READERS often point out the strange titles that grace some scientific papers. We have several favourites, but possibly the most bizarre reached us courtesy of Seranne Howis: “The idiot’s guide to the zen of likelihood in a nutshell in seven days for dummies, unleashed” has the helpful subtitle “A gentle introduction, for those of us who are small of brain, to the calculation of the likelihood of molecular sequences”. If that sounds like your kind of paper, you can see it at .
Howis’s email arrived with what we think was a signature line reading “Warning: I cannot be held responsible for the above text, as apparently my cats have learned how to type.” Or was this a comment from the Virtual Institute of Bioinformatics (Éire), which published the paper?
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Meanwhile, we are pleased to hear from reader Jason Turner that IBM is apparently helping us out on the kitchen appliances front: “Java without the coffee breaks: A nonintrusive multiprocessor garbage collector”. We’re not even going to attempt to explain what part of computer language design we think the paper () is about.
And here’s one we can’t wait to read: Colleen A. Reilly’s “Sexualities and technologies: How vibrators help to explain computers”, which appears in Computers and Composition, vol 21, p 363. Clearly, we’ve been missing out on something.
“They keep on coming. Several readers have pointed out that the head of the European Space Agency’s oceans and ice unit is Mark Drinkwater”
On a more sombre note, in Neurology, vol 62, p 1638, there is a paper entitled: “Really, most sincerely dead: Policy and procedure in the diagnosis of death by neurologic criteria”.
And last but not least, Simon Scarle noticed this in the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition, vol 39, p 448: “Childhood constipation: Is there new light in the tunnel?” You may well ask.
OVER the past year Microsoft and Intel have been telling us we should listen to music, record TV and watch movies on a Windows PC instead of those dreadfully old-fashioned TV sets, CD and DVD players, and VCRs.
Feedback has been to several slick demonstrations of Windows Media PCs that have been carefully set up beforehand by skilled IT support engineers. And we have yearned to be a fly on the wall when the slick demonstrators are home alone without any free IT support. Do they wait while their PC grinds into gear before doing anything useful, then needs software upgrades and falls over because of program conflicts or the viruses that flood in from the internet? Or do they perhaps secretly give up and go back to using a TV set, hi-fi and disc player that switches on (and off) at the touch of a button, and does one thing properly rather than a whole range of things not very well?
Bill Gates himself gave the keynote speech at the giant Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas recently. Needless to say, he used it as an opportunity to promote how Microsoft’s Windows was an ideal platform for home entertainment. Unfortunately for Gates, everything that could go wrong did go wrong, and his promised slide show repeatedly refused to perform.
“Who’s in charge of this company?” quipped the presenter, late-night TV comedy host Conan O’Brien, as Gates looked all at sea and pushed buttons to no avail. “Let me mention that there’s gambling in this town,” O’Brien continued, trying to keep things moving as more blank screens unfolded. “If anyone wants, they can hit the tables and come back when we get this thing working.”
Let’s hope that when Gates was safely back in his mansion, he was able to get his Windows home entertainment system to work a bit more smoothly. Or does he too play safe, and watch TV the easy, relaxing old-fashioned way
THANKS to Matthew Lancey, who thinks he has found out what happens to the half-students at the University of Durham we mentioned in Feedback (15 January). The Independent newspaper carried a report on 20 January about the rust-prevention liquid WD-40. It stated that within three years of inventing the stuff, Rocket Chemical Company had doubled in size to seven people. At some stage, Lancey concludes, the company must have taken on a couple of those half-graduates from Durham.
FINALLY, the contribution of cattle to global warming is far greater than previously suspected, if an article spotted by Stuart Bell in The Daily Telegraph is to be believed. In the paper’s motoring section on 8 January, correspondent Stephen Bayley explained: “Your average cow produces several hundred litres of noxious, sulphurous methane a day. Experts suggest that the aggregate is 60 million tonnes expelled per cow per year.”
Leaving aside the conspicuous lack of sulphur in your typical methane molecule, that is an awful lot of methane per cow – so much so that Feedback is thinking of cancelling a planned rural break next month. The countryside sounds like the sort of place best avoided.
