THANKS to reader Nick Pearson for alerting us to the chance offered by Channel 4 television in the UK to win boxed sets of DVDs of the series in which Richard Dawkins celebrates his scientific hero, Charles Darwin. Unfortunately, Pearson’s email arrived after entries had closed, but we are as amused as he was to note that “Channel 4 reserves the right to cancel or amend the Competition or the Rules without notice in the event of a catastrophe, war, civil or military disturbance, act of God…”
As Pearson notes, if these atheistic and pro-science DVDs were targeted for sabotage by an enraged supernatural being, there would be large issues to deal with – larger even than war or civil disturbance. But unlikely as such an occurrence might be, the Channel 4 legal department would no doubt tell us it wouldn’t be doing its job if it didn’t cover this possibility.
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Pearson likens it to the wager by the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal. Loosely translated, Pascal bet that it was worth believing in God, on the off chance there might be an afterlife in which you’d suffer for not believing. Lawyers, especially when out of their depth, similarly wager that it’s worth covering all possibilities in what they term a “laundry list”, including, but not limited to, the kitchen sink.
“The October issue of the Journal of the British Astronomical Association has a section headed “Forthcoming events on Saturn”. Chris Eccles would like to go along but suspects travel arrangements will be problematical”
Are they being exhaustive enough, though? Pearson notes the unimaginative use of the singular “God”. Would Channel 4 be covered if there were a conspiracy to sabotage the competition by an entire coterie of deities? Shouldn’t the terms read “acts of God or gods or flying spaghetti monsters or invisible pink unicorns or any other imaginary beings”?
CELEBRATIONS have just finished at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, for the 50th anniversary of a milestone that had nothing to do with basic physics research. In October 1958, nuclear physicist William Higinbotham created one of the world’s first video games, called Tennis for Two.
Officially, his goal was to liven up displays at the lab’s annual visitors’ day, and in that he succeeded. Hundreds of people lined up to bat a glowing spot back and forth across the video screen of a common or garden laboratory oscilloscope.
Unofficially, Feedback suspects he was really just goofing off on a slow day, or waiting around with nothing to do when the lab’s particle accelerator was broken, being maintained or otherwise failing to deliver the goods. Higinbotham himself said the idea came to him while reading the manual for an early computer which could plot the course of a missile or a bouncing ball on an oscilloscope screen. He then designed suitable circuits and control boxes – Stone Age versions of today’s joysticks – so that two players could bat an electronic ball to each other across the screen.
The game was adapted for a larger screen, but eventually forgotten until 1982, when Creative Computing magazine heard about it and thought it might be the first video game. With the invention far enough behind for him not to worry about accounting for time wasted on the government payroll, Higinbotham claimed credit for Tennis for Two.
Such primitive video games are old hat now, but hundreds of physicists are still waiting for the completion of repairs to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. What might they be inventing this time, while sitting around twiddling their thumbs?
WONDERING how to submit a paper to the British Ecological Society’s The Bulletin, Maggie Cooper found in its August 2008 edition “The publication process explained” by Liz Baker. Apparently “the editor responsible for handling the manuscript… will invite between 2 and 3 reviewers to consider the paper”.
Cooper says she “spent some time” trying to imagine what that number of reviewers would look like.
RELATED confusion comes to us from the University College London intranet, which asked Chris McManus to “make sure that your new password is between 7 and 8 characters”.
McManus wonders: “How do I type that pesky 0.4 of a character into the password?”
THE BBC’s computers, it seems, are able to think for themselves. When Ian Ground sent a query to the BBC’s education news site he received the following: “Thank you for your email; this is a computer-generated response… This email (and any attachments) is confidential and may contain personal views which are not the views of the BBC unless specifically stated.”
FINALLY, during their weekly shopping trip, Joan and James Williams came across a box of Lyons mince pies, complete with a picture of a jolly snowman and the slogan “Great for Christmas”. On the side of the box was the best-before date: 17 November.
