IT IS only a marketing gimmick, but Feedback feels a certain glee over Xerox鈥檚 offer to trade in printers made by its rival Hewlett-Packard and then hold a 鈥淪mashing Up HP Printers Party鈥� in the Netherlands at the end of the year.
According to the computer magazine MicroScope, Xerox aims to find out 鈥渉ow many printers can be destroyed in a one minute period鈥濃�攖hough we are pleased to see that 鈥渆nvironmental factors would be taken into account with any recyclable features stripped first鈥�.
Feedback has had fraught relationships with many printers over the years, and not only HP ones. Strictly in the cause of science, we would be happy to attend the party. And while we鈥檙e at it, how about a Smashing Up Fax Machines Party or, better still, a Smashing Up Photocopiers Party?
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DOES trying to get useful information off the Internet give you a pain in the head? Do you develop a throbbing in your temples while waiting for sites to download?
It seems that America On-Line thinks this is all too likely. The service provider鈥檚 latest mass mailing in the US doesn鈥檛 just offer software. As well as an AOL disc that will give you access to the Net, there is a free sample of Tylenol for the headaches that could follow. How thoughtful. Yet how strange.
叠搁滨罢础滨狈鈥橲 attempts to enter the brave new world of digital terrestrial television are getting so bogged down in a confusion of conflicting standards that even the government鈥檚 own Independent Television Commission has thrown its hands up in the air on the issue of compatibility.
In May, the ITC published a dense consultation document, Digital Television: Interoperability and Open Access. Only 39 members of the public understood enough of the document to comment on it.
The gist of the ITC鈥檚 conclusion after this 鈥渃onsultation鈥� is that the ITC cannot do anything to ensure that the receivers needed to watch one broadcaster鈥檚 digital channels will be compatible with the services of other broadcasters, but it will talk to the telecoms watchdog Oftel about it. Even if these talks produce any results, however, it will be too late for those who have already bought the first digital receivers.
The ITC鈥檚 chairman, Robin Biggam, recently held a briefing to announce all this, but the spin doctors decided not to invite any of the specialists who might understand what the commission鈥檚 feebleness means for hapless consumers. 鈥淚t was all very basic and we thought that you wouldn鈥檛 have learnt anything,鈥� an ITC spokeswoman told New 杏吧原创.
So Biggam was saved the embarrassment of telling us what he will say to people who buy an expensive new digital receiver and find their set cannot be converted鈥攆or instance, from terrestrial to satellite reception鈥攊f they change their minds over what service is best or move to a house where one type of reception is impossible.
Obviously, problems like that aren鈥檛 鈥渂asic鈥� enough to talk about.
IS IT the time of the year鈥攐r perhaps the cycles of the Moon? Every now and then, some strange urge grips the editors of normally sober academic journals and they start publishing papers with bizarre names.
The 5 October issue of Physical Review Letters, for example, includes a paper called: 鈥淪pin Flipping in the Presence of a Full Siberian Snake鈥�.
Meanwhile, the October issue of the palaeontology journal Palaios has a piece on offer entitled: 鈥淟ove鈥檚 Labour Lost? Or the tragic story of a young palaeontologist who chooses fossil plants as his life鈥檚 work only to discover at age 50 that his mother thinks he should have studied dinosaurs. (Why aren鈥檛 you ever on TV?)鈥�
Has anyone noticed any other examples of this 鈥淥ctober effect鈥�?
LAST YEAR this column reported on how Los Alamos National Laboratory was using honeybees to warn of radiation leaks (Feedback, 23 August 1997). Now we learn that British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) has taken the idea a stage further, by seeing whether crops such as spinach, sugar beet, Indian mustard and dwarf sunflowers soak up radioactive contamination from the Magnox reactors at the Bradwell power station in Essex.
Is using edible crops for this purpose such a good idea, we wondered? Birds, in particular, are very partial to sunflower seeds.
But then again, BNFL has a way of dealing with such problems. Earlier this year, when it found that pigeons at its nuclear plant at Sellafield were contaminated by radiation, it simply shot them all and dumped the bodies in a low-level nuclear waste repository.
GORDON FRASER editor of the CERN Courier, the journal of the European centre for particle physics near Geneva, is writing a book on antimatter.
It is, he says, interesting stuff 鈥攖he more you take away, the bigger it gets.
Feedback wonders if he isn鈥檛, perhaps, getting a little too bound up in his subject. Before signing the contract, he says he asked for an assurance from the publisher, Cambridge University Press, that he would not get an anti-advance that made a hole in his bank account.
He is also concerned about how bookshops will handle the problem of stock control once his volume is on sale. Each time a copy is sold, he says, there will be one more antimatter book on the shelves.