Monday 13 December. The winners will be announced in the 8 January issue. The editorâs decision is final.
WHO HANDS out names? We have prions that are infectious proteins, prions that are birds with a particularly acute sense of smell, and preons that are subatomic particles. Steve Hibbert suspects that the common factor is simply that these are âsciency-soundingâ words. Priddlepuck and nandoofler are not. Do scientists have an innate predilection for such names, he asks, or are they nurtured to follow naming conventions?
And he has a challenge for readers. You must be able to dredge up particularly non-sciency names that egg-heads have squinked into the scientific lexicon by the backdoor. He provides an example from his work in electronic broking. A programmer writing a core application asked the business mandarins what it should be called. They replied âWe donât care, so long as it worksâ. So now Hibbertâs colleagues have to deal with problems with spongler overload and the occasional spongler failure, always maintaining po-faced seriousness.
LAST week we featured a âtasteless press release of the weekâ about AIDS. This week we bring you the most cringe-making press release of the week. Itâs about heart disease, and it comes from the University of Michigan: âListen â do you want to know a secret?â it begins breathlessly: âDo you promise not to tell?
âThe Fab Four are back, and theyâre heading straight for the hearts of millions. Itâs enough to make you want to âTwist and Shoutâ! No, itâs not the Beatles. This Fab Four is a combination of four kinds of medicines that can protect the heart â and maybe save the life â of almost anyone who has ever had a heart attack or chest pain. Although each one of them is great as a solo artist, the Fab Four are even better in concert as a group, say University of Michigan doctors. They âCome Togetherâ to lower cholesterol and blood pressure, slow the heartbeat and keep blood flowingâŠBut many of those who could benefit from this drug combo havenât heard the news. Thatâs why a University of Michigan Cardiovascular Center leader is working âEight Days a Weekâ to spread the word about the Fab Four.â
Weâll spare you too much more of this and go to the punchline from this paperback writer: âJust who are the Fab Four, anyway? Well, the groupâs members have names that arenât quite as catchy as John, Paul, George and Ringo. Instead, they go by the names of aspirin, beta blockers, ACE inhibitors and cholesterol-lowering drugs.â
AT LAST, a new (to us) technological game that doesnât involve a search engine. Meg Kingston introduces us to the textonym. Thatâll be the set of words generated by a particular sequence of key presses on a mobile phone, when the phoneâs software is predicting what word you want. For example, keys 2-2-4-3 can signify ache, acid or cage. Press 7-4-6-6-3-7 for phones, simmer and sinner.
The random nature of the groupings produces some eerie resonances when you consider the words together. What about apron arson, for example? Can a barge be described as acrid? Has an anode ever cooed? Can you debug death? Does the study of maths result in oaths? If the bane of the band was acne, would they be cured if a cane came?
The largest set she knows of is nine words for keys 2-6-9: Amy, any, bow, box, boy, cow, cox, coy, coz. If anyone can beat it, weâd like to know.
WE BEMOANED the lack of a unit for units (13 November). Andrew Fry reckons that we have touched on âone of the few genuinely self-referential concepts that come to mindâ â like the set of sets, which naturally includes itself as a member. âThe unit for units,â he proposes, is the âunitâ â which is in turn a unit.
But, he adds, âIâm having trouble with the concept of 200 milliunits.â
âCrunch time for Europe moon probeâ â the BBC website fails to express its confidence in the SMART-1 mission
