HAVE you finished your breakfast? Good. Then you’ll be able to contemplate what might lie behind this early candidate for best paper title of the year: “Antioxidant capacity of boar seminal plasma,” by Marta Hernandez and colleagues and published in Reproduction, Fertility and Development.
And Ed Yong provides another contender from the Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps: “Effects of nuclear weapons on the gastrointestinal system” by D. A. Freshwater. Yong ventures that these may be large and mainly negative, and indeed the abstract begins “Nuclear weapons have both blast injury and radiation effects on the gut…” Despite having finished breakfast, Yong did not dare read the “Materials and methods” section, and neither do we.
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Meanwhile our colleague Laura Spinney offers this from Brain: “Impaired recognition of scary music following unilateral temporal lobe excision” by Nathalie Gosselin and colleagues. Not being neurologists, we’d have predicted that temporal lobe excision would lead to impaired recognition of, say, nearby nuclear explosions – or, indeed, of “Penile frostbite”. This is the title of a letter by R. J. Waugh that Peter Cameran discovered in an ancient copy of The New England Journal of Medicine (vol 296, p 178). It explains that the condition is “an unforeseen hazard of jogging”.
Enjoy your lunch…
MORE from the department of things you might not want to know. Marjolein Katsma was pleased to see that 51¶ŻÂţ mentioned the recent celebrations of “pi day” on 14 March, aka 3/14, these being the first three digits of 
(19 March, p 7).
She tells us of another celebration that recently took place the “mill-one-ium”, also known as the “geek millennium”. In case you missed it, this historic moment occurred at 1:58:31 UTC on 18 March, exactly 1,111,111,111 seconds since the Unix epoch began at 00:00 UTC on 1 January, 1970. A large celebration was held on the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) freenode channel ##1,111,111,111. According to Wikipedia, at its peak the channel averaged 24 messages a second.
Katsma says plans are already under way to celebrate 1,234,567,890. While the ##1,111,111,111 channel still exists for “a little happy afterglow”, forward-looking enthusiasts have already created a ##1,234,567,890 IRC channel.
RESPONDING to Wichor Bramer, whose girlfriend thought she was easily persuaded until he convinced her she wasn’t (Feedback, 12 March), G. H. Levy writes to tell us that he used to think he was indecisive, but now he’s not so sure.
Coordinating anti-social behaviour
READERS will be sorry to learn they have just missed the opportunity to apply for a job with Bury Metro Council in the north of England as an “anti-social behaviour coordinator”. As Carol Moores observes, “Give me a few beers and I could do that.”
ON 2 April, Feedback reported John Blyth’s news of his polyrepetitive banananas. “Being curious, rather than bored”, Joe Buchanan wondered whether his name had ever been misspelt as Buchananan on the internet. And indeed it has, yea unto “Buchanananananananan”…
PENULTIMATELY, here’s another nugget from our blitz on old files. Mike Trier wrote to us last year, noting that we have a penchant for coining new names for interesting categories of names. He went on to suggest three new categories that require naming.
“An advert on London’s underground promises that you can have “beautiful vein-free legs”. But how, Matthew Carse wonders, does the blood get back to the heart?”
The first category is the coincidence of hearing a name for the first time and shortly afterwards hearing the same name again in a different context. This was prompted by Trier’s reading of what was then the most recent issue of 51¶ŻÂţ – 16 – October 2004 in which the name Finkbeiner appears twice. On page 11 of that issue one Donald Finkbeiner is interested in microwave radiation left over from the big bang, while on page 18 Steve Finkbeiner has been kept awake thinking about mutations in a protein called huntingtin.
Coming across the Finkbeiner effect then led Trier to wonder if there might also be a meta-category requiring a name: the category of categories of interesting names that have been named. And all that thinking finally led Trier to ponder whether there should be a name for people that enjoy naming categories of names?
Although Trier’s message has been buried in our files for all these months, we still haven’t come up with names for the categories he suggests. Which makes us wonder if perhaps there ought to be a name for people who resist the temptation to give names to categories of names?
FINALLY, a little puzzle for you. Take Susan Cartlidge, Tina Ricketts and Dawn Akers. What profession do you think they belong to? Are they greengrocers? Nuclear physicists? Swimming pool attendants? No. Surprise, surprise, they are all members of the McTimoney Chiropractic Association.
