IF YOUR name is D’Arcy, don’t visit asteroid 9491 Thooft.
A few weeks ago, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) named a pair of
asteroids in honour of two Dutch Nobel laureates, Gerard `t Hooft and Martin
Veltman. The asteroids, which orbit between Mars and Jupiter, are now called
9491 Thooft and 9492 Veltman.
Now `t Hooft has declared a constitution for his minor planet. Among other
articles, it states that 9491 Thooft has a territorial zone of 137 kilometres in
all directions. Aliens embarking on the asteroid must be in possession of a
visitor visa if they stay for a period shorter than a 9491 Thooft year or an
immigration visa if they wish to take permanent residence.
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Since the IAU was unable to place an apostrophe in the name of 9491 Thooft,
`t Hooft has decreed that any uses of apostrophes on 9491 Thooft or within its
territorial zone will be outlawed. No keyboards that have an apostrophe key will
be allowed on the asteroid.
The full text of the 9491 Thooft constitution can be found on `t Hooft’s
website: www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/constitution.html.
On his home page, `t Hooft muses: “Rumors concerning an imminent collision
against 9492 Veltman were shown to be unfounded.” Veltman and `t Hooft were once
professor and student. Do we detect a whiff of academic rivalry here?
LAST WEEK, Feedback received a copy of a 10-page internal e-mail from
Microsoft. It details the company’s contingency plans for fielding media
enquiries while its lawyers negotiate with the US Department of Justice on Judge
Jackson’s ruling that Microsoft violated anti-trust laws. Microsoft tells its
employees that it wants to “exercise an effective plan . . . whilst causing
minimum disruption to everybody’s work/home balance”.
The same e-mail had been sent to many hundreds of newspapers, radio and TV
stations round the world. Within minutes Microsoft had realised its mistake and
was asking everyone to ignore it. The incident demonstrates the awesome power of
e-mail. Press one wrong key and private messages spray far and wide and can
never be clawed back.
What’s more, instead of using the “blind copy” option, Microsoft topped and
tailed the message with hundreds of private e-mail addresses for all the world
to see. Worse still, the few lines of text in the body of the message were
monstrously bloated by HTML coding, which wastes space and takes an age to
download. And worst of all, instead of sending the contingency plan as plain
text, Microsoft dressed it up as a fancy-fonted binary Word attachment of the
type that can harbour a virus.
If the people who have been held to monopolise the computer age cannot use
computers sensibly, what hope is there for the rest of us?
EVERY cloud has a silver lining—including a cloud of locusts.
A swarm of 10 billion locusts is on its way to New South Wales, threatening
to wipe out A$250 million worth of crops. The story was given full-page
treatment in the British tabloid theDaily Express last week. With the
headline “Billions of locusts threaten Australian crops”, the introduction
proclaimed: “Farmers brace themselves for worst plague attack in 15 years
costing £100 million.”
But not to worry. A small sidebar of “locust facts” includes this vital
information: “Stir-fried with a bit of garlic, locusts are very similar to
prawns and are rich in protein.”
ANYONE dialling Britain should know that London recently went through its
third number change in 10 years. The capital city used to be coded 01, then it
split it into 071 and 081, then 0171 and 0181. Now it is reunited as 020, plus
an extra 7 or 8 in front of the subscriber’s number.
Got it? Good. Because the British government has spent £20 million
telling everyone about the change. Or nearly everyone. BT, which provides the
lines into most homes and offices, has a system which lets an engineer visiting
a site get the exchange to send test signals down the line. The engineer just
dials a code (usually 175) and the exchange responds by speaking the number of
the line, testing it and reporting the result. Feedback tried dialling 175 from
London. Sure enough the announcement came back “you are 0171 . . . “
It was the same when reader Philip Harvey dialled BT’s 1471 service to find
out the number of his most recent caller. Although he did this more than a week
after the changeover, he was given the 0181 code for the number in question.
It’s a shame he hadn’t done it a few calls earlier. If he had, he would have
been given the number of the BT department which had phoned him (and many
thousands of other subscribers) to tell him the numbers were being changed.
FINALLY, is this the longest shelf life ever? Reader Susan Taylor recently
purchased a jar of Zest Foods organic pasta sauce with a best before date of “2
March 0069″. This suggests it will be safe to eat for the next 8069 years, which
Feedback finds quite impressive.
