A COLLEAGUE recently bought a new VW car and was very pleased with it, until the engine suddenly stopped on a busy main road, with the dashboard showing the cryptic error message “EPC”. An emergency call brought a helpful service engineer, complete with laptop. He plugged it into a socket hidden down near the pedals, then waited while Windows crawled into life and diagnosed the fault.
EPC, it seems, stands for Electronic Pedal Control. Instead of a mechanical linkage between the accelerator pedal and the engine, the car has an electronic sensor that detects the pedal’s position and sends it to the engine. There had been a “communication problem” between the pedal and engine, the engineer explained, which the laptop had now reset.
“It should be fine, but take the car to a garage for a permanent repair as soon as you can,” he advised.
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Our colleague agreed to do exactly that, but for peace of mind he asked what to do if the engine stopped again before the car had reached a garage.
“Turn off the engine, take out the ignition key to shut down the electronics, and restart”, the engineer explained. “That should do it.”
Feedback has been driving cars for over 30 years, many of them old bangers, and never once has the mechanical link between a pedal and the engine broken. The same goes for our colleague. Is it really progress if a vital link breaks down in a brand new car and can be repaired only by shutting down the electronics and rebooting? Perhaps “close all windows” should be part of the recovery procedure.
MICHIGAN’S state government has a long online list of non-accredited universities, gathered from the CVs of past – presumably unsuccessful – applicants for jobs. It is used to check the educational claims of over-eager job-seekers and includes some wonderfully unlikely institutions, such as: His Majesty’s University of Polytechnics, Sacramento, California; North American College of the Artsy; Taylor University of Bio-Psycho-Dynamic Sciences, Chattanooga, Tennessee; University of England at Oxford; University of Esoterica-Frederick, Maryland; University of San Moritz, Great Britain, Cyprus; University of Wyoming, London, England; International Academy for Planetary Planning.
Adrian Platts, who alerted us to this, comments on the hopefuls who dreamed up these institutions: “Full marks for trying.” You can see the whole list at .
GENOME sequencer Craig Venter is nothing if not ambitious. But isn’t even he overreaching himself somewhat? According to an article in Brisbane’s The Courier Mail, Venter is currently in Australia as part of a team of scientists who are “attempting to collect the DNA of everything on the planet”.
Gaye Winders, who told us about this, says: “They’re not getting mine.”
OUR tasteless-press-release-of-the-week prize goes to Ronald Trahan Associates, representing Roche Pharmaceuticals. “With World AIDS Day fast approaching,” it begins, “I wanted to get in touch with some story ideas surrounding this event. This year’s event is even more exciting given that we are celebrating 20 years of AIDS…”
Perhaps the tone here needs a little bit of tweaking.
SOMETIMES it is the details that count, even in fiction. All it would take to destroy the Vatican is 250 milligrams of antimatter, we learn in Dan Brown’s novel Angels and Demons. Annihilating that 250 mg should produce as much energy as detonating 10 kilotons of TNT, about half of the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Such a small quantity might seem an easy thing to hide, and in Brown’s novel it is. But alas, in the real world it probably wouldn’t get past the accountants. Particle accelerators need quite a bit of energy to produce antimatter. According to David McGinnis of Fermilab, the electricity bill for producing 250 mg would be somewhere around a thousand trillion US dollars. “Somebody, somewhere would notice that kind of expense,” McGinnis observes in Symmetry, a magazine published by Fermilab and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
IS THE London Borough of Camden a hotspot for virgin births, wonders Dominic Wreford. He asks this after seeing Camden’s leaflet A guide to registering births at Camden, which states: “The registrar has to record certain details about the mother, father (where applicable) and baby.”
FINALLY, in the November issue of BBC Wildlife magazine there is an advertisement for Burns pet nutrition. It is extolled as an answer for pets’ “health problems such as allergies, skin and digestive upsets, bad breath and tooth tartar, arthritis and behavioural problems”. But how do they know, asks Tom Sargent, who noticed that the ad also proudly proclaims that the product is “Not tested on animals”.
Katy Andrews saw a large, brightly painted motorbike parked outside the hospital where she works. At the bottom of the licence plate, clearly visible, were the words “unmarked police cycle”
