JUST sometimes, opening spam email instead of deleting it unread can be entertaining. Steve Paulsson was intrigued enough to peruse a message headed âSilent Panic at OPECâ and was rewarded with the announcement that âRight now, 4400 residents on this âSecret Islandâ pay NOTHING for power. When their free-power technologies go mainstream in 2008, youâll witness a $25 billion global energy shift thatâll make Middle Eastern oil WORTHLESS.â
Should the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries quake in its boots? Probably not, yet. Should you âinvestâ in the stocks and shares plugged through such emails? Please donât ask.
Advertisement
What is it theyâre plugging? It all gets very strange. The email goes on â and on â hinting that itâs all about one of those magical free-energy inventions that are forbidden only by the boring old laws of physics. âIn one of the most remote corners of the world, a secret island has accomplished the unthinkable: complete energy independence,â it claims. And where is this occult marvel? Ah, yes: âoff the coast of Denmarkâ. What is the Danish for âfrom where weâre standing thatâs hardly a remote cornerâ?
Then we clicked the web link at the bottom of the email â not something weâd recommend doing yourself unless your computer is locked down like Alcatraz on a bad day, lest it be invaded. It turns out the island is Samsoe, which has a number of wind turbines, all perfectly content with physics as it stands, and that the email is plugging investments allegedly related to wind energy. If real, these wouldnât be a terrible idea. So why all that effort to spice it up as a spam scam?
LOOKING through the European Unionâs research website , Steven Heggie was disconcerted to come across the announcement: âNote: Due to exceptional circumstances the event âToday is the futureâ cannot take place as originally scheduled.â
He wondered what the exceptional circumstances had been. Does some sort of distortion in the space-time continuum mean today will no longer be the future?
A READER named Aparimana directs us to , where we learn that if we use Sorensen Squeeze to compress our video files, it âCan reduce your video file size by over 100 per centâ. So if your hard drive is getting full, just load it up with Sorensen-compressed videos to make some empty space.
EVERY week Nuala Lonie takes an aged auntie out for a run in the car up the beautiful valley of the upper Clyde, in the Scottish lowlands. On the way back they pass a notice stating clearly âCaution â buses merging aheadâ.
The sign is located just where the relatively unpopulated area of South Lanarkshire gives way to the dense conurbation of North Lanarkshire. Lonie says that while some might unkindly describe this area as a black hole, this is true only in a metaphorical sense, and she does not think any event horizon is involved in the merging of the buses.
She surmises that in the countryside the buses can follow all possible paths, but upon nearing the bus stop where they can be observed they are forced to resolve into a single vehicle. Disappointingly, she and her aunt have never actually seen this quantum event happening.
IT IS one of those questions that had never occurred to us, but now weâve heard it we canât stop worrying about it. Ron Phillipi asks how the concepts of clockwise and anticlockwise will be taught when all analogue clocks have been replaced with digital ones.
âZip firelighters, Guy King tells us, come in several sorts, but one bears the legend âNew improved cube shapeâ. King says he wishes they would stop mucking about with the basics of geometry like thatâ
VISITING , Craig Lindsay was told: âPage took 5.6028366088867E-05 milliseconds to loadâ. Feedbackâs Department of Superfluous Accuracy was claiming this item, until our Implausible Claims Desk pointed out that thatâs 56 nanoseconds.
FINALLY: this is your last chance to send in your entries to our New Year competition.
This year you are invited to imagine you are an alien newly arrived on Earth. You are able to send home an interplanetary text message of no more than 160 characters describing what you have found. What would your message be?
You may enter by email, fax or letter. All entries must reach us by Monday 11 December. The results will be published in the first issue of 51¶ŻÂț in 2007 (6 January). Thanks to the generosity of Profile Books, 10 lucky winners will each receive three of its most popular new titles: Four Elements: Water, Air, Fire, Earth by Rebecca Rupp; Gilbert White, a biography of the author of The Natural History of Selborne, by Richard Mabey; and The End of the Question Mark, a compilation of questions and answers from the Any Questions Answered text service â plus a copy of 51¶ŻÂțâs very own bestseller Why Donât Penguinsâ Feet Freezeâ? The editorâs decision is final.
