Truth, justice and the American whey
SEVERAL lawmakers in West Virginia are feeling the effects of a celebratory tipple, after they fell ill drinking raw milk – to toast new laws that ease restrictions on consuming raw milk.
US news channel that the bill’s sponsor, Scott Cadle, passed around samples to other delegates before they became sick.
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Advocates of raw milk claim it is a healthier option than pasteurised milk, despite the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warning that it “can carry harmful bacteria and other germs that can make you very sick or even kill you”.
dismissed the connection, telling reporters that a stomach bug had been making the rounds. “There definitely shouldn’t be a law against allowing people to do what they want,” insisted a queasy Pat McGeehan.
Kildare councillor Brendan Young doesn’t lack ambition. His manifesto includes a pledge to “invest in home insulation and public transport, stop climate change, create jobs”
Cutting the cheese
PREVIOUSLY, Feedback shared the news that unscrupulous cheesemongers in the US were cutting Parmesan cheese with wood shavings (12 March). Arthur Chance writes to say Feedback has “either forgotten or never heard of a case that has been doing the rounds for quite some time” – that of an Italian caught in 1969 selling fake Parmesan made of grated umbrella handles. Can this be true? A cursory glance online says a solid maybe.
Extra X
OUT of character: J. C. Cantrell was struck by Lance Hartland’s revelation that his jacket was a different size depending on the country in which it was sold (5 March). A jacket listed as L in the US would be XXL in Italy or France.”Two things became clear to me upon reading this,” writes J. C. “Firstly, this is just another problem stemming from converting metric to English units, and secondly that I, as a wearer of XL jackets from the US, could never buy a jacket in France or Italy – they just do not have enough Xs in their alphabets.”
Locked out
FOLLOWING months of trouble with both telephone and internet connections, BT engineers noted that David Critchard’s password was overdue a change. And so they helpfully changed it. “I was sent an email to tell me that it had been changed, containing the new password,” writes David. “Which of course I could not access because I did not have the password.”
Customer services at BT failed to see that this was a problem. “Finally somebody with a grasp of logic told me I should have used the ‘change password app’ on my phone to change my password yet again, so that I could log in and find out why my password had changed.” Of course!
Law of just so
FEEDBACK has wondered if the laws of the universe could be expressed in aphorisms such as Murphy’s Law. “There is a well-known one,” Faith Anstey writes, “which states that when working towards the solution of a problem, it always helps if you know the answer. I feel perhaps this should be pondered by believers in the anthropic principle.”
Not another knot
HELP is at hand for all who suffer the annoying entanglement of cables (12 March). “A single cable never tangles itself if it only has two ends,” declares John Bailey. “Entanglement only occurs when one or both ends has more than one branch. Simply tie any additional ends into a loose knot and the offending cable will never tangle itself.”
While Feedback puts John’s theory to the test, we can’t help but feel that the string theorists will feel validated knowing that quantum entanglement can be resolved by tying up loose ends.
Something for nothing
FURTHER musings on the quantum state of half-filled drinking vessels. David Sharman writes: “Fifty years ago, I pointed to my 4-year-old daughter’s glass of water and told her ‘A half-empty glass is the same as a half-full glass'”. She agreed, and then claimed that “an empty glass is the same as a full glass”. Pressed for an explanation, his daughter reasoned: “if it’s empty of water, it’s full of air”.
Arrested development
AS WE go to press, the BBC’s home affairs editor Mark Easton reports that the government has delayed its plan to outlaw every psychoactive substance in the world (13 November 2015 ), due to police fears over the enforceability of such a law.
Who would have thought it? Well, the government’s own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs for one, which had previously warned that the Psychoactive Substances bill was “unenforceable” – a view shared by many at the time, including Feedback, and now perhaps the UK constabulary as well.
Spreading standard
EMMA Woolliams shares Feedback’s interest in unusual units (12 March). “As someone who works at the National Physical Laboratory I was aware of Vienna Standard Mean Ocean Water – and we always giggle about the lack of oceans near Vienna.”
But stranger things are to be found in the warehouses of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Emma points us to the page offering reference peanut butter (). “It’s used to check the machines that calculate protein, fat and sugar in our foods – and peanut butter is a beautifully even mixture of all three, apparently.” But is the national standard peanut butter chunky or smooth, wonders Feedback.
