Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
Round house
There is a flourishing genre of content on YouTube and other video sites that can best be described as 鈥済awping at real estate listings鈥�. It can be beautiful, spacious houses that most of us can only dream of living in, or baroque explosions of horrific taste in interior decoration on par with whatever has happened to the White House lately.
So far, Feedback hasn鈥檛 been inclined to add to this content pile-up, but reporter Matthew Sparkes has lured us in with a on RightMove. It is for a building in Farnborough, England, on sale for 拢750,000. The listing has a link underneath the price that reads 鈥淐an you afford it?鈥� Feedback didn鈥檛 click because we don鈥檛 need a website to tell us the answer.
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The building is an upright white cylinder, with chunky extra bits on one side. The built area is about 1000 square metres. Feedback struggled to precisely count the rooms because the ground floor is partly open-plan, but there are at least 10 rooms on the ground floor and potentially around 20 on the floor above, though the top floor has a disappointingly scanty five.
Matt sarcastically described it as a 鈥減erfect family home鈥�, and Feedback concurs with his sarcasm. Only a family whose members don鈥檛 enjoy each other鈥檚 company could use a building like this.
Readers wondering what this is doing in Feedback, wonder no longer. This building is the former , which was used, , to train pilots to cope with the intense g-forces required for high-velocity flight and, later, space travel. The main cylindrical building houses the centrifuge, while the drive motor and bearings are in the basement. Helen Sharman, the first UK astronaut, the centrifuge. No wonder the estate agents describe it as 鈥渁 unique opportunity to purchase a piece of British aviation history鈥�.
The Farnborough Centrifuge , when a new and more modern centrifuge was built. It passed into the hands of a charity called the . However, in August 2024, FAST announced that it had been the centrifuge after the building鈥檚 owner asked for 鈥渁 five-fold increase in rental payment鈥�.
Two years later, it is up for sale. Does anyone have a spare 拢750,000 and fancy opening a museum? Feedback promises not to highlight it as unduly niche, because it actually sounds like somewhere we might go.
A quantum civil service
The ingenuity of the UK civil service truly knows no bounds. Not only can it outsource many of its functions to private companies, but it can also translate quantum phenomena into the macroscopic world.
How else to explain the sign spotted by reader Robert Milne outside the Twickenham job centre? It reads 鈥淎utomated external defibrillator located inside鈥�. Presumably the defibrillator is in superposition both inside and outside the building. Robert wonders if the same is now true of his job: 鈥淎m I now allowed to be both in full-time paid employment and on the dole at the same time?鈥�
Feedback is further minded to inquire how much use the defibrillator is to cardiovascularly challenged members of the public during the many hours of the day when the job centre is closed and the defibrillator locked away.
We also want to know in what sense the defibrillator is 鈥渁utomated鈥�. Does it have an internal AI and robotic arm, so it can snake out of its container and zap unwitting jobseekers?
Feeling resigned
Speaking of rogue AIs, readers may recall the actions of Anthropic鈥檚 Jacob Coxon, who on : 鈥淚 resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.鈥�
Feedback had a bit about this, but it was cut from a previous column because the editors said not enough people would get the reference. Feedback has reluctantly accepted the strong evidence, including book sales and talking to a normal person, that while many people have read J. R. R. Tolkien鈥檚 fantasy novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, far fewer have read his mythological epic The Silmarillion.
The Silmarillion is, we concede, pretty complicated. However, the essence is simple enough. There is a dark lord called Melkor. Melkor has a servant called Sauron, and they hang out in a fortress called Angband doing evil things. This includes creating the Urul脫ki, more commonly known as dragons.
A lot of tech bros appear to have read this, although Feedback isn鈥檛 sure they have understood it fully. Famously, the surveillance company Palantir is named for the magical seeing-stones in The Lord of the Rings, a strong choice given that only two (speaking) characters make heavy use of the Palantir: one goes evil and the other sets himself on fire.
However, at least some readers of Tolkien do appear to have understood his works. Writing on Threads, a fan who goes simply by 鈥渂ree鈥� wrote the , which seems to Feedback to cut to the heart of the matter: 鈥淚 resigned from Angband today. I spent the last three centuries doing metaphysical research for both Sauron and Melkor. Neither dark lord is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to wing猫d Urul脫ki and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.鈥�
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