HERE is one way of mitigating the destructive effects of computer rage. The mailshot Richard Vandewetering received from Enhancing your Mind Body Spirit magazine featured cards giving information on such topics as palmistry and astrology, which, when collected, make up an “ultimate holistic resource”.
One of the cards was about quartz. “Quartz can channel psychic energies as easily as it directs the radio waves through your hi-fi,” it claimed. “Holding your quartz crystal in your hand before you sleep can help you to remember your dreams.” Most useful of all: “Placing quartz on your computer will help to keep it running smoothly. It protects the machine against the negative energy you give out when you’re in a bad mood.”
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So if your computer keeps giving you incomprehensible error messages, the quartz will prevent your negative energy from making you pick it up and throw it out of the window. Possibly.
TALKING of error messages, Gordon Buxton tells us that when he tried to tell his bank, HSBC, that he wanted to get all his statements online rather than through the post, he received the message “The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request”. It then advised “Please contact the server administrator, you@your.address, and inform them of the time the error occurred and anything you might have done that may have caused the error”.
“One of the rooms in the library at Mark Baglow’s school was locked and had a sign on the door saying: “This room has been closed due to bad behaviour.” Naughty room!”
While he appreciates HSBC’s efforts to spend less of his money, he’s not sure how he can be expected to fix the website problem by contacting himself about it.
Pass the quartz, please.
WHEN Colin Deady visited the UK government site , the petition he wanted to create involved thinking in the long term: he wanted it to be open for signatures for two centuries. Unfortunately, the website snapped back: “Duration must be positive” – which, it turns out, means 365 days or fewer. Is there a reason for this reluctance by the government to peer into the future?
While checking out the site, we came across a petition demanding that astrology be taught in schools. There was also one to “Ensure basic numeracy among those standing for public office and [those] reporting their deeds”. Is this the start of a trend of sarcastic petitions? Heaven forfend.
NEW SCIENTIST consultant Stephen Battersby tells us he has received a press release headed “Solar Twin Has Sun-Like Brightness Changes”. He laments the fact that this magazine hasn’t covered the story, thus missing the opportunity to give it the headline “Sun-like star like sun”.
FEEDBACK wholeheartedly welcomes to the pantheon of scientific publishing the new Public Library of Science (PLoS) journal Neglected Tropical Diseases. We wish it every success and a wide readership, and to this end we urge you to visit – hoping, indeed, that enough people do so for it to be renamed Previously Neglected Tropical Diseases.
We cannot match the largesse of the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation, which has offered a $1.1 million grant to the journal, but we like to think we’ve done our bit by spending £10.56 on registering the web address , to make sure it will still be available on that happy day.
A NUMBER of readers who are familiar with the Icelandic tongue have written in to comment on our item about BryndĂs SnæbjörnsdĂłttir and Mark Wilson’s art project on polar bears (17 February, p 48). What they all tell us is that SnæbjörnsdĂłttir is Icelandic for “snow bear’s daughter”. But is that her real name? Yes, she confirms in an email, it is – making this one of the more exotic examples of nominative determinism we have come across.
EXPERIMENTING with the latest banking technology, James Field tried topping up the credit on his cellphone at an automatic teller machine. When he had finished, the receipt informed him “Did you know – you can top up your mobile at Co-operative Bank cash machines?” Er, yes, Field thought.
A RECENT article in The New York Times about studying lice to determine details about human evolution observed: “Samples of gorilla lice were obtained by members of the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project, which provides free healthcare to gorillas in the wild.”
Karen Lepper, who noticed this, supposes that’s good news for gorillas worried about keeping up on their health insurance payments.
FINALLY, an online advert for an Acer desktop PC that Richard Poyner came across says that it “occupies less than 10 times the space of modern tower PCs”. That still means it could be more than nine times as big, Poyner points out, “so I’ll need a bigger desk”.
