AIRBUS “conceived the A350-800 to dramatically increase the aircraft payload-range”, the firm says in a magazine advert. But the next bit made Francis Quinn splutter: “Flying 300 nm further with space for 30 more passengers…”
“I am not sure,” Quinn muses, “whether your average passenger in first, business or cattle class would really notice or appreciate the additional 300 nanometres gained on a flight”. It would certainly be no skin off anyone’s nose, 300 nanometres being the length of a typical collagen molecule in, for example, the average epidermis. Unless, of course, they mean that quaint aviation managers’ unit, the nautical mile (1852 metres).
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Feedback sincerely hopes that Airbus becomes fully metric by the time it hands the planes over to the salespeople. NASA’s experience with mixing imperial and metric units, famously causing the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter, was merely embarrassing and expensive.
AND what will flying look like in 15 years’ time? Stuart Buckman tells us that the Czech Airlines in-flight magazine has a feature on “Future planes”. He is particularly impressed by the supersonic combustion ramjet – or “scramjet” – which apparently had its first successful flight in June 2001. “Flying five times faster than the speed of light, Scramjet will scuttle you from Prague to Sydney in 90 minutes.”
Surely at that speed you would arrive before you left? Someone will be along in a moment to argue about how long before.
THE latest of the questionnaires with which the UK health authorities deluge doctors and patients is all about gauging customer satisfaction with a surgery’s reception and administration. Patients have to say how well they have been treated.
Feedback, on a visit to the local surgery, picked up one of the forms. Questions such as “Was the member of staff polite and helpful?” must be ticked with a value from 1 to 5. To help puzzled patients, “5 – Yes” is marked with a smiley icon and “1 – No” with a glum face.
So far, so clumsy. But how, we wonder, do patients go about answering question 7, “Did you have any concerns regarding patient confidentiality?” This, too, is marked with choices from a smiley 5 for “Yes” to a glum 1 for “No”.
THIS isn’t exactly nominative determinism, Yun Hwang insists, but he doesn’t know what else to call it, and wonders if anyone can help. He’s a student at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. In the university’s school of philosophy there is a lecturer whose name is Michaelis Michael. The students, however, prefer to call him Michael is Michael. They are fond of wondering what else a child with the name Michael is Michael could have become other than a philosopher.
WHEN James Staples had broadband installed by telecom firm NTL, the instructions he was given under the heading “Surname and PIN” reassure Mac users that “These should have been provided to you already”. PC users, meanwhile, will have inherited theirs either “when you ordered your broadband service, or during a visit from your installation engineer”.
That’s the milkman off the hook then, Staples observes.
“From the department of making simple things complicated. The Korean Stock Market’s online statistics page invites users to “select more than 4, but less than 6 items””
WE JOIN Robert Ford in hoping he won’t get any more mail from Delaware-based bank MBNA until November. The bank has just sent him new card details, with the statement: “All of these changes will take effect from 1 November 2005, and supersede any other information that you might receive from us between now and then.”
But supposing the bank realises that this statement is somewhat confusing and sends a correction. Should Ford ignore the correction? And if MBNA then sends him another mail before November stating that it supersedes all others, is he allowed to take headache pills?
IS THERE a word for a word that is what it means? Patrick Burns wants to know this after noting that the word “heteroradical” (mixed roots) is heteroradical, as we pointed out on 27 August. In contrast, “palindrome”, for example, is not a palindrome.
As well as suggesting a name for this category of words (if it doesn’t already have one), readers might like to offer some examples. Two that came straight into our minds while mulling this over were “unique” and “noun”, but we suspect there are many more.
FINALLY on the subject of words, Ben Moore concedes that this isn’t really a diontologia (20 August), but he still wishes to let us know that he was pleased recently to be able to take the opportunity, while being shown a colleague’s drawings of a hermaphroditic flatworm, to be able to correctly observe that there was “a vas deferens between the male and female gonads”.
