CHRIS Elliott’s name comes well down the circulation list for New Scientist at his work, so it was a while before he read our story about the Kyocera batteries that are liable to “rapid disassembly” (17 April).
When he did, he couldn’t help feeling a twinge of sympathy. He is an engineer working in aerospace, and occasionally has to write FMEA, or failure mode effect analysis reports. This is where you list everything that can go wrong and what will happen if it does.
There is a ban on some specific words though, and Elliott ruefully admits that he is obliged to use euphemisms such as: “Fire – uncontrolled thermal event”; “Explosion – spontaneous rapid disassembly event”; “Bursting – unplanned loss of containment”; “Crash – deconstructive deceleration”.
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NO, we’re not going to start nominative determinism again. But we can’t resist passing on something that Nick Dingle noticed on . It appears that the US navy spokesman put up to answer journalists’ questions about the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is one Lieutenant Mike Kafka.
As the article on The Register observes: “Yes, you’re reading that correctly. A man named Kafka has been deployed to field questions about a prison where the criminals are only vaguely charged with crimes, can’t speak to lawyers and likely will never get out.” Any resemblance this reality bears to an actual fiction is entirely coincidental.
WANT a gift with a difference? Then you should have a glance at the Firebox.com catalogue that David Simmons received. One of the items that struck him was monkey-picked tea: “This delicate brew has been hand picked by monkeys! No, really! The well cared for monkeys are specially trained by their Chinese owners to pick rare, wild tea plants in inaccessible places such as cliff faces.”
The other was weasel coffee: “This unusual organic brew has been eaten and then regurgitated by rare Vietnamese weasels…the weasels’ gastric goings-on radically alter the taste of the coffee and the result is a stronger, smoother, heady-flavoured coffee.”
We have to say we find these claims a little hard to believe. The canonical version of the coffee urban legend features an Indonesian civet cat anyway. But whatever the truth, Feedback will be sticking to tea and coffee that has been touched by human hand only. Especially the coffee.
FEEDBACK likes jazz, so was rather pleased to be sent a copy of the very popular new recording by pianist and singer Jamie Cullum, called Twentysomething. The disc arrived to promote Super Audio CD, the new super hi-fi digital system that uses a recording technology called Direct Stream Digital.
A publicity note inside the CD sleeve promises “the ultimate audio quality (because) Direct Stream Digital technology reproduces the original sound without any distortion…Nothing will ever sound the same again.”
So isn’t digital wonderful? But we cannot help wondering how carefully the system’s backers have read the rest of the sleeve note. Writes the record’s producer, Stewart Levine: “This album was recorded and mixed entirely in the analogue domain… I have extensive experience in both formats (analogue and digital)…analogue tape gives it a warmer and also clearer, more realistic sound…the analogue format has worked just fine since the days of Louis Armstrong on to the Beatles, and through to the White Stripes. Don’t fix it if it ain’t broken.”
CHRIS Brown was constructing a model rocket and was puzzled on reading the instructions to find that one of the materials required was “slow setting instant glue”. In similar vein, Tom Yates tells of a Chinese takeaway he knows that proudly states on its menu: “Every dish is instantly cooked to order, therefore short delays may occur.”
IT SEEMS that Internet mail service Yahoo! has decided only to allow its customers negative mail storage. Nick Laurie received this peremptory message the other day: “You are currently exceeding your Yahoo! Mail storage quota by a very large amount. You are only allowed – 2048.0MB of storage but you are currently using 0.0MB of storage. Your account has been temporarily disabled from receiving new messages.”
FINALLY, for £12.50 you can buy a set of Eternal Life rings on eBay. These rings “are believed”, as the promoter is careful to say, “to allow humans to stay physically young forever”.
On the other hand, as Owen Thompson was interested to discover, the risk-free guarantee offered with the rings allows you to return them within 30 days “if you are not completely satisfied with your purchase”.
Shaun Plumb received a message signed “Customer Service Advisor BT Psyphones”. So that’s how their shiny new phone network will work.
