杏吧原创

IF A tree makes a phone call in the forest and no one answers, did it happen? Our updated version of the famous philosophical question from Bishop George Berkeley is made necessary by the proliferation of fake trees trying, without ever quite succeeding, to pretend they are not cellphone masts.

Now there is, inevitably, a website devoted to these strange unlife-forms. displays photos of the pretend pines that populate its author鈥檚 native Scottsdale, Arizona. Of course, one of these would stand out like a sore thumb in an English village like, say, Little Giggleswick in Norfolk. But if you get a chance to knock on the church steeple in such places, you may be in for a surprise鈥�the hollow fibreglass echo of a sham church.

THE googlewhackblatt saga continues. We have recently discussed the problem that googlewhackblatts 鈥� words that generate only one hit in a Google search 鈥� cease to be such when they are included on the New 杏吧原创 web pages or in a collected googlewhackblatts web page. Now Stephen Granger-Bevan has come up with a simple solution.

If, rather than searching for googlewhackblatts themselves, googlewhackblatt hunters pursue words which generate no Google hits at all, the googlewhackblatt nature of these words will be created rather than destroyed if the words appear in Feedback and are subsequently published on the web.

For starters, Granger-Bevan offers four such words: hodgsonblatchbat (which he says means an offensive weapon used to control unruly chemistry students), runshawbogglebox (apparently, a great mind from Preston, Lancashire), Feedbackgooglewhackblatt (a word that has only become a googlewhackblatt by virtue of its inclusion in Feedback and thus on New 杏吧原创鈥檚 web pages) and antegooglewhackblatt (a word that has yet to become a googlewhackblatt by virtue of its inclusion on New 杏吧原创鈥檚 web pages). All four of these words are antegooglewhackblatts at the time of writing but will be Feedbackgooglewhackblatts by the time you read this, because by then they will have appeared on www.newscientist.com, where Google will detect them.

What a neat idea, we thought. But no sooner had we received Granger-Bevan鈥檚 email outlining his scheme than we received an email from Lawrence D鈥橭liveiro which said: 鈥淎ll this talk of how a web page that tries to collect googlewhackblatts would destroy them 鈥� well, I鈥檝e done it. I鈥檝e created a web page of googlewhackblatts which do work. It鈥檚 .鈥�

A glance at the words on D鈥橭liveiro鈥檚 page reveals that what he has done is almost identical to what Granger-Bevan suggests 鈥� except that instead of giving his antegooglewhackblatts to Feedback so that they will assume googlewhackblatthood when they are published on www.newscientist.com, he has achieved the same end by publishing them on the web himself. Delightful new words they are too, but we won鈥檛 repeat them for obvious reasons.

A MAXIM to live by 鈥� or to ensure your survival at work, at any rate 鈥� is 鈥淒o not annoy the geek鈥�. For the person who controls your computer and its network connection controls your working life.

This is what a manager at a certain US state administration found. His geek, who we shall call Kurt Jackson, decided that sharing office gossip about the manager鈥檚 alleged laziness wasn鈥檛 enough. So Jackson installed a program on the said manager鈥檚 computer that at random intervals saved an image of its screen.

And what did he find? That 70 per cent of the images included an active game of Solitaire, and only 2 per cent actual work.

Cue anguished discussion on geek bulletin boards: is privacy indivisible, or is it legitimate to breach it to get back at the Men in Suits? No anguished discussion seems to have ensued among the bureaucrats, however. Jackson was fired, and the manager is still in place.

THE opening ceremony at the Athens Olympics featured Greek discoveries in science and mathematics, and reflected the fact that the ancient Greeks saw science and the arts as one. What a pity, then, that the BBC commentator overheard by Len Fisher had to let down British science and arts by referring to the cube as 鈥渁 figure that does not appear in nature鈥�. Has he never seen a salt crystal, Fisher wonders?

FINALLY, going through some cupboards, Michael Kellock came across an old bottle of Steradent denture-cleaning powder. The back conveyed the usual stern admonitions: 鈥渄o not place powder in mouth鈥� do not drink solution鈥�rinse [denture] thoroughly before replacing in mouth鈥�not to be taken.鈥� Meanwhile, a prominent message on the front proclaimed: 鈥淔resh taste鈥�.

From the department of superfluous accuracy. Andrew Wainwright was recently informed by his Lotus Domino server: 鈥淢emory Available (including virtual): 5668.7578115463 megabytes鈥�