Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
Weight in dollars squared
PROGRAMMERS at a Famous Web Search Engine are forever trying to find new ways to be helpful – and to keep us coming back. Clive Jones was recently looking up exchange rates between the British pound and the US dollar. He discovered that if you put a figure and a currency in the search box, the search engine makes “a decent stab at providing an instant conversion without the need to select a website and search around”.
Later, he accidentally typed “pound pound dollar rate” into the search field and received the result: “1 British pound pound U.S. dollar = 0.677349486 kg U.S. Dollars2“. After studying this, Clive says he “can only conclude that they have attempted to provide the weight of a pound of dollars”. What the intriguing unit the kilogram-dollar-squared might represent continues to elude him, though, as it does us.
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Ignoring Clive’s warning that we were in danger of opening the floodgates of permutation, we tried “euro euro dollar rate”, which wasn’t recognised as a currency conversion; then “euro pound dollar rate”, which we were informed was “1 Euro pound U.S. dollar = 0.584544487 kg U.S. Dollars2“.
Something similar happens for yen. Disappointingly, “blue whale pound dollar rate” gives the usual selection of links, many to pages that do not mention whales. One links to the news, attributed to Fox, that “ Would Equal Weight Of 89 Blue Whales” – taking us into the outer reaches of fiscal strangeness.
Brian Robinson sends us a photo of a large sign outside a showroom in what he describes as “rural Virginia”. It says: “Antique tables made daily”
Lift is four floors short
OUR “missing floors in buildings” theme has inspired readers to send us stories about buildings around the world equipped with lifts that miss out certain floors (4 May). Now Alan Chattaway sends us the strangest one yet.
“Here in Vancouver, Canada, one of our tallest buildings has four missing floors,” he says. “The is so narrow that it would have swayed in high winds or earthquakes. To prevent this, 400 tonnes of water are on the roof to increase inertia, and four floors below are filled with concrete cross-bracing.”
Alan concludes that “the missing floors may not be obvious to those using the elevators”. We think this is just as well. The knowledge of all that water and concrete just above your head when you reach the “top floor” would not be reassuring.
Theoretical types of people
INEVITABLY, Feedback readers have sent in further responses to our mentions of the T-shirt slogan that there are “only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don’t” (16 March and 11 May). John Hartley suggests an alternative: “There are {{},{{}}} types of people in the world – those who understand the construction of ordinal numbers in axiomatic set theory, and those who don’t.”
Feedback’s resident mathematics guru agrees. The symbol “{}”, he explains, represents the empty set, which has no members; and {{}} represents the set whose single member is the empty set – which is how we get to “one” in set theory. And so on to “two”, and the rest of arithmetic.
All of which may well be true. However, Feedback suspects that the market for this T-shirt will be somewhat smaller than that for the binary variant.
One dimensional volume
AS HE was about to send a parcel via , Tim Walker decided to check first that it wasn’t too big or heavy, so he clicked on the link to “check parcel size”. Here he was presented with the statement: “max volume up to 225cm.”
He had a bit of a struggle with “max volume up to”, wondering how it was possible to have more than one maximum, but decided to treat this as mere tautology. But this still left him with a one-dimensional volume, leading him briefly to wonder how many one-dimensional parcels you can fit in a three-dimensional delivery van.
He assumed, of course, that they had omitted “cubed” after “cm”. Then he noticed that the website includes a handy “UK volume calculator”, so he decided to check if its definition matched the one he knew. He put in “10 cm” for parcel length, parcel width and parcel height, hit “calculate size” and was given a “combined size” of “50cm”.
Tasty bin bags
A SIGN in Roger Calvert’s local ASDA supermarket proclaims “Tried, Tasted and Chosen by You”. The two displays it refers to, Roger tells us, are for liquid laundry detergent and plastic bin bags.
Take it all with you
FINALLY, Feedback frequently does a double take when a disembodied voice on London’s Underground admonishes passengers to “take all your belongings with you” when leaving the train. Would they really appreciate us wedging the doors open while we unloaded 1000 books, the cast-iron cookware and the shelves they sit on?