FEEDBACK is hopefully not alone in having spent too much time at school becoming rather good at working out where soccer, rugby or other balls were heading, precisely in order to be somewhere where a high-velocity animal bladder covered in freezing mud was not. This seemed rational at the time and still does, but such an unsportspersonlike attitude left us distinctly short of action figures to identify with.
No longer. 鈥淪piderman and Superman beware,鈥� The Edmonton Sun announced earlier this year, 鈥渁 new Canadian superhero is poised to take a byte out of the toy market. GeekMan is a 15-centimetre-tall plastic model figure resembling a computer buff.鈥�
The bendable doll wears a black T-shirt with a pocket, thick-rimmed glasses, jeans and trainers, and is armed with a laptop, a hand-held computer, a wristwatch, a coffee mug and a plastic pocket protector to prevent ink stains on his pen-filled shirt pocket.
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Reader Helen Simmons notes that wherever you are, you can strike a blow for un-macho equality by buying one at .
AND now for something fairly different. If you search the US Internal Revenue Service site at for 鈥渃artoon dinosaur interpretation鈥� (with quotes) it produces a single result page, which attempts to explain how to use the search facility. Does that make it a recursive taxwhack?
The explanation in question reads: 鈥溾�楤usinesses鈥� alone is ambiguous. Is it looking for general business information or information specific to small businesses? You can use the reject operator (the 鈥榤inus鈥� sign) to eliminate the cartoon dinosaur interpretation.鈥�
Chris Dorger discovered this when he was reading through the 鈥渁dvanced search鈥� section and came across the explanation. He then spent a lot of time searching the site trying to get an explanation of the explanation, but he still doesn鈥檛 know what connection there is between businesses and cartoon dinosaurs. Perhaps there is a reader out there who can definitely tell us whether this has meaning or is merely surreal.
IS THIS a truncated instruction, or it is one of those cuts that no-frills airlines make so that they can offer the incredibly low prices that they do? Not knowing which, Chris Swithinbank felt decidedly uneasy when he sat down on a recent cheap flight to Dublin, Ireland, to find the following message on the back of the seat in front of him: 鈥淟ife jackets under the sea.鈥�
BRIAN Ross-Meering has a son with an enquiring mind. When his son was 5 years old, Ross-Meering took him on a trip to London to see the sights. As they changed trains at Baker Street, Ross-Meering told his son that the platform they were transferring to was actually the very first London Underground station to open. His son鈥檚 near instantaneous response was to ask where the trains went to if it was the first station.
Ross-Meering was stumped. He had used the station many times and read the posters there that make this claim in the course of describing its history. But it had never occurred to him to ask this obvious question.
THE rotavator that Russell Long鈥檚 father recently hired to turn over the earth in his back garden bore, he assures us, a stern warning label: under no circumstances was it to be used indoors. So if your carpets are in that bad a state, you鈥檒l have to think of another solution. Do not steam-clean the lawn, by the way.
WHEN Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided to launch the company on the stock market, they received forms from the US Securities and Exchange Commission. One contained a box asking for the estimated total proceeds of the floatation. So they filled in 鈥�$2,718,281,828鈥�.
Such confidence in their estimating powers! But the mathematicians among you may already have spotted that this is not a story about spurious precision. For the number is what we鈥檒l call a giga-e: a thousand million times the number e, the base of natural logarithms. And here comes the maths bit for the post-slide rule generations: if raising e to the power n gives you another number m, n is the natural logarithm of m. There is no space to explain in this margin why 鈥渘atural鈥�.
So that moment鈥檚 mathematical frivolity has probably helped keep Google鈥檚 floatation popular with geeks, despite their normal suspicion of large concentrations of power. But what Feedback wants to know is: what other unusual feats have fundamental constants performed?
FINALLY, one from the department of the blindingly obvious. Having bought a Bath Belle shower cap, Roger Randall鈥檚 wife was reassured that she had done the right thing when she read the directions: 鈥淔or use in shower or bath. Place cap over head to prevent it from getting wet.鈥�