WHAT would you think if you found someone in possession of the following list: “Mow lawn; do laundry; buy groceries; clean gutters; do homework; trim trees; mail anthrax; pick up dry-cleaning”?
Doran Amos has this list. Doran Amos is not a suburban teenage terrorist. We definitely believe this reader should not be subject to “extraordinary rendition”, nor made to wear orange.
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Amos’s story, and he is sticking to it, is that he was just trying out the experimental “Sets” program at . Type in a few words or phrases, such as “mow lawn”, “buy groceries” and “do laundry”, and it tries to create a list of other related words by checking its vast database for words that go together on web pages.
The program is not very good at culturally specific lists: feeling peckish in London, we typed in “fish” and “chips” and got “sausage, beer, bread” and so on… and when, given the German flavour of that response, we tried “Wurst” and “Bier”, we got a list including “Wintersport” and “Baustoffe” – building materials.
But it does seem to be rather good at the international language of physics: “boson, lepton” produces “baryon, gluon, fermion” and so on. But how do “Kyoto” and “Bush” go with “Nirvana”?
“At London’s Heathrow Airport, Tom Nielsen-Marsh saw a sign in the front window of a police car saying: “Explosive police dog”. Presumably its bang is worse than its bite”
And, yes, when we tried “mow lawn, do laundry, buy groceries”, we got the same list as Amos did. We vividly picture alarm bells going off at the National Security Agency as soon as this item gets onto our IT network. Please, nice Mister Spook, it wasn’t us. It was the computer. It was the web. Honest.
HAVE you ever had a bright idea that you thought would make a great book or movie, but you lacked the time or energy to sit down and do all the tedious storytelling? Why not patent the idea instead, says Andrew Knight, a registered patent agent based in Washington DC.
As any movie fan can testify, there are only a limited number of storylines around, and Hollywood continually recycles them with minor variations. Patent the plots, and you can make film-makers pay you megabucks in royalties.
Knight’s website () says that he has “conceived of a variety of unique fictional storylines”. But instead of pounding the keyboard for endless hours to create the great American screenplay, he has turned his ideas into patent applications.
Knight concedes that the courts have yet to approve the concept, but he reckons it’s only a matter of time. He recommends filing your own applications early “before the Federal Circuit approves storyline patents and the floodgates open”.
We are already at work on a patent application for a story in which an attorney files patents on storylines, and look forward to a comfortable retirement on the French Riviera when Hollywood buys the rights.
THE online newsletter of Fitness First Australia has a section on “The secret life of enzymes” which states: “Enzymes are essential for proper digestion. Without them you are not able to digest your food properly. It simply takes too long, and your body eliminates the food before you have received the benefit of any of the food’s nutrition.”
What follows took Keith Lapidge by surprise: “The body produces most of its enzymes first thing in the morning, as the sun comes up. It continues producing enzymes through the noon hour as the sun peaks and stops producing enzymes around 6.30 pm, as the sun sets. So, for most effective digestion and nutritional absorption, it is essential to eat a big breakfast, preferably early in the morning, when your enzyme production is at its maximum. It is best to eat your big meal at lunch, when you are still producing adequate enzymes, and to eat a smaller dinner, preferably before 6.30 pm, when your body stops producing enzymes.”
This startling revelation has given Lapidge a brilliant idea for a book, which he will call The Sunset Diet or, perhaps, The Nocturnal Diet. All it will recommend is that people who don’t want to put on weight eat as little as possible during the day and as much as they like at night, when, if Fitness First is to be believed, everything they eat will simply be eliminated before it can make them fat. Lapidge believes this idea will make him rich.
Tongue-twisting circumlocution
FROM the department of technobabble: a member of John Hastings’s family has been prescribed an oral analgesic, fentanyl, in a form which the manufacturers, Cephalon, describe as a “compressed lozenge with integral oromucosal applicator”. When you open the packet, Hastings tells us, it’s a lollipop.
FINALLY, Giovanni Barbieri can’t resist telling us that the professor in probability and statistics at the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo is called Doctor Chance.
