WE SYMPATHISE with Peter Swanson, owner of a pub in the Pilbara region of
Western Australia, who became concerned last month when a large Nexus Transport
truck plastered with radioactive warning symbols pulled up outside. He became
even more concerned when the driver jumped out and said: 鈥淲ere do you want the
beer, mate?鈥�
The truck, apart from delivering food and drink supplies to the area, was
also carrying two tonnes of processed material from Rio Tinto鈥檚 Kintyre uranium
deposit.
鈥淚t didn鈥檛 look right, it just didn鈥檛 look right,鈥� said Swanson.
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Rio Tinto and Western Australia鈥檚 Health Minister John Day insisted that
there was no health risk. 鈥淭here are international standards in transporting
radioactive matter and Nexus Transport has met them,鈥� a spokesman for Day
said.
We are sure that this is correct. Even so, we can鈥檛 help wondering if this
might be the start of a new trend in antipodean machismo: 鈥淩eal men drink
radioactive beer.鈥�
DENSE CLOUDS prevented stargazers in Britain from marvelling at the annual
spectacle of the Leonid meteor shower recently. But that is no excuse for
fobbing them off with doctored images. Several British national newspapers,
including The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The
Express, published pictures鈥攁ll supplied by Reuters鈥攐f what
appeared to be a veritable blizzard of light over the Jordanian desert.
鈥淚t looks as if it鈥檚 raining diamonds,鈥� gushed The Express. To the
practised eye, however, the length of the meteor tracks in the photo appeared
suspiciously uniform. Real meteor trails would have shown up with tracks of
differing lengths that were not all parallel.
Suspicions were confirmed the next day when a small, apologetic paragraph
appeared in The Daily Telegraph. Rather than showing the Leonid shower,
the newspaper explained, the Reuters picture was in fact an ordinary time-lapse
photo of the night sky.
Which just goes to show, you can鈥檛 pull the wool over a stargazer鈥檚 eyes.
MANIPULATED images of heavenly bodies seem to turn up in clusters, rather
like the Leonid meteors. Feedback鈥檚 colleague spotted another example in The
Times on 15 November. 鈥淎stronomers get their first sight of a new planet,鈥�
ran the front-page headline. Underneath it was a convincing image, captioned
鈥渢he star and its giant planet鈥�.
Convincing, that is, unless you happen to know that no telescope in the world
can resolve a planet around another star. Relatively, the planet is too small.
The reported discovery had been made, not by imaging the planet, but by watching
the star dim slightly and inferring that a planet must have passed in front of
it.
And the picture? What a lovely bit of brushwork.
顿翱狈鈥橳 tell Richard Dawkins this, because it might upset him. When reader John
Doyle was at London Heathrow airport recently, he browsed through the books in
WH Smith鈥檚 bookshop. All Dawkins鈥檚 major works were there鈥攊n the section
marked 鈥淩eligion鈥�.
CALL US nostalgic, but we are always rather pleased to hear of people doing
their bit on behalf of good, old-fashioned paper. The Papercom Alliance has a
website at www.papercom.org. The alliance, we are told, is an
organisation with a mission to 鈥減romote a vision of the future where paper-based
communication will grow as part of an evolving US and global communications
尘补谤办别迟辫濒补肠别鈥�.
The site has a 鈥渨rite to us鈥� link which Feedback turned to eagerly, pen at
the ready鈥攐nly to be confronted with an e-mail facility. Some
contradiction somewhere?
WHEN reader Mark Lines-Davis arrived one morning at London鈥檚 Waterloo railway
station recently, a customer announcement over the station intercom apologised
for cancelling a train 鈥渄ue to train crew displacement鈥�.
The announcement didn鈥檛 say whether the crew had been displaced by a few
metres and were thus unable to reach the controls, or if they had been displaced
by a few kilometres, or perhaps even into a parallel universe. Nor did it say
what strange force had displaced them. It鈥檚 an interesting excuse, though.
THE British Board of Film Classification, with the aid of Microsoft Windows
Explorer, offers an excellent search facility on its website
www.bbfc.co.uk/website/Classified.nsf/$$Search. In fact, it is so
excellent that it even allows you to search for films that haven鈥檛 been made
yet. After asking you to list details of the film you are looking for, such as
the title and the director, the search facility asks you to say when you think
the film was made鈥斺�漛etween the dates 01/01/1900 and 31/12/2099鈥�.
FINALLY, thanks to the many hundreds of you who entered the Feedback
Christmas Competition, which is now closed. We are about to get down to judging
your entries, which promises to be an enjoyable task. The winners will be
announced in the 25 December/1 January issue.