THE Google empire gets vaster every day. Now it includes a map service at , with search facilities, direction-finders, locations of businesses and so on. Starting with, say, a map of the UK, you can zoom in right down to individual streets, or use the mouse to wander around a town, perhaps pausing to find the local pizza restaurants. Then, zooming back out, you can use the mouse to cross the Atlantic and start exploring the US in the same way.
One thing might strike you as odd, though. If, instead of heading west to the US, you head east, you find… nothing. A blank screen. Europe simply isn’t there. Nor, farther on, is Asia. Nor are the Pacific islands. In fact, there’s nothing until you hit the US again, this time from the west.
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Heading south from there, you get as far as an outline (no more) of Mexico and a few Caribbean islands. After that the screen goes blank and you drop off the edge of the world again.
Google’s world, it seems, consists only of the UK and the US.
A PRESS release from the UK’s Royal Society announces: “This year two women have been elected to the Fellowship. They are Professor Uta Frith, deputy director of the Institute of Cognitive Neurosciences at University College London.”
Richard Smyth, who alerted us to this, supposes that Professor Frith will no doubt be beside themselves with delight.
Redundantly translated place names
THANKS to the many hoi polloi who responded to our mention of the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles – “the The Tar Tar Pits” (Feedback, 21 May) – by telling us about other redundantly translated place names. Some of these appear to be quite famous for it, notably Torpenhow Hill in Cumbria, UK, a name that means “hill” in the language of each of the tribes that successively conquered it, so that it translates as “hill hill hill hill”. Similarly, Breedon Hill, which takes various spellings (such as Bredon and Bredden) all over the UK, combines the Celtic and the Old English words for “hill”, so it translates as “hill hill hill”.
And then there’s the River Avon, which means “river river”, and Eas Fors Waterfall on the Isle of Mull in Scotland, which means “waterfall waterfall waterfall”, and the Sahara Desert and Gobi Desert, both of which mean “desert desert”, and Lake Nyasa, which means “lake lake”…
But that’s quite enough, especially since a bit of Googling (try “pleonasm”) will lead you to many sites that deal with this topic. It only remains to add that “the many hoi polloi” translates as “the many the many”.
SCANNING his local newspaper, The Northwich Guardian, Michael McLean was surprised to read how the local Kingsmead Primary School ensures that its pupils get a healthy lunch: “Every child at the school is stored on our computer and so we have a constant record of what they have had to eat and drink. Parents can have this information emailed to them and they can track their child’s diet from snacks to main meals.”
That’s an impressive technological feat, McLean observes, and one that seems to have gone unnoticed by scientists. “Does this mean I can be emailed to America instead of flying?” Presumably it reduces classroom overcrowding, too.
NOT long after he married, Dennis Miller tells us, his wife began to feel broody. He pointed out to her all the drawbacks of having a baby and the changes to their lifestyle that would follow. She replied, “I know that, Dennis, but you try telling me that.”
“Reader John Devereux’s former boss used to say: “I never make mistakes. Well, I did make one once. That was when I thought I had made a mistake, but hadn’t””
THIS magazine recently carried a review of a book about the role of the female orgasm in evolution, The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the science of evolution by Elisabeth A. Lloyd (14 May, p 52). Readers might be interested to know that one of the fiercest critics of Lloyd’s theory is apparently a professor of biology at Arizona State University named John Alcock.
In somewhat similar vein, the name of the man at London’s Royal Free Hospital who led a recent trial of a contraceptive implant for men is Pierre-Marc Bouloux, which may not seem strange to French people, but to an Anglo-Saxon eye is quite disconcerting.
NIGEL Stevens was puzzled by this statement in ntlworld’s user policy: “Your account can only be used for a single internet session at any one time and therefore for no more than 24 hours in any one day.”
THE Bloomsbury portable spellchecker in the Maplin online catalogue boasts “Corrections for 1000 most miss-spelt words”. Clearly “misspelt” is not among them.
FINALLY, a can of Morrison’s toilet cleaner tells us that it “cleans, freshens and kills germs”. Edward Williams, who noticed this, is reminded of the oyster in Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter: “After such kindness, that would be/A dismal thing to do!”
