Handy nutritious molecules
RESOLUTIONS to change one’s life are traditional in some cultures at this time of year. You could do worse than pledging to eat more fruit. But what fruit in particular? And how to decide, without spending days sitting down (bad) reading research papers (good)?
Tim Dodd sends a novel shortcut, helpfully supplied on a card with his regular delivery of fruit and vegetables. “SweeTango apples,” it explains, “are new apples to the New Zealand market. An interesting fact is that their molecules are twice the size of other apples.”
Chemists may rejoice at this – at last, two-apple-sized molecules instead of the small, fiddly ones.
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Andrew Doble noticed a useful safety tip on the dashboard of a ParCar golf cart: “stop vehicle before reversing”. He has tried to disobey it. And failed
Reality is certified in law
ARE the above-mentioned SweeTango apples real? Taking a shortcut around the vexed philosophical questions of “reality”, Feedback headed to the , where that they are legally declared to exist. Their molecular properties will be news to the University of Minnesota, which holds the trademark. Then we discovered that they have their own website – , oddly enough. This reports that their cells are than other apples’. That apostrophe is also rather important here. We’re vaguely pleased to see greengrocers upholding their apostrophic tradition in the card that Tim Dodd received.
Pencils – unite and fight!
TRADEMARKS… that reminds us. When we checked before the winter break, no one had objected to the Twitter corporation’s application to restrict the use of the word “Tweet” in more than 750 contexts, including branding of cremation, pencils and escorts (22 November). We discover at that the fee to do so is €350, which may explain the silence. A whip-round?
Dawn of a new numerical era
A NEW numerical era dawns in this issue of Â鶹´«Ă˝. What other weekly publications have passed our liminal number of 3000 issues, a colleague asked. A famous web search engine knows: no sooner do we type “issue 3000” than it suggests The Beano – which, Your Honour, is a weekly illustrated magazine for children based in Scotland, UK.
The New Statesman, probably the inspiration for Â鶹´«Ă˝â€™s title, was founded by Sidney and Beatrice Webb with the support of George Bernard Shaw and other progressives on 12 April 1913 – so it has now racked up 5308 weeks.
In a different corner of the political spectrum, The Spectator was first published on 6 July 1828. Yes, the dangerously modern Gregorian calendar was in force then. And no, Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet program will not recognise that as a date. It insists they have -89,406 weeks under their belt, which is appropriate for a backward-looking publication.
Time magazine was founded on 3 March 1923. Its current issue when we wrote this, dated 22 Dec 2014, was given the charmingly old-fashioned designator “Volume 184 No. 24”. What is the base of this arithmetic? We estimate 4792 instances of Time.
Purveying practical precision
BUT we are celebrating the above-mentioned threshold in issue 3002 of Â鶹´«Ă˝. Why?
We glide past the argument that all numbers are interesting (1 November). The dawn of our third numerical millennium should of course be celebrated at the point appropriate to purveyors of practical precision (called “pedants” by some).
Feedback, for one, questions the thinking that led to fireworks on 31 December 1999: as discussed here on 18 December that year, the start of the Gregorian millennium was 1 January 2001. Hence, we aimed for issue 3001. But the holiday issue was a bumper issue, encompassing numbers 3000 and 3001. In a sense this makes 3001 an imaginary issue number. Cheers, anyway!
A set of the ex-uninteresting
RETURNING now to the question of whether all numbers are interesting, we find a report from Graham Andrews that 39 is not. It’s a WikiFact, in on the 1986 Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers, which states that 39 “appears to be the first uninteresting number”. Douglas Woodall argued that this in itself makes it interesting, and so on for any larger boring number (1 November).
However, according to Graham, the 1997 edition of the book notes that 39, like all 2-digit numbers ending in 9, equals the product of its digits plus their sum. Further, it has another property that will lead us to look up the word ““. Later. The revised edition nominates, Graham reports, 51. We await readers’ reasons why this number is interesting, other than for the reason Douglas gave…
All this leads us to suspect that there is a distinct set of formerly uninteresting numbers. Is their distribution as frustratingly irregular as that of the primes? Could there be applications in cryptography?
Invert comfort inverter
FINALLY, we return to the world of trademarks. We noted Jeroen Gildemacher’s discovery in his employer’s basement of a machine labelled “Comfort Inverter” (17 May). Now we find that “Comfort Inverter” exists in law and is to Daikin, purveyors of air conditioning. The confirms that we need to invert the meaning, as it were, to describe an “inverter” that controls current to maximise comfort. Glad that’s sorted.