FED UP with complaints about pollution and foul smells, Japan鈥檚 Ministry of
the Environment has published a list of the country鈥檚 100 most fragrant places.
As well as sites that smell of lavender blossom and wisteria, it includes a
Chinese medicine shop in Toyama Prefecture and the streets of Shizuoka with
their heady scent of grilled eel.
According to The Japan Times, the selection process wasn鈥檛 easy,
with the eight judges having to take great care when selecting the winners from
the 600 entries they received. 鈥淲hat smells nice to one person can be a stench
to another,鈥� explained ministry official Tetsuo Ishii.
The two most contentious sites to make it onto the list were a railway
station in Osaka that reeks of barbecued meat and Korean hot pickle, and Tokyo鈥檚
Kanda area, which was nominated for the scent in its second-hand book shops.
Advertisement
Feedback looks forward to the publication of a similar list for Britain, and
hopes that The Famous Walworth Road Caf茅 in South London, with its
pungent odour of egg, bacon, sausage and chips, will make it onto the list.
NOMINATIVE determinism took a new twist in the 1 September issue of The
Economist, which noted the alphabetic bias among the names of the world鈥檚
richest five men at the time: Gates, Buffet, Allen, Ellison and Albrecht.
Moreover, it noted, the heads of government of the G7 industrialised nations
were Berlusconi, Blair, Bush, Chirac, Chr茅tien, Koizumi and someone in
the second half of the alphabet. What can be going on here?
Not as much as it might seem at first sight. Feedback has weighed the London
telephone directories, and it appears that approximately 65 per cent of the
entries are in the first half of the alphabet. Even so, a skilled statistician
could no doubt find something significant about these distributions.
The Economist鈥檚 columnist hypothesises that the effect may start in
school, with Zysman sitting at the back of the class and Aaronson getting all
the attention. Perhaps a reader with access to a citation index can dig up some
more data to help the investigation. Does this phenomenon occur in science, and
is it related to discipline? What about the social sciences, where authors are
listed alphabetically?
OFF TO a bad start . . .
Much as we hate spammers, we feel almost sorry for the company that produced
the spam received by reader Clark Rockefeller and, presumably, millions of
others. Here it is in its entirety:
鈥淲e are glad to announce that hundreds of the best offshore developers are
now available at your fingertips. The quality you receive is equivalent or
superior to that offered by domestic companies, but at a fraction of the cost.
Here is [Error: Formatting error: Non-hexadecimal character in QP encoding]鈥�
A CONCERNED reader who wishes to remain anonymous tells us of his worries
that anthrax is almost the same organism as Bacillus thuringiensis
(Bt), which is produced commercially as a pesticide. The two organisms can be
grown and prepared in the same way.
Because Bt is generally considered harmless, the facilities producing it
probably have not been investigated as possible sources of the anthrax material.
Our reader wanted to suggest to the FBI that they should be, and that and the
original anthrax powders should be checked for traces of Bt.
However, he discovered that you can no longer e-mail the FBI from its
website. All correspondence must be sent by regular mail.
Bizarre.
YOU鈥橪L NEVER believe this, but Microsoft has finally admitted that Windows
2000 has been a lot less than perfect.
At the grand launch of XP, the latest version of Windows, Microsoft鈥檚 Chief
Executive Steve Ballmer told how his own sons had given up on the last version,
Windows 2000, because it kept crashing when they tried to use it.
鈥淲indows 2000 did not pass the Ballmer-boys test,鈥� he admitted. 鈥淏ut they
have been running XP and it鈥檚 never not run a game or program and it hasn鈥檛
crashed. XP has passed the Ballmer-boys test.鈥�
Inspired by this news, we gave XP the Feedback test, and tried to upgrade a
Pentium PC that comfortably satisfies the stringent technical requirements that
Microsoft tactfully tucks away on the bottom (yes, bottom) of the fancy retail
packaging.
Within a few minutes the PC鈥檚 screen was displaying a long list of the
hardware and software likely to clash with XP. The PC then threw up the message
that 鈥渋nstallation has shut down to prevent damage to your PC鈥�. The PC then
crashed and we spent the weekend using back-ups to get it working again.
If Steve Ballmer鈥檚 boys are ever in London, perhaps they wouldn鈥檛 mind giving
us a hand getting XP to work.
READER Rob White tells us of a sign he saw on a newsagent鈥檚 shelves that
said: 鈥淧lease do not read.鈥� whoops, too late . . .
叠搁滨罢础滨狈鈥橲 Meteorological Office doesn鈥檛 like to keep telephone callers
waiting, but for those who simply have to hold it plays delightful music down
the line. Its choice? Vivaldi鈥檚 The Four Seasons, of course.
LIFE IS full of hidden dangers. Reader Andrew Linton recently took part in a
study of reaction times on behalf of the Northern Ireland driving licence
authority. Before he started, he had to sign a disclaimer about claiming
compensation for serious injury or death as a result of this research.
The study involved clicking a mouse button in response to videos displayed on
a computer screen.
AND FINALLY, another in our series of ambiguous signs. Our report about Jo
Morley鈥檚 misreading of a sign that said 鈥淎ll refuse to be thrown in skip鈥� (20
October) reminded reader Jenny Narraway of a notice she saw in the grounds of
University College London. It read: 鈥淏uilders skip only in this corner鈥�. She
felt it was a great shame they weren鈥檛 allowed to skip anywhere else.