Are wind turbines really fans?
WHY didnât we think of that? The only way we can do justice to a that John Gledhill forwards from the Leamington Courier newspaper is to reproduce it in full:
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âIt is blindingly obvious and I am amazed that an âexpertâ has not pointed this out.
âFact 1: Most of the ash trees in Denmark have died, or are dying from the fungal disease, Chalara fraxinea.
âFact 2: The Danish company Vestas is the worldâs largest manufacturer of wind turbines.
âAs a country, we purchase and erect these huge fans all over our rural landscape, from where they then spread the fungal plague indiscriminately. Itâs an ill wind indeed!â
It may be best not to credit the author here. All we can add is: Huge fans â no thanks!
BALLYGOWAN mineral water, Barry Cash was startled to read, is âfiltered through calcium-enriched limestoneâ. Barry asks, âHow can you enrich it with more calcium?â
âKEEP back from the platform edge,â begins a sign from Penrith railway station sent by Alan Storer from Victoria, Australia, who assigns it to Penrith, New South Wales, Australia. Feedbackâs fine eye for typography and railway architecture places it firmly in Penrith, Cumbria, UK, in the time of standardised British Rail signs using the Helvetica font. Searching, we find readers of The Guardian newspaper in 2006 of its location.
And why might it have gone viral all over the interweb and undergone such memetic mutation? Because we more frequently see a sign that assumes some knowledge of physics in expressing the reason for keeping back, such as: âPassing trains cause air turbulence.â
The sign in Alanâs photo is in plain English and finishes, simply, with: ââŠor you may get sucked offâ. Feedback wants an explanation for the giggling we hear. This is serious.
The value of âdonât knowâ
FEEDBACK reported John Gledhillâs confusion over whether âdonât knowâ fits into the continuum of ordinal numbers (1 December). The notion of âdonât knowâ as a number reminded a colleague of the UK governmentâs thoughts on the subject of the cost to authors of rules that allow other people to use their work without asking or paying â so-called âprivate copyingâ.
When he looked for info on such costs, our colleague found that civil servants in the Intellectual Property Office had that they donât know. The IPO estimated the gross business benefits to be about ÂŁ141 million a year and so proceeded to subtract âdonât knowâ â the amount of authorsâ losses â from this, coming up with an estimate for a net benefit of, guess what, ÂŁ141 million. This seemingly places the value of âdonât knowâ at zero.
Our colleague felt pretty confident that, in this context, even if the value of âdonât knowâ could not be specified, it was certainly not zero. So about the role in applied mathematics of the special value âNot a Numberâ, or âNaNâ â as specified in the from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. In fact, the correct answer to âÂŁ141 million minus NaNâ is âNaNâ.
It was at this point, we understand, that the IPOâs collective eyes glazed over.
THE above-mentioned colleague hears that the same Intellectual Property Office civil servants have since moved on from mangling applied mathematics to logic.
A scurrilous rumour spread by a former civil servant holds that their recalculation of the costs and benefits of permitting use of authorsâ works for the purposes of parody starts from the assumption that âthere is currently no parody in the UKâ.
If true, this would be a fine example of a sentence which is its own disproof.
OUR piling system throws up in Canadaâs Globe and Mail online telling us that in October President Bashar al-Assad of Syria âapproved a law on the health security of genetically modified organisms⊠to regulate their use and productionâ.
SANA, the state-run news agency, explained that the lawâs purpose was to âpreserve the health of human beings, animals, vegetables and the environmentâ.
The same report mentions that âmore than 33,000 people have been killed in 19 months of conflictâ in Syria, âmost of them civiliansâ. Clearly, al-Assad is, despite that, the kind of guy who cares.
FINALLY, several readers were inspired to respond to our report of a psychic fair âcancelled due to unforeseen circumstancesâ (6 October). Tony Lang is reminded of the organisers of similar âpsychicâ events in Ewell, Surrey, UK putting up large banners â and he wonders, âWhy do they need to advertise?â
Barrie Wells, meanwhile, wonders whether the organisers of such events may have an arrangement with Virgin Trains, the railway operator that sent a promotional email advising him to, âBook before today, and save for tomorrowâ.
