Are wind turbines really fans?
WHY didnāt we think of that? The only way we can do justice to a that John Gledhill forwards from the Leamington Courier newspaper is to reproduce it in full:
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āIt is blindingly obvious and I am amazed that an āexpertā has not pointed this out.
āFact 1: Most of the ash trees in Denmark have died, or are dying from the fungal disease, Chalara fraxinea.
āFact 2: The Danish company Vestas is the worldās largest manufacturer of wind turbines.
āAs a country, we purchase and erect these huge fans all over our rural landscape, from where they then spread the fungal plague indiscriminately. Itās an ill wind indeed!ā
It may be best not to credit the author here. All we can add is: Huge fans ā no thanks!
BALLYGOWAN mineral water, Barry Cash was startled to read, is āfiltered through calcium-enriched limestoneā. Barry asks, āHow can you enrich it with more calcium?ā
āKEEP back from the platform edge,ā begins a sign from Penrith railway station sent by Alan Storer from Victoria, Australia, who assigns it to Penrith, New South Wales, Australia. Feedbackās fine eye for typography and railway architecture places it firmly in Penrith, Cumbria, UK, in the time of standardised British Rail signs using the Helvetica font. Searching, we find readers of The Guardian newspaper in 2006 of its location.
And why might it have gone viral all over the interweb and undergone such memetic mutation? Because we more frequently see a sign that assumes some knowledge of physics in expressing the reason for keeping back, such as: āPassing trains cause air turbulence.ā
The sign in Alanās photo is in plain English and finishes, simply, with: āā¦or you may get sucked offā. Feedback wants an explanation for the giggling we hear. This is serious.
The value of ādonāt knowā
FEEDBACK reported John Gledhillās confusion over whether ādonāt knowā fits into the continuum of ordinal numbers (1 December). The notion of ādonāt knowā as a number reminded a colleague of the UK governmentās thoughts on the subject of the cost to authors of rules that allow other people to use their work without asking or paying ā so-called āprivate copyingā.
When he looked for info on such costs, our colleague found that civil servants in the Intellectual Property Office had that they donāt know. The IPO estimated the gross business benefits to be about Ā£141 million a year and so proceeded to subtract ādonāt knowā ā the amount of authorsā losses ā from this, coming up with an estimate for a net benefit of, guess what, Ā£141 million. This seemingly places the value of ādonāt knowā at zero.
Our colleague felt pretty confident that, in this context, even if the value of ādonāt knowā could not be specified, it was certainly not zero. So about the role in applied mathematics of the special value āNot a Numberā, or āNaNā ā as specified in the from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. In fact, the correct answer to āĀ£141 million minus NaNā is āNaNā.
It was at this point, we understand, that the IPOās collective eyes glazed over.
THE above-mentioned colleague hears that the same Intellectual Property Office civil servants have since moved on from mangling applied mathematics to logic.
A scurrilous rumour spread by a former civil servant holds that their recalculation of the costs and benefits of permitting use of authorsā works for the purposes of parody starts from the assumption that āthere is currently no parody in the UKā.
If true, this would be a fine example of a sentence which is its own disproof.
OUR piling system throws up in Canadaās Globe and Mail online telling us that in October President Bashar al-Assad of Syria āapproved a law on the health security of genetically modified organismsā¦ to regulate their use and productionā.
SANA, the state-run news agency, explained that the lawās purpose was to āpreserve the health of human beings, animals, vegetables and the environmentā.
The same report mentions that āmore than 33,000 people have been killed in 19 months of conflictā in Syria, āmost of them civiliansā. Clearly, al-Assad is, despite that, the kind of guy who cares.
FINALLY, several readers were inspired to respond to our report of a psychic fair ācancelled due to unforeseen circumstancesā (6 October). Tony Lang is reminded of the organisers of similar āpsychicā events in Ewell, Surrey, UK putting up large banners ā and he wonders, āWhy do they need to advertise?ā
Barrie Wells, meanwhile, wonders whether the organisers of such events may have an arrangement with Virgin Trains, the railway operator that sent a promotional email advising him to, āBook before today, and save for tomorrowā.
