COMMUNICATING on the move! That’s the advertisers’ glib message. Feedback’s message is: read the small print on the “roaming” charges that make it possible to use cellphones and e-mail services abroad.
Feedback recently tested one of the new European “triband” cellphones that can be switched to “roam” on the frequencies used in the US. It worked in Las Vegas, Silicon Valley and all down the Pacific coast. But the surcharges for roaming pushed the cost up to about £2 a minute—even for calls received.
Using e-mail abroad can be even more expensive. Every country has its own Internet service providers and some are free. But most can be accessed from abroad only by making an international call. Hotels charge an arm and leg for these, and using a data link to a cellphone can cost even more.
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One way to avoid international calls is to sign up to a local Internet service while abroad, perhaps for a free trial month. But beware. Loading the necessary new software can upset your laptop’s existing settings. Also, expect to be asked for credit card details and to be stuck with international phone calls to the help desk after you have flown home if anything goes wrong with the cancellation process. And you may still not be able to pick up e-mail sent to your existing address.
AOL and Compuserve offer subscribers the chance to access their services in other countries by dialling a local number. Great. But watch out for surcharges. The online information for Compuserve’s new 2000 system is so ambiguous that even the company’s own staff cannot agree what it means. One spokesperson said visitors to the US must pay a surcharge of £2.50 for every connection made, however brief. Another later said it is £2.50 an hour. Who knows who is right? Certainly not the subscriber helpline, which said it was free.
So world travellers be wary. You can end up paying through the nose just to send or receive a few short text messages.
WHILE the Y2K bug was in the news, The New York Times decided to sort out a little date problem of its own. It corrected a 102-year-old error in its issue numbering, to take effect from 1 January 2000.
According to the online news service Risks Digest, on 6 February 1898 a careless “copyboy” calculated that the issue after number 14 499 would be 15 000. Since each subsequent day’s issue number was worked out by looking at the previous day’s issue and adding 1, no one spotted the error for over a century.
The paper’s current “newsroom assistant” (as they are now called) in charge of typing in the number each night started wondering about whether an error had ever been made, worked out what the current number should be and tracked down the gap. The New York Times put back its issue number by 500 and “regrets the error”.
“ANY information regarding the existence and whereabouts of these organisations will be welcomed by the editors,” says the Directory of British Associations. It is referring to organisations on its list which it “believes to exist”, but about which it has no details. Such organisations are preceded in the list by two asterisks and followed by the words “organisation lost”.
And what kind of organisations have got “lost”? Steve Shrewsbury sent us page 23 of the directory, which has two examples on it. They are the Association of British Private Detectives and the Association of British Security Officers.
If anyone finds these organisations, perhaps they could contact the directory.
THE headline of an article in one of Medscape’s online medical pages reads: “Sudden coronary death remains a significant health problem”.
Well, yes.
AS IF to prove once more that chemists have a sense of humour (did we ever doubt it?), Bristol University’s Paul May has added a list of unusual, but genuine, chemical names to his Molecule of the Month website.
Among the chemical delicacies are the super-tough compound “adamantane” (not, despite appearances, named after 1980s pop star Adam Ant) and its chemical cousin “bastardane”, more formally known as ethano-bridged noradamantane.
Then there’s the soccer ball-shaped “buckminsterfullerene” and the natural product “megaphone” from the roots of the plant Aniba megaphylla. There is even a mineral with the intriguing moniker of “cummingtonite”, while the stuttering “unununium” also makes an elemental appearance.
But the choice that May puts at the top of his list is, for the sake of decency, best left to visitors to find for themselves. Suffice to say, it involves the arsenic version of the molecule pyrrole. See www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Chemistry/MOTM/silly/sillymols.htm.
AND finally, one from the department of redundant information. A friend arrived at Kauai airport in Hawaii recently. A loudspeaker announcement informed him: “Bags from flight 111 from Honolulu will be arriving on Carousel A or B.”
He looked around. There were only two carousels, A and B.
