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Feedback is Â鶹´«Ã½â€™s popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com

Madness remastered

Happy New Year! Well, unless you’re reading this online on the evening of publication, in which case it’s still only 30 December, unless you’re in a different time zone, in which case it might be New Year’s Eve, but not quite New Year yet. There we are, starting the year as we mean to go on: tying ourselves in knots over an unnecessary detail.

With the new year naturally comes thoughts of resolutions and fresh starts, of a brand-new you. Go ahead and have that mid-life crisis! There’s no time like the present.

For real freshness, you could try watching the remastered version of Mad Men: the seminal television drama about advertising executives in the 1960s blithely telling everybody how to be happy while simultaneously making an absolute hash of their own lives. The new version is in 4K, which ought to mean the cinematography is clearer and more vibrant than ever before.

Except that they have made a hash of it. The mistakes are encapsulated by , in which Roger Sterling (John Slattery) returns to the office after a heavy lunchtime’s drinking and spectacularly vomits all over the carpet. In the remastered version, the framing of the shot is slightly different, revealing two crew members crouched on the floor operating a vomit-dispensing hose.

Feedback would be less inclined to tease if this were a new phenomenon, the result of path-breaking remastering technology, but it is nothing of the kind. Back in the mists of time in 2014, when David Bowie was still alive, those clever people at Fox decided to remaster the paranormal classic Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In the process, they changed the shape of the shots .

You guessed it: sometimes crew and equipment wandered into the frame, while on other occasions, shots were cropped in weird ways that reduced the focus on the characters. They also forgot to apply the filters used to make scenes look like night when they were shot in the day, resulting in around in bright sunlight.

Something similar happened when The Simpsons was brought onto Disney+. Earlier seasons were shot in 4:3 and cropped into widescreen. Of course, The Simpsons is stuffed with visual gags, and careless cropping removed many of them, hence the 2019 Vulture headline . They included guest stars going missing from shots, and a removal van labelled “CLUMSY STUDENT MOVERS” being unceremoniously cropped.

Still, it could have been worse. Feedback is both old and nerdy enough to remember our dismay upon going to the cinema in 1997 to see the remastered “special edition” of Star Wars. This featured a lot of new digital visual effects, many of which sat oddly against the original analogue effects. It also, and at this remove we really are sorry to harp on about this, changed the logic of a key scene in which Han Solo escapes a bounty hunter who has him cornered at a table. In the original version, Han slyly shot the bounty hunter under the table. In the new version, the bounty hunter shoots first but somehow misses at point-blank range. Feedback has been baffled by this for 29 years.

Text to speech, ish

New year, new recurring items in Feedback. Don Allen writes in to tell us of an SMS message that was sent to his landline and automatically translated into speech by some unidentified piece of software. (Don headed his email “More AI stupidity”, but we aren’t actually sure AI was involved in this.) The resulting verbal message was: “Your order number five billion, twenty-seven million, eight hundred and thirty-nine thousand, nine hundred and fifty-one is ready for collection.”

As Don says: “Just as well I was only expecting one order.” We wonder if other readers have had similarly bizarre messages through the medium of automated text-to-speech transcription.

A shorts interlude

With apologies, we must address some lingering business from 2025. In November, we described a study that sought to compare the hygiene benefits of tight swimming briefs – which are mandated in public swimming pools in France – versus loose swimming shorts.

The study suggested that tight briefs might lead to fewer microbes being released from the digestive tract, “due to their elasticity exerting external pressure on the gluteal muscles, thereby reducing contact between the rectum and the fabric.”

Gaëlle Ribault writes in “as a French person” to offer an alternative justification. “As I’ve always understood it, the rationale for the interdiction of shorts in swimming pools is that they risk being worn in multiple other settings, thus being exposed to many sources of dirt and microbes,” she says. In contrast, no self-respecting person would wander around town in briefs, because, as Gaëlle drily puts it, they “lack discretion”. At minimum, one would wear something over them, thus reducing the chances of external contamination.

This does, we must admit, make more sense than the muscle thing.

Moan and groan

Lastly, in response to our item on the social psychology of dad jokes, Michael Cousins wrote in as follows. “When does a joke become a Dad joke? When it’s fully groan.” He adds: “I’m here all week.”

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You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.