âSCIENCE of Star Warsâ is an intriguing title for an exhibition, but Feedback is a bit nervous of getting too close to some of the âreal-world scienceâ displays, especially the ânuclear pulse engineâ and more so the âmatter/antimatter powered spacecraftâ. But if you want to take the risk, you can do so at the in Texas until 3 September.
The exhibitionâs previous spot, in Los Angeles, was sponsored by US aerospace company Northrop Grumman â which in its press release modestly omitted to mention its large involvement in President Ronald Reaganâs Strategic Defense Initiative â known, to its , as ââ.
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THE gentlemenâs toilet in the London offices of construction company Sir Robert McAlpine contains a machine selling tampons. The reader who told us about this â who wants to remain anonymous â wonders whether this may be taking gender equality too far.
I command you, unclean search resultâŠ
AGAINST his better judgement, a reader who wants to be known simply as John opened a spam email which turned out to be offering âFaith Based SEO Servicesâ. What does that do, then? Itâs âa Christian based company⊠formed by Don Conrad and Jeffrey Sloe to provide excellent search engine optimization service to businesses and individuals⊠We feel that God has called up [sic] to help you, whether large or small, move your website to the top of Google.â
Riiight. And how might they use the âBiblical principlesâ they refer to at to order search engine results? Will they âoffer all burnt sacrifices unto the Lord in the sabbaths, in the new moons, and on the set feasts, by number, according to the order commanded unto themâ (1 Chronicles 23:31)? Or do they simply enjoin the search results âBeloved, follow not that which is evil, but that which is goodâ (3 John 1:11)?
âSeen on a New York dry-cleaning establishmentâs van by Piera Robson: âWe use organic solventsââ
They have a ready-made disclaimer, though: âI am the first, I also am the lastâ (Isaiah 48:12).
ON THE UKâs National Health Service website Graham Nash found a calculator to work out how much you could save by giving up smoking. It asks how much you pay for a pack of 20 cigarettes and how many cigarettes you smoke a day. He wondered what would happen if he put 0 in both boxes, and was told that the cost of a packet âMust be greater than ÂŁ00.00 and up to ÂŁ1,000,000â. And the number of cigarettes smoked âMust be greater than 0 and less than 2,147,483647 [sic]â.
WIKIPEDIA entries are, we know, never finalised, and their reliability varies â sometimes from minute to minute, as a look at their editing history can reveal. But when Gary George looked, and also later when we did, the table summarising road speed limits around the world at listed the limit on some German autobahns as infinity.
Apart from the obvious question of how the German parliament managed to repeal relativity, George observes that this measure could solve the problem of traffic jams, if everyone arrived at their destination in an immeasurably small amount of time. On the other hand, he adds, âIâd still end up late for everything, having taken an infinity of wrong turns.â
A geek interjects: the symbol they want is not infinity, which is in some sense a magnitude, but NAN (not a number), the non-value reserved in computer programming to represent the case when the result of a calculation is not, in fact, a number. Obviously.>
Feedback responds: Er, obviously. Please donât explain.
WHEN Nick Christie was filling in a form for the UK Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, it gave him this warning: âDo not use your browserâs âBackâ button as this may cause your transaction to fail and you may have to start again. If you do have to change any of the information you have entered so far, please select âCancelâ and start again.â
FEEDBACK frequently fails to make high-tech things do what is promised on the box, so we feel much better for hearing a gloriously frank admission from an expert would-be user.
At the end this month the BBC is launching its system, which will let a PC download almost any TV programme broadcast over the last seven days. It all relies heavily on Microsoftâs Windows technology. When unveiling the system, Ashley Highfield, the BBCâs director of future media and technology, said his ambition was to have the system built into TV sets, so that you donât need a PC to use it. To underline the desirability of this he recalled how he recently tried to set up a home entertainment network.
He said he took the signal from his living-room Media Center PC and plasma screen, squirted it round his house via Wi-Fi and received it on an Xbox games console. The object was to watch entertainment from the living room in his bedroom. âThe only thing wrong with all this is that it doesnât workâ he admitted. âLetâs just say this is nascent technologyâ.
