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David AIttenborough

. The website boasts a plethora of pseudo-chat rooms that cater to every conceivable taste, both safe for work and otherwise. One of the most popular is r/Relationships, where people can share details of their personal lives with total strangers for validation and advice.

Yet as stories on r/Relationships have become more baroque – my boyfriend doesn’t want anything to do with the dog I adopted during a previous relationship, help me convince my partner not to drop out of law school to start a podcast, etc. – suspicions are growing that many of the posts are made up.

That hasn’t stopped software developer Garett MacGowan from creating an AI rendering of David Attenborough’s voice . Feedback was worried that such a melding would tarnish the stature of a beloved icon, but the reverse has happened: in Attenborough’s husky whisper, even the internet’s worst imaginings take on a dignified hue.

Lean times

Feedback previously reported on a case of nominative determinism that had crept into the pages of Â鶹´«Ã½, in which Glasgow researcher Michael Lean was quoted in an article on obesity.

Jon Arch has now written in – with Michael’s blessing – to point out that his surname in fact derives from the Gaelic words Macgillean Dubh, and so didn’t emerge fully formed as an adjective indicating slenderness. “Â鶹´«Ã½ might like to reflect on the assumption that all British names are English,” they write. A salutary reminder, thank you.

Brain spinning

Continuing on the same theme, Christine Dann points us in the direction of a choice quote from neuroscientist Scott Grafton’s book Physical Intelligence: “Henry Head was the lead editor of the journal Brain, not to be confused with Lord Brain, who later became head of Brain and wrote an admiring essay on Head published in Brain.”

Dip in standards

by scientists who ought to know better. The suggested appellation for these was astronyms, owing to their high incidence among astrophysicists, but subsequent readers have written in to assure us that all branches of science are equally guilty.

Really? You expect us to believe that? Well, then how do you explain recently uploaded to the arXiv preprint server that parses the phrase “Morphological Analysis Yielding separated Objects iN Near infrAred usIng Sources Estimation” as MAYONNAISE. Only an astrophysicist could come up with that one. And no, that wasn’t intended as a condiment.

Neat pun

attention has been drawn in recent weeks to a number of journal articles with noteworthily punning titles. This week’s entry is a paper in the American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology on the use of interleukin-6 (IL-6) receptor antagonists as a possible treatment for covid-19. In the paper, Tanner Hedrick, Brian Murray, Robert Hagan and Jason Mock reflect on the undue attention such treatments have received and the need for greater care in promoting new therapies.

The title? .

Western central time

. Is he really running? If so, why? And, crucially, will he have to redefine time to win?

In order to be on the ballot in Wisconsin, West was required to turn in his nomination paperwork by 5 pm on 4 August. According to documents cited in , however, his campaign actually filed it 14 seconds late, meaning that his name won’t appear as an option for Wisconsin voters.

Rather than admit defeat and move on, the West campaign opted to challenge the decision. On what grounds, you might ask? Well, says lawyer Michael Curran, the 59 seconds immediately following the start of the new hour continue to belong to the previous one. In his own words: “For the average observer, arriving before 5.01 pm is arriving ‘not later’ than 5 pm.” To be filed later than 5 pm, he argues, it would therefore have to be submitted at 1 minute past.

It is an ingenious line of reasoning. Hopefully, our editor will see the light when it comes to Feedback’s own filing deadline.

PC Waddle

. That, at least, is our takeaway from about an incident in Nottinghamshire, UK. Police officers apparently found a runaway Humboldt penguin “plodding up a village street” and escorted it home (to a nearby farm, apparently, rather than Chile).

When asked about the bizarre story, a local inspector said officers had been trained to deal with “a variety of incidents with complex demands”. Feedback would love to know more about this apparent penguin-stopping training. Do flippercuffs even exist?

This is Gilead Amit’s last Feedback

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