A jack of all trades
READERS may be familiar with the Erdös number, a description of how far removed a researcher is from famously prolific mathematician Paul Erdös. His immediate co-authors earn a score of 1, anyone who co-authored a paper with one of those researchers is scored 2, and so forth.
A similar system measures connectedness in Hollywood via the degrees of Kevin Bacon. And in the music industry, Black Sabbath are at the centre of the collaborative Venn diagram. So it was only a matter of time before somebody combined all three, giving rise to the Erdös-Bacon-Sabbath (EBS) project.
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The authors of say: “Anyone with a well-defined EBS number must have many talents and a fascinating backstory, but they turn out to be more numerous than you might think.”
Never mind well-known polymaths such as Brians Cox and May. Who knew, for example, that Colin Firth (E6, B1, S4) co-authored a paper on the neuroscience of political leanings () or that Condoleezza Rice (E6, B3, S4) abandoned a career as a pianist to pursue politics? And how delighted we are to discover that Terry Pratchett has the very respectable score of E4, B2, S3, thanks to his Discworld series spanning literature, film and music.
“Andrew Tucker is informed by an ITV News report on nail bars that “the work is mostly manual”. “I suppose it would be,” he says”
pH proof water
PREVIOUSLY Feedback mulled the issue of ocean acidification or, as UKIP’s Roger Helmer would have it, ocean de-alkalinisation (4 February). Dominic Burrow spies an opportunity to pour oil on these troubled waters with technology from Echo Elemonics, a company selling a device that adds hydrogen molecules to .
The firm’s homepage takes pains to point out that the device doesn’t produce the alkaline water you may have seen peddled with dubious health claims, but is a machine for adding a “symphony of balanced trace elements”, which will increase your fitness, support weight loss and balance “energy fields and environmental harmonics” for more “harmonically tuned experiences”.
Incredibly, the machine can add hydrogen molecules “without substantially altering the pH of the water in the process”. Feedback suspects that if this property could be applied to the world’s oceans, we might save the coral reefs with a large-scale anti-de-alkalinisation programme.
Swoops and scoops
MEANWHILE, Ian Nelson finds a surprising revelation nestled in a story from the Daily Mail about a roofer in The Hague, Netherlands, who is plagued by a dive-bombing gull. Commenting on the motives for the attack, the paper concludes that “the bird was acting defensively because it was giving birth to chicks”.
OH NO
previously challenged readers to find celebrities whose names can be constructed using single-letter symbols from the periodic table (7 January).
Andy Ward writes to complain that “if the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry hadn’t changed the symbol for argon from A to Ar in the early 1960s, the task would be easier”. But he offers leeway in that fusion scientists and cosmologists “often use the symbols D and T for the heavier isotopes of hydrogen”.
Finally, he notes that it is possible to make several phrases ending with the symbols for oxygen, fluorine and fluorine. Be OFF with you Andy, that’s no way to behave in Feedback.
Joust a minute
THE insatiably curious Hillary Shaw writes to say she was searching for web hits for the date 12 October 1399 “to see if there were any historic events that happened”. Surprisingly, the top result was a link to the BBC Sport schedules for Sunday 12 October 1399. Her initial excitement was soon deflated, however, when she realised that the given page only declares, “There is no schedule for today. Please choose another day from the calendar.”
“Perhaps the time-travelling BBC sports schedulers have omitted to include the medieval jousting tournament for that day, or maybe it was just another religious holiday and all the knights had a day off,” says Hillary. “Perhaps BBC sports correspondents can clarify?”
Feedback thinks she’d be better off asking Tony Robinson of Time Team.
Higher dimensions
DEMAND for much-vaunted 3D television has proved rather flat, and manufacturers such as Sony, Panasonic and LG are quietly dropping the feature from their latest models.
Nobody, however, told residents in Bukhara, Uzbekistan, where Anthony Wheeler spotted a cinema offering an even-more-extravagant 5D show. “I would certainly have paid the price of admission just to experience these added dimensions, but sadly our train was about to depart,” he says.
Which makes Feedback wonder if three simply wasn’t the magic number for TV buyers. Could 66.7 per cent improved 5D sets be what’s needed to convince consumers? And how many pairs of glasses would we need to watch shows on them?