A CREATURE viewed by modern society as 鈥渓ittle more than a benign food source 鈥� the cow 鈥� is also shown to be an astute animal capable of solving riddles, with an intellect more traditionally associated with an ape鈥�. Readers in the UK who saw this statement in The Observer newspaper would find it most interesting if true 鈥� but quite surprising, to say the least.
鈥淪tudies at Oxford University,鈥� the report continues, 鈥渇ound that Betty, a Caledonian heifer, instinctively bent a piece of wire using a gap in her food tray to create a hook that allowed her to scrape food from the bottom of a jar.鈥� That鈥檚 one clever cow, with most unusually dextrous hooves.
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But isn鈥檛 it an amazing coincidence that Betty the New Caledonian crow also fashions hooks from wire (New 杏吧原创, 12 June 2004, p 46)? Could it be that a simple typing error somewhere was ingeniously amplified as The Observer鈥榮 writers practised their craft, polishing the text by avoiding a repetition of the word 鈥渃ow鈥� and sharing with us their reflections on the animal kingdom? We tremble to think, especially since the law of conservation of typographical errors implies that printing this item guarantees the appearance somewhere else in this issue of a detailed discussion of dart matter.
鈥淭ea tree oil is a favourite alternative remedy. Quite how alternative is illustrated by the warning on Derek Long鈥檚 bottle of it: 鈥淔or external use only. Avoid skin contact鈥濃��
EVER wonder what really motivates interest in space tourism? Is it a quest for exploration, adventure and thrill-seeking, or simply another place to go for the bored and very rich? The case of space entrepreneur Walt Anderson suggests a third possibility.
Anderson is the CEO of Orbital Recovery Corporation, a company developing ways to extend the lifetime of communications satellites. He has funded a long series of space-related projects, including a plan to turn the old Russian space station Mir into a tourist haven. The money came from a pile of cash he had made by starting long-distance telecommunications companies in the early 1990s. Business boomed, but according to the US Department of Justice, Anderson wasn鈥檛 eager to share the profits with the government. The feds charge that Anderson hid about half a billion dollars through offshore companies over five years during the 1990s. By their accounting, that saved him about $170 million in federal taxes 鈥� until they came and arrested him for tax evasion at the end of February.
Anderson has a reputation as a libertarian and a record of spouting off about the government as well as wanting humanity to expand into space. But was his real goal to give an entirely new meaning to the word 鈥渙ffshore鈥�? In space, no one can see your bank statements.
AND here are two stories that have surfaced during a bout of spring cleaning of the Feedback files.
Has Elsevier Science (part of the same company as New 杏吧原创) perfected time travel and forgotten to tell us? The announcement of its Scopus service describes it as 鈥渁 single abstract and indexing database, which covers 14,000 scientific, technical, medical and social sciences titles from 4000 publishers.鈥� That鈥檚 moderately impressive, but not as good as this: 鈥淎lso 167 million scientific web pages going back 40 years.鈥�
Feedback could once boast of having read the entire web 鈥� in 1989, the year of its invention. So where were those 167 million pages hiding then? Perhaps in the same dark corner of Feedback鈥檚 filing system as this misplaced announcement.
THE second story we missed when a colleague鈥檚 email somehow got buried in the wrong folder.
You might think that the Grand Canyon in Arizona counted as prima facie evidence that the Earth is getting on a bit. You might also consider it inevitable that there would be a publication entitled Grand Canyon: A different view, arguing: 鈥淭he canyon gives us a glimpse of the effects of a catastrophic global flood, as well as an appreciation for the scale of the biblical Flood of Noah鈥檚 day.鈥�
But should such a view, suggesting the canyon is only a few thousand years old rather than the 5 to 6 million years calculated by geologists, be promoted in the US National Park Service鈥檚 (NPS) gift shops? When the issue arose last year, some thought it was an unconstitutional endorsement of a religious belief by the state and that it undercut NPS scientific education programmes.
But the powers that be thought otherwise. The NPS, according to the pressure group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, let the dollar do the talking. Spokeswoman Elaine Sevy was quoted in Baptist Press News as saying, 鈥淣ow that the book has become quite popular, we don鈥檛 want to remove it.鈥� And, so far as we know, it鈥檚 still on sale.
For the whole sorry story, see