IS GLOUCESTERSHIRE the unluckiest place in the world? A BBC news report suggests that on top of extensive flooding earlier this year, this part of England has been visited with another grievous natural disaster. The article, at tells how the UKâs slug population has skyrocketed thanks to the unusually wet summer. âSome areas have been particularly badly hit,â it says. âIn parts of Gloucestershire there are 100 slugs per square foot.â
Tim Newberry has done some calculations and they donât look at all nice. If slugs are about 3 inches long and about half an inch wide, he suggests â sticking with the BBCâs imperial units â and they are tightly packed, you might be able to squeeze 96 into a square foot. Thatâs not quite 100, but consider the implications. With that slug density, there simply isnât any room for anything else. Gloucestershire must now be almost entirely composed of slugs. As Newberry asks: how do the people there move around? The squishiness doesnât bear thinking about.
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BRRRINGGG! Itâs the wee hours of the morning. You pick up the phone. It might be a family emergency, after all. But you donât recognise the voice on the other end of the line. Youâre in the US and donât know anyone with such a heavy foreign accent. So you slam the phone down, mutter something nasty about telemarketers and go back to sleep.
âA UPI report spotted by Marjolein Katsma about storms in Yemen notes: âFatalities and injuries caused by lightning strikes are also common due to the stateâs typography.â What dangerous font would that be?â
Thatâs exactly what Lindy Hall did one morning in early October 2005. Then the phone rang again, and the caller said âThis is really important,â and asked to speak to her husband John. She relented and handed the phone to her husband, who then learned he had just won the Nobel prize in physics.
So if youâre a scientist, or living with one, in a time zone several hours behind Sweden and the phone rings very early one morning next month, you might want to listen carefully. And remember that the Swedish for âyippee!â is âhurra!â
HOW good are you at brushing your teeth without any of the toothpaste touching your skin â not even the extra-sensitive skin inside your mouth? The tube of Ultradent Opalescence toothpaste that Geoffrey Clark bought came with a Material Safety Data Sheet that included this recommendation: âSkin contact: wash with soap and water.â
Quite worrying, we think.
THE letter about service changes that Raymond Green received from MBNA bank told him: âThese changes will take effect from January 2008, except the âImportant changes to your Insurance Coverâ which will take effect from 10 November 2007. These changes will supersede any other information that you might receive from us between now and then.â
Green is worried: âWhat I want to know is, if I do receive information from them between now and then and it says it supersedes any earlier information received from them, do both lots of information supersede each other, thus cancelling each other out?â
WE HAVE, as Paul Vernon admits, curtailed the debate on nominative determinism â many times. However, Vernon couldnât resist telling us about a company that seems to have a recruitment policy based on it.
Apem is a freshwater and marine environmental consultancy whose team of scientists includes Peter Spillett, who specialises in fisheries management, and water industry and resources; Rachel Waterfall, who works in water resources and aquatic ecology; and Elizabeth Bywaters, whose focus is [aquatic] invertebrate biology.
The team also includes Nick Kneebone, who bucks the trend by working in invertebrate taxonomy. Invertebrates, as everybody knows, donât have knee bones.
BORED at work, Max Maguire found himself looking at the Help section of MSNâs Hotmail, under âClose your MSN Hotmail accountâ.
The first instruction given is âTo close a free Hotmail account, sign in to Hotmail using the account. Click Help, and then follow the instructions in the topic named âClose your MSN Hotmail accountâ.â
How very helpful.
FINALLY, Don Jewett writes to ask if we at Feedback send copy round the office by reading it to our colleagues over the telephone â or perhaps by shouting it from desk to desk, as they do in Hollywood movies.
The reason concerns our treatment of Jewettâs story about the âdragon dropâ feature of a software program that Jewett surmised was the phrase âdrag and dropâ erroneously transcribed from a telephone call. When we ran that story on 11 August we misspelled Jewettâs name as Jewitt, even though the name was correctly spelled in Jewettâs email to us. Our apologies for this error. Next time we will shout louder.
