HOW WOULD you like to have a spider named after you? According to the The
West Australian newspaper, the Western Australian Museum in Perth has launched a
fund-raising and awareness programme called “Live Forever”. It promises that for
just A$5000 (£1800), members of the public can achieve nominal
immortality by having a species named after them.
To inaugurate the programme, Paralympics sailing gold medallist Noel Robins
has had the honour of having his name attached to the rare spider Austrarchaea
robinsi, a creature distinguished, apparently, by its “elongated head and
dzܳٳ貹ٲ”.
With new species being discovered all the time in West Australia, there is
plenty of scope for the programme. It aims to raise money for research and has
the fulsome support of naturalist Harry Butler, “whose well-known name appears
on a few species, including a louse that lives in the anus of a carpet
Բ”.
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Feedback can’t wait to be similarly honoured.
FROM The Sunday Times “Style” magazine,
13 May: “A promising new treatment
that should become available soon are ‘biological’ deodorants. These won’t
destroy the armpit bacteria, but will break them down into odourless carbon
dioxide and water.”
The bacteria’s relief at not being “destroyed” would be short-lived.
ACADEMICS love a good lie, it seems.
A site called “Dave’s web of lies” (www.cs.man.ac.uk/~hancockd/lotd.htm)
celebrates lying in all its forms. It includes, for example, “Lie of the day”,
“Guest liar” and “Our esteemed celebrity liar”—currently Stephen Fry, who
has this to say: “Journalism is an honourable profession, attracting some of the
most talented and thoughtful minds in the world. Its aim is to inform, elucidate
and uplift the human spirit.” (We’re not quite sure why this evidently true
statement is included on the site, but let that pass.)
Guy Halsall of Birkbeck College, London, tells us he decided to contribute to
the site’s “Submit a lie” section. Having done so, he took a look at the
3950-strong “Database of lies”, and suddenly noticed something about the e-mail
addresses of the people who had sent them in. A surprisingly high proportion
ended with the academic sign-off “.ac.uk” for British universities or “.edu” for
American ones.
And that’s the truth.
THE FRONT cover of a recent issue of the Institute of Biology’s in-house
journal The Biologist carried two headlines that paired up more happily than the
editors may have intended. After “Breathless” came “Sex underwater”.
DETERMINED to improve its public image, NASA has instituted new
“housekeeping” rules for its staff. An anonymous employee of the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, California, reported an office-to-office inspection by
management to the NASA Watch website (www.nasawatch.com). “This is not
associated with safety issues such as fire hazards (such as stacks of papers
reaching the ceiling or cardboard boxes on the floor), but whether the
inspecting committee can see clear desktops, neat piles of paper, and papers not
being currently used as filed.”
Violators were warned that untidy desks “could impact their annual
performance review and threaten their annual salary increase”. Does the same
sort of thing apply, we wonder, when employees make a miscalculation that
crashes a spacecraft?
A MEMBER of the New Scientist editorial staff was recently on a
much delayed flight from a Greek island to London. To cheer up the disgruntled passengers,
the cabin crew held a competition. The person who gave the nearest estimate of
the length of the journey in miles would win a visit to the cockpit.
A lady passenger raised her nose from the issue of New Scientist she was
reading, thought for a moment, and penned a guess. Needless to say, she was
astonishingly close and duly won.
As for the New Scientist journalist who witnessed the event—he was
miles off.
ᷡ鷡’S one for the nitpickers among us. Intel has been running adverts in
magazines telling businesses how its products could give them the advantage of
continuous trading on the Web. It did this by stating “The web never sleeps” and
running this string of numbers across the page: “60/60/24/7/365.”
It’s not too hard to work out what the numbers mean—60 seconds a
minute, 60 minutes an hour, and so on. The trouble is they’ve got it wrong. The
365 should be 52.
So there.
WHEN British reader Nic Plum gave in to pressure from his children and
stopped off at a McDonald’s on the A14 recently, he was intrigued to discover
that the customer care manager was called Caroline Careless. The sign on her
lapel didn’t say if she was a Miss, Mrs or Ms, so he could only wonder if she
was born Careless or became Careless when she married.
READER Ashley Mills spotted an intriguing sentence in the section on the
QWERTY keyboard in his copy of Understanding Computer Science for Advanced Level
by Ray Bradley: “France uses the AZERTY keyboard and the Chinese keyboard can
only be imagined.”
So do the Chinese type by telekinesis?
A SIGN outside the Nightingale building at the University of Southampton
says: “University of Southampton School of Nursing and Midwifery. Deliveries at
rear of building.”
FINALLY, a footnote in the 11 May issue of Science suggested that the
British government has been worried about a little-known disease for the past 30 years.
The note referred to the “Northumberland Report: The Report of the Committee of
Inquiry on Food and Mouth Disease (HMSO, London, 1968)”.
