TO most railway passengers in the UK the idea of saving time when travelling by train is laughable. You鈥檙e much more likely to waste it, stuck on a sweltering train because of the rails buckling in the sun. Or waiting for hours on draughty autumnal platforms while hard-pressed railway staff remove leaves from the line one by one, or be stranded by the wrong type of snow in winter. Truly, there is an excuse for every season.
But now the UK鈥檚 rail enquiries website () proves that travelling by train does save you time 鈥� and on a spectacular scale.
Normally the trains from London Bridge to Brighton take about an hour, or at least the timetable says they do. But what about the 22.43 service? According to a helpful box that gives you the details of your journey, this train arrives 23 hours and 21 minutes before it departs.
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Now you can just about understand a computer program straying 24 hours with a train that arrives after midnight. But what about the next train to leave London Bridge? How do you explain its arrival in Brighton 47 hours and 10 minutes before it leaves?
MEANWHILE, reader Rob Eason tells us that while booking a ticket online via , he inadvertently entered a date for mid-July, rather than mid-August.
Thetrainline website smartly spotted his mistake, informing him that: 鈥淥utward travel must not be in the past.鈥�
Presumably, then, it鈥檚 okay to return in the past.
BUT if the railways have trouble with time travel, British Telecom has an equally eccentric approach to distance. Our reader Doug Williamson regularly cycles to work from his home near Tunbridge Wells. So he consulted the route planner on BT鈥檚 website, which as we noted a couple of weeks ago (Feedback, 2 August) calculates distances with an impressive accuracy.
According to the route planner his journey to work is 8.75 miles. But the journey back is only 8.39 miles. So while you can understand that the journey home might feel shorter, it鈥檚 more difficult to understand why the route planner thinks the same. Could it be, ponders Williamson, that his U-shaped route adds an extra 0.36 of a mile simply by going round the outside of the 鈥淯鈥�. Or could it be the large roundabout that he has to go almost all the way round on the way to work? Or, perish the thought, is BT鈥檚 impressive accuracy just a little bit too good to be true?
OF COURSE, the problem of measuring distance precisely is scarcely new, as reader Guy Buncombe points out. On the road from North Berwick to Dunbar in East Lothian is an old-fashioned painted iron signpost informing travellers that they are 71/8 miles from Dunbar. Doubtless the town has a conventional centre, from which all distances are measured. But Dunbar is about 2 miles across, so how are travellers supposed to know which part of Dunbar they are precisely 71/8 miles from?
Not that this is purely a Scottish problem. Some years back Feedback was walking along a Cornish country road to Newquay. With the storm clouds gathering it was a relief to see a signpost indicating that the town was only 2录 miles away, until the next signpost half a mile down the road, pointing in the same direction, which said it was 2戮 miles to the town.
ONE of NASA鈥檚 nagging worries is space debris that is too small to track with ground-based radars but big enough to damage or destroy spacecraft. A few years ago, NASA put out a call for new techniques to track this space junk, and one of the proposals to emerge was to put a laser radar system into a satellite to take a look.
Laser radars can spot small objects because their wavelengths are much shorter than the microwaves used in ordinary radar, so it sounded like a good idea. However, physicists at the company that landed the contract to investigate the idea got a shock when they analysed the problem more carefully. Laser radars scan only a small amount of space at a time, and space debris moves very fast. It turned out that a laser system was three times as likely to be destroyed by the impact of a piece of space debris as it was to spot any junk at all.
THE race to achieve the quickest ever rejection of a paper by a major academic journal is really hotting up. Already Rob Knell, of Queen Mary College, London, had a paper rejected by a major academic journal in a speedy 34 minutes (Feedback, 19 July). Now Darrel Swift, of the Department of Geography and Geomatics at the University of Glasgow, UK, says that he was 鈥渕ightily disappointed鈥� to find that his paper was rejected by another peer-reviewed journal in just 6 minutes. At 8.06 am he was delighted to receive an email from the production editor saying that his manuscript met all the journal鈥檚 requirements and had gone out for review. His elation was short-lived. Six minutes later he received an email from the editor rejecting his paper.
Reader Peter Hambleton is still digesting the sign in the loos at the British Orienteering Championships: 鈥淣othing to be put in the toilet that has not been eaten鈥�.