RANDOM correlations continue their spread across the World Wide Web – particularly through helpful suggestions of “related items”. Feedback has so far concentrated on the imaginative offerings to book-seekers on – most recently on 1 May. Now the blight is spreading across online forums.
Consider the plight of those seeking help on the construction of spreadsheets at all. In the “Related articles” on the page on creating a warning message in Excel (at ) readers are directed to seek further advice on how to “Make Phyllo Sheets with a Pasta Machine”.
The advice looks sound, but has little to do with spreadsheet programs: “phyllo sheets” are a posh version of what the devotees of British pie shops would call “flaky pastry”. In structure, however, they are much like a multidimensional spreadsheet, made of many layers of negligible thickness. Feedback fears that next time hunger impels us into Greggs the bakers for a cheese and onion pasty, we’ll be mentally checking for contradictions between the layers of pastry.
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“Niall Litchfield notes that, according to , the camera orbiting the Red Planet on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter “can reveal features as small as desks”. It does not say what they are doing there”
MEANWHILE, back to Amazon’s correlations. Karen Ashworth asks if we have noticed the market distortion New Scientist book reviews can cause at the online retailer.
When she searched for The Battery: How portable power sparked a technological revolution, by Henry Schlesinger, which was reviewed in New Scientist on 20 March, p 47, Amazon suggested that, based on what other people are buying with it, she might very well be interested in The Natural Navigator, by Tristan Gooley. This was also reviewed in New Scientist on 20 March, p 47. Coincidence?
LET us not forget that Amazon offers more than mere suggestions. Check out this bargain. Shopping online for rechargeable batteries, Andy Green came across a , including four batteries, retailing at £16.27.
This price, Amazon announced, represents a saving of no less than £3,560,000.00 on the recommended retail price, described by Amazon as a saving of “100 per cent”.
THE Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, seems fated to suffer misnomers. We reported on 13 February that it got called the Large Hadron Colander in a London pub quiz.
Now Richard Walder tells us that there is an exhibition of artworks at the De la Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea on the English south coast, with the theme “The artist and the role of science in the search for the ‘God particle'”. It features photographs of colliders and particle smashers from around the world, one of which has this caption: “Shown here is the 27-kilometre underground tunnel on the French/Swiss border known to science as ‘The Large Hardon’ collider”. It was only a matter of time.
FROM the UK Met Office’s on 9 May: “The Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland is presently erupting to a height of between 16-20,000 feet (5-6km), then heading off in a south-south-easterly direction.”
Jack Harrison in Cambridgeshire, UK, is keeping a fearful watch on the north-north-westerly horizon, just in case.
Sleep report wakes up Feedback
FEEDBACK was feeling drowsy, but was woken up by a sentence in a press release from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Reporting on a study aimed at improving students’ sleeping habits, it said: “By the end of the semester, students had increased their total nightly sleep time by an average of 15 minutes; and more than three-out-of-five students had started sleeping almost an hour longer.”
Hang on a minute, we thought, suddenly alert. If 60 per cent of the students slept nearly an hour a night longer, why was the average for all students only 15 minutes? If nearly an hour means, say, 45 minutes, the only way the numbers work is if the 40 per cent of students who didn’t sleep nearly an hour longer actually slept an average of 30 minutes less, not more.
Something is wrong somewhere. Maybe the press officer who wrote this had had a late night.
The up-to disease strikes again
ANOTHER fine example of the “up to” obfuscation disease (24 April) is provided by Bryan Thomas. He points out that a recent copy of the New Zealand Consumer magazine noted that “Up to 500 New Zealanders fall ill with a food-borne illness every day – nearly 20,000 a year”.
In fact, averaged over a year, 20,000 cases is about 55 per day. That “up to” phrase makes the sentence mathematically credible, Bryan observes – but even so it remains virtually meaningless.
FINALLY, emergency veterinarian Andy Maloney was stumped when he wanted to prescribe some Frudix diuretic tablets for a sick cat. The directions on the pack said: “Dogs and cats: One tablet per 10 kilograms once or twice a day at 8-hour intervals”.
“Try as I might,” he says, “I couldn’t figure out a dose that complied with the directions.”
