FEEDBACK is surely not alone in detesting 鈥渉elpful鈥� computers, reasoning that their entire purpose is to be obedient, not to second-guess their owners. Adonis Patrikios, in contrast, decided to test just how helpful and friendly the Microsoft Office Assistant 鈥� usually incarnated as a supremely annoying paperclip 鈥� could be.
鈥淲ho am I?鈥� No response.
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鈥淲ho are you?鈥� No response.
鈥淲hy are we here?鈥� At last: Would you like to add a diagram?
No, thanks. 鈥淒o you even love me anymore?鈥� Justify Text. OK then, he thought, I鈥檒l justify it: 鈥淚 want to know if you really care, or is this just a job to you?鈥� How to speak to a computer. Perhaps he was getting somewhere.鈥滵o you really want me to speak to you or are you just being polite?鈥� Start an unscheduled online meeting.
This sounded to him a lot like an invitation to a rendezvous鈥�
THE US house of representatives subcommittee on space and aeronautics was told by Robert Davis on 11 June 2003 that 鈥淎bsent [sic] US-Russian cooperative aerospace endeavours, Russia will fill the vacuum.鈥� So who, Peter Bernau wants to know, is going to pay for that much stuff?
SO WHAT will it be called? Whether 2003 UB313, the object larger and farther than Pluto whose discovery was revealed at the end of July, ends up as a planet or a mere Kuiper belt object, it needs a name. So newscientistspace.com asked readers to suggest some.
鈥溾�漀ot for pacemaker users or for use during pregnancy,鈥� warns Robin Fennell鈥檚 20-bit screwdriver set. Why?鈥�
The top-ranked suggestion was Persephone or Proserpina, the Greek and Roman names for a goddess captured by Pluto, causing her mother enough grief to create winter. Sadly, as lead discoverer Mike Brown notes on the site , these names are already taken.
Brown notes that while the team has already proposed names for Kuiper belt objects from Native American, Inuit and minor Roman gods, 鈥淥ur new proposed name expands to different traditions still.鈥� So that doesn鈥檛 quite rule out the second of our readers鈥� proposals, Peace or Pax 鈥� with some of which we could do 鈥� or the fourth, Xena (a television heroine, your lordship).
Feedback can report a strong South American vote for Maradona (number 10 shirt). The readers who proposed 鈥淢ianus鈥� and 鈥淪cooby Doo鈥� should probably remain anonymous.
See more at www.newscientistspace.com/article/dn7811.
RISK was the subject of a presentation to the International Payments 2005 banking conference, held in London in late April, by Dow vice-president for Acceptable Risk
, Erastus Hamm. He explained the philosophy thus: 鈥淗ow many lives equal how much benefit? Making this explicit would of course mean putting a precise value on human life. The government can鈥檛 do that鈥he good news is nobody has to, because our society has a democratic means for determining value. It鈥檚 called the market, and it plays no favourites.鈥�
Hamm discussed risks taken by businesses, starting with pesticide manufacture and going back in time to when the predecessor of IBM sold equipment that was reported, decades later, to have been used by Nazis for tracing Jews. He concluded that, though these were skeletons in companies鈥� closets, each turned out to be a 鈥済olden skeleton鈥� with 鈥渉arsh but acceptable costs鈥�. Several bankers signed up for licences for Hamm鈥檚 Acceptable Risk Calculator and posed for photographs with mascot 鈥淕ilda, the golden skeleton鈥�.
That particular wunch of bankers may be mortified to know that Hamm had no connection with any company called Dow, and was rather one of a group of anti-capitalist pranksters accidentally invited to the conference. Read more at .
URGENTLY needing to replace his British passport, Dave Kirkham visited the passport office website and found his way to the page 鈥淯rgent Applications: Travelling within 48 hours鈥� ().
There he was advised: 鈥淵ou will need to make a personal application at one of our offices, using our Premium or Fast Track services. There are additional fees for these services.鈥�
Fair enough, he reckons, that the need for speed costs. But then it warned him: 鈥淐urrently demand for appointments is exceptionally high, and you should therefore allow at least two weeks for your appointment date.鈥�
Dave is now considering spending the extra just to find out whether the new passport, when it eventually arrives, is really valid for time travel too.
FINALLY, you have unfortunately missed The Gateway to Ancient Egypt, an exhibition at the Yokohama Museum of EurAsian Cultures that closed on 14 August. Guy Robinson noticed that it featured CAT (computer-assisted tomography) scans of mummified animals and presumes that you could have pointed to some of those images and been doubly truthful when you said, 鈥淭his is a cat scan鈥�. He wonders how many more such doubly true statements there are. Restricting the field to statements about existence, we hereby dub them diontologias and immediately add the question: are there any triontologias?