DOZENS of readers responded to our plea for help finding out what a “pyridaben carbazole sound” 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 – or a “click”.
Hugh Casement entered most thoroughly into the spirit of our disillusionment by stepping away from the web and asking his friend Gang Huang – who answers that it is, roughly, a “tsak” sound: the equivalent Chinese is two characters that sound like ka-tsu. These are also used to name carbazole – sort-of phonetically, with the “ba” left out.
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“You see the perils,” Gang observes, “of consulting a Chinese-English dictionary.”
Giuseppe Sollazzo also asked a friend, and was told the sound is like “gada”. We know that Chinese characters can be pronounced differently by speakers of different languages, but does that work for these?
Numerous readers – and Victor Mair in an – 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 “Bussey laming” – sort-of phonetic for “bucillamine”. “The habit of contracting words,” she notes, “is an absolute killer when it comes to finding the meaning in a dictionary.”
We did enjoy Tony Kline’s discovery in the course of his searches that a section of the Chinese egg industry markets itself under a trademark given to us as “giggle clatter”. It seems translation software is at work again here, producing with the headline “Giggle Pyridaben: eggs, too, marketing” and filling it with lyrical but perplexing sentences like: “Jade Mountain is surrounded by the sea side by mountains, beautiful scenery, is the growth of the local chicken pyridaben giggle.”
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. “Do not remove the teapot from the base during the filling cycle,” they say, “as scolding water will be ejected.”
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 “a 1 in 20 chance of being utter nonsense” (17 July). The correct formulation is, as Jan Willem Nienhuys points out: “When investigating utter nonsense you have a 1 in 20 chance of finding a ‘result’ that can be reported as being significant.”
In our defence, we suggest – retroactively, to be sure – 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 “4D baby scan” is more than mere marketing guff (17 July). As Carole Twining of the says, such scanners “do 3D surface reconstructions from successive [2D] ultrasound scans; adding time gives you 4D imaging”.
NORMAL marketing-speak service is resumed with the intriguing claim that Graham Langford found in an Orvis clothing catalogue for a fabric with “4-way stretch”. Would that perhaps include time dilation?
“The instructions on Roland Dyer’s “Wizz OXI ultra plus” fabric stain remover advised him to dissolve it in “5ltr warm water max. 400 C””
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 “reduces the appearance of being a raddled old hack” (30 November, 2002).
Now we look forward to non-claims in which “75 per cent of users agreed” (with a footnote pointing to a survey of 17 people), and products that “may help you forget you have a urinary tract infection”. Brace yourselves.