Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
Men make monthly mistakes
PUBLICIST Diana Ziskin writes to alert us that “The creators of MyPeriod Tracker App are five typical guys who were tired of the drama, discourse and sometimes absurd fights they would come home to with their wives and girlfriends when they had no idea it was ‘that time of the month’.”
An attached advert for the phone app, in which women can share their cycle with their partners so that “your relationship can once again run more smoothly… yes, even during that week!”, has the guys saying that it “was borne [sic] out of our need for survival and to better understand and be able to support our wives”. Some readers may visualise a pause after “survival”, followed by the blenching of a man who realises he had better backtrack, entirely unconvincing though this effort is.
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Given the date of this issue of New Scientist, a curious Feedback wonders how well one of these would go down as a Valentine’s Day gift.
Hunting through his cupboard, Ian Wells found . He wonders what the boredom or terror editions do. We’re boggled by “Cola Bottles” and “Strawberry Laces” scents
A whale’s hall of fame
LONDON’S Natural History Museum attracted a great deal of publicity in January for its announcement that it will replace the iconic copy of a Diplodocus skeleton in its entrance hall with a real blue whale skeleton. As Susan Parker observed on the day of the announcement, “Dinosaur fans everywhere will be weeping into their cornflakes.” And they did, indeed lobbying to .
But “the important thing”, as Susan puts it, “is that this will give a proper perspective on the standardised blue-whale unit of measurement – whereas we don’t tend to talk about multiples or fractions of a Diplodocus.” Not yet, we don’t. Feedback’s mailbag quivers in expectation.
Safe soccer standard
PERHAPS the above-mentioned cetacean should instead be moved to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in France to serve as the Standard Blue Whale?
On a related topic, Feedback was discussing with friends the problem of using the football pitch as a unit of area owing to the variation between pitches (25 October 2014). As a sportophobe, we found ourselves in the unusual position of agreeing with Manchester City fans in proposing that the Manchester United pitch be made the standard, moved to Paris and kept under glass in a vacuum.
While a whale waits
CONFUSINGLY, Jack Harrison reports a way to combine whales and football into a measure of time. He spotted a poster in Tobermory on the Isle of Mull that announces: “Sperm whale – can dive to over 1000 metres and stay underwater for the duration of a football match”.
On the buses
COINCIDENTALLY, we think, several readers wrote at the end of January to ask: “whatever happened to the double-decker bus?” This, as Richard King observes, “was the standard unit of weight when I was young”. The “Routemaster” bus, now banished to London heritage status, has a mass of 7.47 tonnes – or, in the new non-metrocentric international units, 1.5 African elephants.
Rob Macfie thus questions the use of the outdated unit by Sheffield City Councillor Jayne Dunn, who proudly that about 188 double-decker buses of salt had been spread to de-ice that city’s roads.
Alex MacDonald and Richard Bamborough both noted that new nuclear waste vaults at Dounreay in Scotland were in the Daily Record as being “equivalent in volume to between 370 and 450 double-decker buses”. Feedback wonders whose interests are served by using a superseded unit of volume.
Double-deck decibel distress
MORE disturbingly, Alex MacDonald also forwarded from the Aberdeen Press and Journal, also in Scotland, that a soundproof building at the Lossiemouth Air Force base “would be able to silence the fighters’ twin engines – which are the same as 32 double-decker buses”. Feedback has enough trouble comparing decibel values given plainly: this really makes our head hurt.
Stop in the middle of nowhere
SPEAKING of buses, Sofia Graves writes: “When you travel on the bus from Majorca airport into the city, the first stop is announced as ‘Joan Maragall Street – Virtual’.” She hasn’t “had the guts to explore what would happen if I got off at a virtual stop”.
If she got off, would she be able to bypass the 8-kilometre journey to Joan Maragall Street – Real?
The search for poetry
FINALLY, we were a little piqued by the feature on writing poetry in computer code (27 December 2014, p 51). Feedback was rhyming in the Pascal language a quarter century ago.
Anne Sproule does much better by sending poems apparently produced by computer code. The title of each poem is a word that you enter into a search engine: the body is the suggestions it provides you, at that moment, on what you might be looking for. Anne gives two examples:
THIS: This is the end / This American Life / This is why I am broke / This is 40 / This means war!
WHY: Why is the sky blue? / Why am I so tired? / Why do we dream? / Why do dogs eat grass? / Why am I always so tired?
