Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
When art intimates life
IT CAN be nice when people believe science has inspired their art. Can be. Consider “intermedia” artist installation ReBioGeneSys, which he is “theoretically capable of forming the self-organizing chemistries necessary to produce semi-living molecules and perhaps even protocells”.
Brown had detected a flaw in an earlier work based on a primordial soup of chemicals: namely, there was nothing forcing these to do anything. So ReBioGeneSys is designed to “torture the chemicals within (by freezing them, heating them back up and so on) in the hopes that more complex life will eventually form”.
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“Think of it like soup,” . “The more you boil it down, the deeper the flavor becomes because the molecules draw closer together.” That last bit makes Feedback somehow doubt the nature of the “experiment” – and reluctant to taste Adam’s soup.
Martin Albu reports that a club he belongs to boasts that its membership card is biodegradable and “should last a lifetime”. For some reason he finds this worrying
Multidimensional marketing
DIMENSIONS exert a fascination over marketing creatures. Sönke Hardersen saw an advert for a jacket boasting “six-dimensional elasticity”. We now find that Mick Cooke sent the same ad earlier, having received it with the same running socks. Sönke “can only envy those sporty people who are able to move in six dimensions”.
Perhaps they can, if we include rotation around three axes as well as motion in the three familiar dimensions. But how does that relate to elasticity? Multi-dimensional wringing out?
Now a nine-dimensional Nikon
THE above six-dimensional advert blurb is far from a record. Philip Knight draws our attention to a that its associated TV channel will be presenting theatre filmed live with the latest technology. Specifically: “Nikon has also developed a nine-axis robotic arm”. Philip presumes that the images captured along the nine axes will be broadcast in nine dimensions. But can they be watched on boring old two-axis screens, he wonders?
Bending over backward in several dimensions to be fair, Feedback discovers that multi-axis robots are . We suspect the “nine” reference is to the number of pivots between the floor and the lens.
Dress design dimensionality
PROBABLY over-egging the multi-dimensional pudding is the “” to which Guillem Southwood alerts us. For added shock-of-the-new, this is the output of a 3D printer. Some readers will already have guessed that the fourth dimension could well be time: in particular, the time to assemble a slightly crunchy lace dress from 2279 printed panels connected by 3316 hinges. Shiny technology. Making life simpler, again.
Dreaming of dental disaster
SUCH multidimensional phenomena occasionally wake Feedback with a start in the middle of the night. We are not alone. Pat Jeater reports opening a new tube of that offered “a new dimension of whiteness” and sensibly deciding that 11.30 pm was not the time to ponder this.
Unfortunately, 3.30 am was the time, according to Pat’s dreaming brain. It mulled, for example: Will these extra dimensions keep on accumulating the more I brush my teeth with this new toothpaste? What happens to the gums around these newly dimensioned teeth? How will they cope when the teeth have extra dimensions? Just who is in charge of allowing all of these new dimensions?
Dimension-deficient doodads
OTHER objects offered for sale seem to be dimension-deficient, such as the sheets of wax that Dave Goodwin was , described as: “Size (L × W × H): 16.00 in × 8.00 in × 0.00 in”. We find that there is a £3.75 delivery charge to discover what these two-dimensional sheets weigh.
Scorching silver screens
THE TV industry has largely given up on promises of multiple dimensions and now has yet another new mantra: “Not just more pixels, but better pixels”. The marketeers’ problem is that few people can actually see the extra detail in their newest, flashiest sets unless they sit very close or the screen is very, very bright.
A colleague found a demonstration unpleasant, especially when the image flashed, and wondered about the possible risk of this triggering photo-epilepsy or migraines. One company said, yes, this was being looked into – but no, they could not identify the university doing the work.
Then in the tea break at a tech conference a senior engineer from a UK TV station confided the reason: “We are very aware of the risks and would love to do some real research. But nobody dares do it because it would involve tests that deliberately push subjects into epileptic fits, and might very possibly kill them.”
Multiple Mountains of Madness
FINALLY, James Loch sends a literary – if not fine-art – template for multidimensional mayhem. H. P. Lovecraft’s was serialised in Astounding Stories in 1936, six years after of his trademark being, Cthulhu. It recounts the adventures of some unfortunate Antarctic explorers.
As they finally escape, one of the harried adventurers looks back a final time. He gets a glimpse of a far city, whose features include “the windowless solids with five dimensions”.