WORRIED that time spent in front of a computer screen is damaging your children’s health? You may want to think twice, then, before encouraging them to join the latest wheeze from the US National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute’s “We can!” initiative.
It aims to promote “healthy eating, increased physical activity, and reduced screen time”. And how does it aim to do that? Why, by encouraging children to visit a famous social networking site, and to vote for their favourite entry in the project’s first video contest ().
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Jane Kauer particularly likes the surely ironic injunction to watch all nine videos. Even better is the plea to “share the videos with your friends and family and encourage them to vote” – “instead of, presumably, getting away from their screens,” as Jane says, “and going for a walk”.
“The UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change a “daft strategy” for electricity microgeneration. “A bit too close to the truth”, says our anonymous tipster”
Why is this physicist like a frog?
NO SUCH worries for Anthony Burton, who has been spending time at his computer enjoying a well-known word processor’s suggestions on spelling famous scientists’ names. Our version gives several accepted spellings of Dimitri Mendeleyev’s surname, but his suggests “Minelayer” – oddly appropriate considering what his periodic table did to notions of matter. Quantum physicist Louis de Broglie comes up as a less fitting “Froglike”.
Search function with a blind spot
WINDOWS 7, the latest operating system from Microsoft, is generally agreed to be pretty good. But Feedback has fallen foul of a serious oddity. Its search function, which can rapidly find keywords buried inside thousands of documents stored on a hard disc, has a disagreeable foible: it ignores the content of some files. For example, if the part after the dot at the end of a file name – the “extension” – is “DOC” and the file was not created by Microsoft Word, the search skips it.
Website forums bristle with . So Feedback asked a senior manager, who looked worried and promised to investigate, but after two weeks clammed up and referred us to a press spokescreature, who referred us to the support team in India. There followed 6 hours over two days spent trapped on the phone while an engineer remotely tampered with the PC, asking questions like “What word processor do you use now?”
Finally, after two weeks’ consultation with Microsoft in the US, the engineer phoned to agree that the problem does indeed exist. “But it’s not a fault,” he insisted. So what is it – a feature?
Lacking actual help from Microsoft, by trial and error Feedback found a fix. Make copies of the old files, with “.TXT” as their extension, and Windows 7 will happily search these. The quickest tool for this copying is probably the , typed at the blinking, scary, 1980s-flavoured command-line prompt.
TRAVELLING on a Eurostar Italia train (not to be confused with the branch-line service linking London to continental Europe), Marc Smith-Evans was delighted to see how far precision engineering has come: at the end of the carriage a display showed that the internal temperature was 22.000000 °C. Clearly, his comfort is important to Italian railways – to the nearest microdegree.
Record-breaking nested acronyms
TOPPING our examples of very deep multiple nesting of acronyms and initialisms (10 July), Henry Bainbridge has come across a record-breaking five-deep example. The is, it turns out, a TDIF Expansion Board, in which TDIF is the Tascam Digital Interconnect Format, in which TASCAM is TASC America Corporation, and TASC is TEAC Audio Systems Corporation and TEAC is the Tokyo Electro Acoustic Company. “It made my day,” Henry says. “It was very boring until then, as you can imagine.”
ALARMINGLY, a large banner recently on display outside Ianthe Maclagan’s local Co-operative Society grocery store in Kidlington, Oxfordshire, UK, declared: “We ensure the views of our members reflect the way we run our society”. She wondered how they do that. Her son suggests it’s some stuff they put in the milk.
INSPIRED by our mention of the signposted assertion that “falling rocks do not stop” (12 June), Richard Sutcliffe reports that his favourite road sign, displayed widely in the mountains of Colorado, is “Icy conditions may exist”. He suggests this should be followed by “Next philosopher 500 miles”.
This reminds Feedback of hours on the US freeway network spent pondering how the common sign “Bridge freezes before road” could be translated into the pictographic form used of warning signs in the rest of the world.
FINALLY, another strange sign is recalled by Peter Toye, who saw it on a tradesman’s premises in Stratford-upon-Avon, UK: “Practical Chimney Sweep”. His father wondered what a theoretical chimney sweep did.
Feedback fears the implications may be more sinister. The term “practical mason” is, we are told, used by Freemasons to designate masons who actually shape stone. So is there a secret society of impractical sweeps? If there is, the secret has clearly been so well kept that the first question, before “and do they rule the world?” would have to be “how could we tell?”
