Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
Bringing dark to our lightness
BEING a candidate in a local council election must be demoralising, if only for hearing so many excuses for being ignored while door-knocking: “I donate by direct debit”, “we’re atheists” and so on. But Frank Cross tells us of residents eagerly buttonholing a candidate on the doorsteps of Bromley in the south-eastern penumbra of London.
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That might have been pleasing, had the residents not been keen to protest about new high-tech light-emitting-diode streetlights – on the grounds that they, among other things, are “dangerous”, “bring people out in rashes” and “send them blind”.
A quick search reveals the headline “” As always, the question mark begs the answer “of course not”. (Parenthetically, does anyone have a counterexample to this rule about headlines?)
According to the Observer newspaper ““. Richard Spragg says “This has been on the cards since the first horse discovered Newton’s laws of motion”
Bulb of a conspiracy theory
NOT only do some allege that the scarily new lights cast harm, as above. Frank alerts us to a new light-bulb conspiracy theory.
Sadly, it’s not as much fun as the spoof-conspiracy of – an immortal, though determinedly incandescent, inanimate character in Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow. According to some of Barack Obama’s opponents, it was the Democrat president of the US who oppressively outlawed Byron’s ilk to further an evil plan to combat imaginary climate change.
Of course, that’s not quite right. Frank sends , which points out that LEDs “have a dark side”, containing heavy metals. They do, in minuscule quantities, so don’t eat too many. But they look, you know, sciency.
The article further points out that the current phasing out of incandescent light bulbs was mandated in the US by the of 2007 – which was signed into law by none other than Republican president George W. Bush.
It’s a conspiracy conspiracy!
RAISING the subject of conspiracy theories offers an opportunity to mention one of our favourite paper titles: “.” Stephan Lewandowsky tells the story at : “Some 18 months ago I published with colleagues… that reported a survey of visitors to climate blogs which established a small, but significant, association between the endorsement of conspiracy theories and the rejection of several scientific propositions, including the fact [of]warming from greenhouse gases.”
You can probably guess what happened next. People who reject science deluged Lewandowsky and his colleagues with complaints that the allusion to “conspiracist ideation” was a conspiracy: a lovely example of a phenomenon known as “recursion”. They were incandescent at being depicted as exhibiting what we shall call “non-standard mentation”.
In the nature of recursion, of course the wonderfully titled follow-up paper attracted second-order fury. Sadly, the journal Frontiers in Psychology then , explaining that its “investigation did not identify any issues with the academic and ethical aspects of the study [but did] determine that the legal context is insufficiently clear”. In other words they feared being sued. You can still read the follow-up paper, though, at .
The persistence of error
THE persistence of incorrect ideas can be puzzling. While discussing messages hidden in scientific articles, we mentioned the late mathematician John Isbell putting the acrostic peccavi – Latin for “I have sinned” in a draft paper (15 March).
Mike Adams was just one of the readers who reminded us that the word was the entire text of a telegram General Charles Napier sent to inform his superiors that he “had Sindh”, capturing the province in 1843 for British India. Yes, we knew that. We were teasing.
Yet it seems we were wrong; the telegram wording was apocryphal.
At , Bamber Gascoigne’s Encyclopedia of Britain reports that in 1844, after Napier was berated for his ruthless actions, teenager Catherine Winkworth brightly remarked to her teacher that Napier’s despatch should have been ‼ő±đł¦ł¦˛ą±ąľ±â€ś. Today, with the sad demise of telegrams, he would have to text it. Or it.
Most learn while alive
WE LEARN something every day of our lives. But is that the limit? Bob Holmes reports of a US Public Broadcasting Service television show on the teenage brain – that contains the helpful headline “Most learning takes place throughout our lives”. He had been looking forward to learning quantum mechanics after his death.
Round and round a help loop
FINALLY, returning to recursion: Jonathan Wallace reports that he looks after a Facebook page for a butterfly conservation group. Having problems logging in, he tried Facebook’s help centre and was directed to a “” page. Under “log in issues” there was a link entitled “I can’t log in” which seemed to describe the problem. Clicking on it took him to “Review the known login issues” which took him straight back. We believe he finally escaped the loop.