READER Leigh Bunting was dreaming one morning in the spring. He canât remember what the dream was about, but he does remember waking to find the bedroom door shut. This was odd, because usually it isnât. It was so odd that it woke Bunting from the dream of waking â at which point he found the door was open as usual.
âI have spent some time trying to think of a term for a dream within a dream,â he tells us, and âfinally came up with ârecursive dreamsâ. I thought I was being quite smart.â A famous web search engine discloses, however, nearly 200 postings to blogs and bulletin boards about the phenomenon.
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Blogger Steven Rainwater at says he asked himself, after a dream within a dream within a dream, âhow many recursive realities could I push onto the stack before my brain had a stack overflow and dumped coreâ. Even if programming jargon is not your thing, you will appreciate the problem: if each dream occupies a certain amount of memory, at some point âpushingâ another one onto the âstackâ of nested dreams will use up all available memory, causing a crash that will spit out the whole lot.
Feedbackâs closest experience involves waking up in good time to go to a meeting, having an uneventful 10-kilometre journey to the venue, arriving precisely on time â and then waking up back home, at the moment the real meeting started. Assuming, that is, that we did in fact wake up and we arenât currently dreaming weâre typing this.
âThe lobby of David Cottrellâs Masonic lodge in Adelaide, Australia, contains a sign demanding âDo not place ANYTHING on this shelfâ. It is, naturally, on the shelfâ
Polar bears and baby elephants
UNUSUAL units may be all very well, but they have driven Colin McLeod to plead for some standard-setting. âA recent press release from the pet charity PDSA,â he tells us, âurges motorists to buckle up pets in cars, saying that an unrestrained 22-kilogram dog flung forward in a 50-kilometre-per-hour crash would hit the driver âwith as much force as a polar bearâ.â
Last year, by contrast, Transport Canada reported that an unrestrained 11-kilogram child in a similar crash can be thrown forward âwith the force of a 1200-kilogram baby elephantâ.
Since the dog weighs twice as much as the child, why is it equivalent to a polar bear, an animal which typically weighs only around half as much as a baby elephant?
Perhaps the answer is to do with the speed at which the vehicle is travelling. But McLeod still wants to know this: âIf a motorist should be unfortunate enough to have an accident while transporting an unrestrained baby elephant or polar bear, what units of force should be used in these circumstances?â
Giraffeâs necks and Golden Gate Bridge
WHICH makes it an appropriate moment to introduce readers to the unusual unit converter discovered by Matt Zimmerman at . This enables you to convert from one unusual unit to another. Sadly, in the âweightâ section âmale polar bearâ is listed, but there is no baby elephant, only a fully grown one. Even so, you may be interested to know that one African elephant equals 12.24790343434 polar bears. There is also a âlength/heightâ section which reveals, for instance, that one Golden Gate Bridge equals 720 giraffeâs necks.
BETWEEN Cambridge and Newmarket in the east of England there is a road sign saying âHidden dipsâ. They were so well hidden that Laurie van Someren, despite giving full attention to the road, didnât see them. He wonders, however, if they consisted of taramasalata, hummous and guacamole, in that order â perhaps they were a test installation of eco-friendly traffic lights?
SCOTTISH POWER sent a letter to its customer Alan Arnott headed âImportant information about your energy accountâ. Under the heading âCommon sense ways to save energyâ it told him: âSwitch your TV, hi-fi or video off at the mains and youâll save 60 per cent of the energy it uses on standby mode.â Like Arnott, Feedback would have guessed that switching everything off would be a 100 per cent saving. Does Scottish Power know something about electricity that we donât?
HUNTING for a job, Emma Thompson found an entry on a jobs database seeking âInstore Demonsâ. Her excitement at the possibilities of such a post was mounting, with trepidation at what the training might involve â until she clicked the link and found that mundane âDemonstratorsâ were required. The post of âBreast Support Secretaryâ at a local hospital turned out to be just that, and neither Thompson nor we will speculate on what it involves.
FINALLY, should we name the firm of accountants and business advisers that sent Perry Bebbington an email bearing the disclaimer âIf you cannot read the contents of this email please reply entering the words âplease forward plain text versionâ in the subject lineâ? Oh, all right then, we wonât, on the assumption that they may be good at decimal arithmetic whatever their shortcomings are in binary logic.
