DOZENS of readers responded to our plea for help finding out what a āpyridaben carbazole soundā might be (26 June). We had been disappointed to find that the all-knowing internet did not help, and had suggested readers might like to send us their suggestions the old-fashioned way. One in fact sent a postcard, of the Louvre, Paris, suggesting it could be a substitute for an expletive ā or a āclickā.
Hugh Casement entered most thoroughly into the spirit of our disillusionment by stepping away from the web and asking his friend Gang Huang ā who answers that it is, roughly, a ātsakā sound: the equivalent Chinese is two characters that sound like ka-tsu. These are also used to name carbazole ā sort-of phonetically, with the ābaā left out.
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āYou see the perils,ā Gang observes, āof consulting a Chinese-English dictionary.ā
Giuseppe Sollazzo also asked a friend, and was told the sound is like āgadaā. We know that Chinese characters can be pronounced differently by speakers of different languages, but does that work for these?
Numerous readers ā and Victor Mair in an ā reached similar conclusions by using the tools they suspect of setting the puzzle in the first place: machine translation programs. Lynette Jeggo read our plea while revising a computer translation of a Chinese scientific paper that included the drug name āBussey lamingā ā sort-of phonetic for ābucillamineā. āThe habit of contracting words,ā she notes, āis an absolute killer when it comes to finding the meaning in a dictionary.ā
We did enjoy Tony Klineās discovery in the course of his searches that a section of the Chinese egg industry markets itself under a trademark given to us as āgiggle clatterā. It seems translation software is at work again here, producing with the headline āGiggle Pyridaben: eggs, too, marketingā and filling it with lyrical but perplexing sentences like: āJade Mountain is surrounded by the sea side by mountains, beautiful scenery, is the growth of the local chicken pyridaben giggle.ā
YOU may, meanwhile, be chastened by the sound produced if you ignore the instructions that come with a Swan Teasmade kit, as John Gledhill has discovered. āDo not remove the teapot from the base during the filling cycle,ā they say, āas scolding water will be ejected.ā
DISCUSSING the possibilities of retroactive prayer, Feedback felt the need to point out that a study with a standard social-science 95 per cent confidence level has āa 1 in 20 chance of being utter nonsenseā (17 July). The correct formulation is, as Jan Willem Nienhuys points out: āWhen investigating utter nonsense you have a 1 in 20 chance of finding a āresultā that can be reported as being significant.ā
In our defence, we suggest ā retroactively, to be sure ā that we used the statistical approach that starts from an estimate of our belief in the hypothesis before experimentation starts: the approach formulated by the Reverend Thomas Bayes. And almost everything that lands on our desk is, on the face of it, deeply improbable.
READERS have also written to gently remind us that the concept of a ā4D baby scanā is more than mere marketing guff (17 July). As Carole Twining of the says, such scanners ādo 3D surface reconstructions from successive [2D] ultrasound scans; adding time gives you 4D imagingā.
NORMAL marketing-speak service is resumed with the intriguing claim that Graham Langford found in an Orvis clothing catalogue for a fabric with ā4-way stretchā. Would that perhaps include time dilation?
āThe instructions on Roland Dyerās āWizz OXI ultra plusā fabric stain remover advised him to dissolve it in ā5ltr warm water max. 400 Cāā
Turning to the Orvis website (), we were delighted to discover a similar garment that consists of 2.5 layers. We assume, until corrected, that the secret of the stretch is in the fractal dimensionality of the cloth.
FINALLY, Feedback has a prediction. Last month, the European Food Safety Authority published a round-up of assessments of . It turned down four-fifths for lack of evidence, including claims that cranberry juice fights urinary infections and that expensive yogurt in tiny pots does anything much, really.
Purveyors of magic health-giving foods have six months to comply and make their claims less enchanting. Our prediction is that we will face a glut of baffling not-quite-claims, borrowing from the practice of the cosmetics industry. You know how it goes: Vitamin X āreduces the appearance of being a raddled old hackā (30 November, 2002).
Now we look forward to non-claims in which ā75 per cent of users agreedā (with a footnote pointing to a survey of 17 people), and products that āmay help you forget you have a urinary tract infectionā. Brace yourselves.
