AN ADVERT is currently running on British television for a product aimed at the 1 in 10 men âover a certain ageâ who suffer from erectile dysfunction. For obvious reasons the advertising agency has decided to go for allegory when demonstrating the success of the product: the ad shows a couple strolling happily, hand in hand, through a field of barley.
What John Reade wants to know is: is it only the weed scientists and agronomists among the viewers who noticed how weedy the crop is? And is it pure coincidence that the weed is wild oats?
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ACCESSORIES for the iPod have to be stylish, but do they have to incorporate the latest technology? Certainly the iPod amplifier manufactured by N&S Valveworks of Saitama, Japan, doesnât. It uses old-fashioned valves, or vacuum tubes, the electronic dinosaurs that were supposed to have gone extinct at the dawn of the transistor age.
Of course, many audiophiles still hold a torch for valve amplifiers â but coupling them up with an iPod? The juxtaposition seems so unlikely that one reviewer for IEEE Spectrum magazine called the amp âas oddly conceived a product as Iâve ever encountered in more than 20 years of audio reviewingâ. However, he agrees that the music sounds good â as long as you start with a higher-fidelity sound source than the compressed digital sound from an iPod.
FURTHER to our speculation about spam loops (Feedback, 16 July), hereâs a variant. Most email users are sadly accustomed to receiving messages from virus warning systems on servers that they have never emailed anything to, telling them that they have sent a virus. Someone they know has been infected with a virus, which has borrowed their identity from that careless personâs address listâŠ
Seranne Howis, however, was a bit startled to discover recently that she had been spammed by herself. Apparently, she had some great stock options for sale.
TALKING of spam, Paul Brown has been reading the randomly generated text that some spammers use in an attempt to convince filter programs that their messages are original compositions. He has spared us the sordid âpayloadâ, but is really rather impressed by this example: âBlack holes are where God divided by zero / Small to greater matters must give way / Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought / Real love is a permanently self-enlarging experience.â
THIS weekâs example of RAS syndrome (redundant acronymâŠ) has been staring all geeks in the face for nearly a decade: CSS style sheets, used to define the colours, type style and so on of web pages. CSS stands for âcascading style sheetsâ, a double redundancy that is painfully appropriate to the way they work.
AND another surprising paper title. Sue Low reports that she found an article in the American Journal of Ophthalmology (vol 137, p 379), entitled âMicrowave-superheated Vics vapo rub: An ocular public health dangerâ.
Vicks, incidentally, is spelled correctly in the body of the article but wrongly in the title.
ITâS not really a GoogleAnything, but itâs still intriguing â and not only if you are a computational linguist like Peet Morris. Reading a review of Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track, a biography of the physicist Richard Feynman, Morris was intrigued by reference to Feynmanâs âsecond, disastrous marriage to a woman who allegedly once told him âsome old bore called, but I sent him awayâ when Niels Bohr tried to visit FeynmanâŠâ.
So Morris looked up âsome old bore called, but I sent him awayâ on a well-known internet search engine. Not only did this produce just one hit â the review Morris was reading â but so did the phrase âsome old bore calledâ.
Maybe weâre unlucky, but given our experience of bores, their age distribution and their propensity to call, this seems astonishing. What should we call a phrase that intuition says should be common but is in fact, due to the amazing combinatorial properties of language, scarce? Well, letâs call it exactly what it is: a nearly clichĂ©. Four words or fewer; must make sense; weâre going to regret thisâŠ
âInstruction label on IKEAâs Bryt pendulum clock: âTime stops when the pendulum is pulledââ
ATTACHED to the riding hat that Claire Adams bought in Australia was a label saying âKeep out of direct sunlight.â How she is supposed to do that while cantering through the outback, she does not know.
FINALLY Feedbackâs Department of Unusual Units is pleased to announce another entry to our expanding collection. An upgraded flood barrier on a river in south-east England âsaved hundreds of homes from flooding during October 2000, when flows down the Medway were 13 times the averageâ, reports the BBC website â âequal to 1000 baths full of water passing every secondâ. The kilobath is of course also equal to one bath filling in a millisecond, which would be handier, if noisier.
