Feedback is 51¶ŻÂțâs popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com
How the whale crumbles
More on the topic of unusual units of measurement, in particular how to communicate the size of information. Attentive readers will recall Christopher Dionneâs suggestion that the scale of large datasets could be conveyed by comparing them to the genome of the blue whale (12 April).
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Bruce Horton writes in with a firm riposte. âThe whole point of using blue whales to measure the size of things is that everyone knows how big a blue whale is, so we can easily visualise the length of anything measured in blue whales,â he writes. âBut most people cannot visualise the size of blue whale DNA, so that idea wonât work well.â
He has a point. Feedback is still scarred by the era of the Human Genome Project in the early 2000s, when we had to find comparisons to get across how much information is carried on our DNA. These often involved stacks of Bibles reaching halfway to the moon. Nowadays, we would just use the collected Wheel of Time books.
Fortunately, Bruce has a solution. He points us to a 2005 study in the parody scientific journal Annals of Improbable Research, which describes SNAP: . The researchers attached a giant African land snail to a two-wheeled cart, the wheels of which were CDs or DVDs. While the snail moved slowly, the data nonetheless travelled at 37,000 kilobytes per second â meaning the snail-based system transferred information quicker than existing broadband connections.
SNAP, Bruce argues, âis a standard unit of measurement of data transfer that is easy for anyone to visualise and understand and is recommended for common useâ.
Perhaps. While we await further correspondence, we wish to recommend a new unit developed by Ken Taylor and his wife. They have an orchard that includes some damson trees, which Ken describes as ânotoriously variable in yield from year to yearâ. Hence they have established âthe crumbleâ, which is a measure of how many desserts they can make per harvest. Ken reports: â2024 was a very bad year â just 3 crumbles.â
Shock findings
âWell who would have thought it,â says news editor Alexandra Thompson. âStop the press.â She was drawing Feedbackâs attention to a with the title: .
Compared with smaller cars, one of those great hulking SUVs is more likely to kill you if it hits you. Now, you might expect Feedback to snark at the sheer obviousness of this: yes, heavier objects hit harder than lighter ones, if they arrive at the same speed. But of course, one of the main virtues of science is the refusal to accept common sense for an answer, but instead to check things.
We hereby invite reader contributions in the category of âno shit, Sherlockâ. The more painfully obvious the discovery and tediously long-winded the experiment, the better. Do people enjoy picnics less if theyâre overrun by ants? Does your water bill go up if you have a leaky tap? At least one enquiring mind wants to know.
Licking badgers
Historian Greg Jenner made a noteworthy discovery in April. Writing on , Greg says: âyou can type any random sentence into Google, then add âmeaningâ afterwards, and youâll get an AI explanation of a famous idiom or phrase you just made upâ.
Gregâs invention was , which Googleâs AI meant âyou canât trick or deceive someone a second time after theyâve been tricked onceâ. Um, first of all, the US electorate begs to differ. Second, this is, and we canât stress this enough, completely made up. Yet that didnât stop the AI a detailed explanation. ââLickingâ in this context means to trick or deceive someone,â it says, and âthe phrase likely originates with the historical sport of badger baitingâ. Badger baiting was a real thing; this etymological link is not.
In the replies, people submitted their own made-up phrases and Googleâs âinterpretationsâ. came up with âYou canât run a mile without hitting it with a hammerâ, which is apparently âa motivational phrase often used to emphasize the difficulty or struggle involved in achieving a goalâ. Feedback was particularly delighted by the use of âoftenâ in that torrent of nonsense.
offered âItâs better to have a tentacle in the tent than a rat in the rattan chairâ. Google informed him that this is âa humorous idiom that suggests itâs better to be in a situation that is initially uncomfortable or unusual than a situation that is undesirable and/or dangerousâ. Feedback has a number of thoughts on this, not the least: why should a rogue tentacle be considered uncomfortable but not dangerous? Weâve read H. P. Lovecraft: tentacles are a bad sign.
Alas, the âmeaningâ function seems to have been deactivated. We tried to persuade Google to give us a definition for ânever rub a roe deerâs cabbagesâ, and it wouldnât do it.
Of course, itâs mean to pick on the AI for doing what it was built to do: generating responses to questions. And itâs not like we havenât met any humans that would rather spew nonsense than admit they donât know the answer to a question.
But it perhaps highlights the issues with adding this technology to a page meant to be a source of accurate information. Feedback now no longer entirely trusts the results on Google, which ironically means the AI was right: you really canât lick a badger twice.
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