DOZENS more readers have written about the ādidnāt I do well?ā gesture, remaining divided on whether it represents polishing oneās fingernails or an invisible medal (23 July). Bob Millar says that it was common when he was young, as was another interesting gesture which involves a finger laid up the side of the nose. This can mean āKeep it quiet, but we know something special,ā or āHa! I know something that you donāt.ā
But why? The all-knowing interweb is not helping, producing only more questions, as you might expect for a problem that depends on meaning rather than simply finding the words. We declined to watch the zit-killing video that came back from a search for āfinger side of noseā. We need the actual intelligence of Feedback readers to settle thisā¦ know what I mean?
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āāWelcome to SPEED,ā says the road sign in the charming photo Shane Dwyer sends, which continues āplease slow downā ā in the interests of safety in the Australian town of that nameā
WHEN Hanny Middlebrook checks her webmail on she is informed that she had used up ā-2147483648 per cent of 1 GBā. Hanny doesnāt understand how she can have used such a large negative percentage of her byte allocation.
Ian Cutter received the same message and wondered about the wondrous efficiency of the system that could compress his data to occupy negative space. Mary Voice, meanwhile, is āa little nervousā over what might happen if she deleted all her Bigpond email. Might the net quantity of information in the universe become negative?
Yes, yes, we do have an idea how it happened, to forestall further emails: -2,147,483,648 is the largest negative number that can be represented in 32 binary digits. But not all the permutations of those 32 bits represent numbers. One or more is commonly reserved for reporting the result of, for example, dividing by zero, which is ānot a numberā or āNaNā. And if a programmer asks too forcefully for the value of NaN, many systems return their largest negative number instead.
This will have instantly sprung to many minds that regularly grapple with computer programming; we apologise if to other minds its content is as large and negative as that of our readersā email boxes.
AN ORGANISATION called World-Check, Graham Barrow tells us, offers an online service to help assess the risks of doing business with what are known in financial circles as āpolitically exposed personsā ā such as ex-president of Egypt Hosni Mubarak and Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya.
Its website claims: āMore than 4500 institutions, including over 49 of the worldās top 50 banksā¦ rely on the World-Check database of known heightened-risk individuals and businesses.ā
Graham ācanāt for the life of me work out exactly how many of the worldās top 50 banks actually use World-Checkā. Answer: NaN.
SEVERAL readers have joined our Society for Promotion of Numerate Proofreading (SPNP, 6 August) and written to castigate Ā鶹“«Ć½ for saying that air temperatures in Londonās Tube tunnels āhave doubled in the 100 years since they were built.ā (6 August, p 38).
Well, er, yes. To talk of a temperature measured in Celsius doubling does make no physical sense. Mike Whittaker takes advantage of the fact that doubling an absolute temperature (measured in kelvin) is less nonsensical to ask whether, if the temperature was 10 Ā°C (283K) in 1911, āthat makes it 293 Ā°C (566K) now?ā.
But if you ask the person on the Clapham omnibus ā or on a Northern Line tube train sweltering beneath it ā what a temperature half of todayās would be, youāll get one of two consistent answers, depending on whether they were brought up in Celsius or Fahrenheit. Feedback suspects, or hopes, that this would fail for other numbers whose doubling makes no sense, such as earthquake magnitudes.
And whatās that got to do with the price of fish? It raises the question of whether it strictly makes sense to talk of a price doubling, unless you specify that itās with respect to a named individual at constant hourly pay. We have a topic for debate at an inaugural SPNP general meeting.
FEEDBACK is covered in shame. Lee Mason, self-described as an āavid 16-year-old Ā鶹“«Ć½ readerā, looked up the rest of the product catalogue of , whose āOrange Spreadā we observed to be ingredient-free (12 March). āIt appears,ā Mason reports, āthat Walden Farms is a well-established business, and since 1972 has promised foods with āNo Calories, Fat, Carbs, Gluten or Sugars of any kind!ā.ā
The main constituent of almost all their products is ātriple filtered purified waterā: their chocolate dip, for example, equally claims zero nutrition, apart from 35 milligrams of sodium per serving. In Leeās opinion, an alternative to such goods, at a cheaper price, is to āsimply add triple-filtered purified water to your favourite cardboard cereal boxā.
FINALLY, the sign Tony Holkham saw in his local fish and chip shop stated: āFirewood. Kindling, middlers, logs (mostly ash).ā
āThatāll be second-hand firewood, then,ā he thought ā until he realised that āashā referred to the type of tree the wood had come from.