BROWSING the weather forecast site , John Poyner was somewhat startled to be presented with an advertisement for supermarket Tesco offering a āThunder and Lightning Strikeā ā with free delivery. Had they been reading the article about artificial lightning from Tesla coils in this magazine on 24 June (p 36)?
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British newspapers are notorious for going bananas over a bit of weather. They are not alone. Ian Stewart forwards a bulletin from the Bulgarian news agency at : āThe heat wave, which started sizzling in Bulgaria last week, will continue on Friday, to be followed by spells of showers over the weekendā¦ Experts attribute the weird weather to a combination of unfavourable astrological and geological conditions, which have changed Bulgariaās climate from moderately continental to subtropical.ā
Stewart is working with the British Council to āraise awareness of climate change in Bulgariaā. Clearly the task is not yet done. Unless the carbon dioxide emissions of would-be magicians who hammer rocks are more significant than we thought.
UNIVERSITY exams may traumatise students, but their answers give their professors much food for thought. Palaeontologists have lately been sharing their favourite examples. Some are technically accurate but nonetheless misleading understatements, like the student asked to give the age of a dinosaur who responded āDeinonychus lived more than one hundred years ago.ā There are wild guessers ā like the student, asked to name groups that developed powered flight besides birds, bats and pterosaurs, who answered āpenguinsā.
āA pack of āmini Yum Yumsā declares ācontains colour flavourā, as spotted by Nic Plum at supermarket Sainsburyās ā where synaesthetes shopā
Then there are the terms that go beyond the studentās vocabulary. When a professor asked students to list ātwo vestigial structures in humansā, one listed āheart and lungsā and a second listed ābrainsā. The temptation to answer āspeak for yourselfā must have been strong.
LORD Justice Sedley and Mr Justice Gray may know something that science doesnāt. Martin Gorst alerts us to their June judgment in the high court in London that the monthly āCritical Massā event was a ācustomary processionā and therefore not subject to the need for formal notification to the Metropolitan Police. But what is this critical mass, you may ask?
Let the august judges explain themselves: āSince April 1994 in London, as in many other cities throughout the world, starting in San Francisco in 1992, cyclists have gathered at a set time early in the evening of the last Friday of each month for a mass ride through the streetsā¦ It is, of course, their numbers that make the participants a critical mass in the scientific as well as the social sense.ā
Feedback has an urgent message to cyclists. As we understand the āscientific senseā of critical mass, this means you must not get too close together. We really do not want to find out at what density you will explode.
FOR reasons unknown to us, Sean Williams found himself looking up the word āmonolatryā. Wikipedia defines it as the practice of worshipping only one deity, while acknowledging that there may be more than one: . However, Williams was intrigued to find a link to a yet-to-be-written page on āalatrismā. At the time Williams wrote, āalatrismā was a Googlewhackblatt, producing that single web page when you search for it. Mentions have multiplied since then ā but of course we pay attention only to one.
We think we can help with that missing definition. āAlatrismā would be formed from the word āalatryā, the practice of not bothering to worship any deities, regardless of how many there may be (recall āidolatryā and the prefix āa-ā for ānoā or ānotā). This brings us to Feedbackās Statistical Proof of Alatry.
It goes like this. The only thing we know about deities with any certainty is that the number of them is a whole number, the idea of a fractional deity being frankly absurd. So the number of deities in our universe is an integer, in the range from minus infinity to plus infinity. (We leave the theologians to interpret a negative number of deities: this is number theory, and its conclusion should save them the trouble.)
For it is commonly accepted that we should expect our universe to be typical of possible universes. So the expected number of deities is in the middle of the range of possibilities. That is, zero. Quod erat demonstrandum.
FINALLY, the Summer 2006 catalogue from The Scholarās Bookshelf offers what Wayne Newman reckons is a rather surprising video: āAugustus; First of the Emperors. Mixes rare footage with exclusive interviews and archival art. 50 min. Color and B. & W.ā