ANYONE lucky enough to attend a function at the Royal Society in London will
notice that lunch is served in a room with a prominent notice proclaiming: 鈥淲e
do not serve any food derived from genetically modified materials.鈥�
Does this represent an important shift in Royal Society policy? Readers will
remember that not so long ago the society was involved in a high-profile
exercise rejecting claims by Arpad Pusztai that genetically modified potatoes
are harmful to rats.
Do the learned fellows now know something the rest of us don鈥檛?
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READER John Buckman tells us of the e-mail message he was sent the other day
by his office鈥檚 IT support team: 鈥淎ll staff. Please note that you are required
to save work and completely log out of the system at 13:30 today. Urgent work is
being carried out on server 811. Please also close down any machine that is open
whose operator may not be aware of this message. Work and drivers will be lost
if this operation is not carried out.鈥�
Buckman duly logged out and started waiting. He waited and waited until, a
long time later, he noticed a colleague working on his PC. The colleague said he
had just logged on and everything was now OK. So Buckman did the same, only to
discover this e-mail message from IT support in his inbox: 鈥淒ear all. The work
on server 811 has been carried out, things are back to normal. You are clear to
logon. Thank you for your cooperation.鈥�
FOLLOWING our piece about the evacuation of the Microsoft building during the
earthquake that hit Seattle (17 March), Bert Schreiber has written in from the
Texas Gulf Coast. He tells us that the office complexes in the area鈥檚 many
petrochemical facilities are required by law to run periodic unannounced
evacuation drills.
The average evacuation time in one such complex was about five minutes,
Schreiber says. One of the officials decided to see how long it took on Friday
at going-home time. The building was empty in three minutes.
THE British government wants to get National Health Service doctors online
and onto the Internet. All well and good. But things aren鈥檛 moving as fast as
they might, and a despairing medic who has been waiting months for connection
recently asked Feedback for help.
A company called Syntegra, owned by BT, will make the connection but says
that to do so it needs vital information on IP addresses from the doctor鈥檚
computer. The doctor has no idea what an IP address is, or how to get it. So we
phoned up on the doctor鈥檚 behalf to find out exactly what to do. Syntegra told
us to phone the NHS help desk. When we did so, the help desk told us to look at
the registration page of the NHS messaging website.
Resisting the temptation to say it seemed perverse for a helpline to tell
people who want to connect to the Internet to access the Internet for advice on
how to connect, we gave it a try, only to find that the NHS Web page on
registration is 鈥渦nder construction鈥�.
THANKS to the Australian Department of Immigration for deepening our
understanding of how ecologists go about their work.
Simon Grove of James Cook University in Cairns, Queensland, tells us that
when a German ecology student was trying to enter the country on a tourist visa
he was taken aside by an immigration officer because of his plan to do some
fieldwork during his stay. The officer assumed this work would attract a wage,
in which case the student would have needed a working visa.
At the student鈥檚 suggestion, the officer spoke to Denis Rodgers, a researcher
at the university. Rodgers explained that 99 per cent of all ecological
fieldwork in Australia was carried out without payment.
鈥淎h, so doing ecology鈥檚 like working for meals on wheels then, is it?鈥� was
the officer鈥檚 perceptive reply.
READER Barrie Potter got quite excited the other day when a courier firm
delivered a large brown cardboard box.
The box measured a substantial 28 by 30 by 40 centimetres. But it was
surprisingly light, and when he opened it up its contents measured a rather
modest 3.5 by 12 by 15.5 centimetres. Even this, however, was mostly packaging
for the final item鈥攁 flash memory card and PCMCIA adaptor, which measured
just 0.4 by 8.5 by 5.5 centimetres.
Well, at least it arrived safely.
OUR discussion of programming 鈥淓aster eggs鈥� (14 April) inspired reader Sara
Long to remind us of one of the most famous Easter eggs of all. Long says that
if she types the text 鈥淚鈥檇 like to kill Bill Gates鈥� into Microsoft Word 95, and
pastes it into the thesaurus, the program鈥檚 suggested synonym is 鈥淚鈥檒l drink to
迟丑补迟鈥�.
Was somebody working at Microsoft feeling a little less than gruntled when
this was programmed in, we wonder?
OUR piece on truncated subject lines in reader Guy Robinson鈥檚 e-mails (17
March) prompted Evan Manning to send in an example of his own.
Manning was surprised to receive an e-mail headed 鈥淣ew data received from
God鈥�. On opening it he found, somewhat to his disappointment, that all he was
being told about was new data received from NASA鈥檚 Goddard Space Flight
Center.
JUST two letters transposed, and a hard-hitting political statement loses its
punch. The Indian online magazine Down-to-Earth had this headline above
an article about the US backing out of the Kyoto agreement: 鈥淏iggest rouge of
them all鈥�.
Puzzled readers who read on found the explanation: 鈥淭he world should declare
the US a rogue nation for this act of extreme selfishness . . .鈥�
THE envelope used for returning the federal income tax form in the US bears
the instruction: 鈥淚f you are filing electronically, do not use this envelope鈥�