WANTING to travel from Great Britain to Ireland, Geoff Steedman looked up routes online. He was offered a route involving a ferry from Holyhead in Wales to 鈥淒ublin Ferry Port鈥� 鈥� a location with which he was not familiar. Helpfully, the National Rail website he was using offers maps of the locations served.
Geoff clicked. He was presented with the railways鈥� double-arrow logo in the middle of a plain blue rectangle. Zooming out 鈥� a long way 鈥� he discovered that the National Rail computer holds the belief that Dublin Ferry Port is roughly 1000 kilometres due south of Accra, Ghana. That puts it somewhere out in the south Atlantic Ocean. If you get there before they read this, you can check via .
Perhaps the sudden appearance of 鈥淒ublin Ferry Port鈥� stemmed from a desire to avoid explaining how to pronounce D煤n Laoghaire, the proper name of the ancient town a dozen kilometres south-east of Dublin where the port was and, despite National Rail鈥檚 map, remains. (In the mouths of 鈥渢he plain people of Ireland鈥�, to use a catchphrase of the town鈥檚 funniest inhabitant, the late Flann O鈥橞rien, it is pronounced 鈥渄un-leerie鈥�.) The great and densely referential work Ulysses opens in this very spot, and James Joyce was, townspeople say, inspired by the ships venturing out across their wine-dark sea. Was National Rail in turn inspired by a coded reference to the south Atlantic somewhere in the book?
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鈥淔riends of the Earth sent Magnus Alexander a monthly Enews bulletin headed 鈥淒emand climate change鈥�. But, he says, 鈥淚 liked things how they used to be鈥濃��
Lacking time to re-read Ulysses, we started playing with the latitude and longitude of D煤n Laoghaire (53.30掳N, 6.13掳W). Transpose as we would, we couldn鈥檛 get to the south Atlantic鈥� but, d鈥檕h! It dawned on us that the location shown by National Rail is the intersection of the prime meridian and the equator 鈥� 0掳N, 0掳W.
We now expect that in map-world, if not the real world, this is quite a crowded spot, populated with all the locations for which various database clerks thought 鈥淚 give up鈥� and entered zero for the co-ordinates. What else have you found mapped there?
DOES cascading synergistic jargon make your brain hurt, too? Feedback has on occasion resorted to handing out corporate buzzword bingo cards to enliven presentations by managers in suits.
They took hours to set up. But thanks to the marvels of information technology, no more! Go to and you will be rewarded with a fresh card each time you visit. The top row of the one in front of us now reads 鈥渆nable, geo-targeted, game plan, dot-com, best practice鈥�, which sounds perfect for a presentation on monetising the user-interactivity of Interweb 3.1, or the like.
Print off bingo slips, hand them to colleagues enduring the meeting with you鈥� and advise them to try to avoid shouting 鈥淏ingo!鈥� too loudly when the presenter has completed a row or a column of jargon. Failure to exercise such self-restraint could result in a dynamic downsizing denouement 鈥� known in American English as a pink slip, and to Brits as a P45. In that unhappy event, though, the ex-colleagues could always check for innovative income-stream identifiers: it has just suggested to us that we might seek work as a 鈥淕raphic Filtering Guru鈥� or a 鈥淒ot-Com Evolution Administrator鈥�.
COULD it be that some signs are quantumly determined, collapsing to a state of true or false when you observe them? Based on his observations, Neill Jones thinks that it could.
He gives the example of a sign outside his house saying 鈥淣o dog fouling鈥�. Every time he has looked at it, he says, it has been true. This is also the case with another 鈥淣o dog fouling鈥� sign on a building a couple of streets away.
On the other hand, on Salisbury Plain in the south of England, where there are regular military manoeuvres, there is a sign by the road saying 鈥淭ank crossing鈥�. This, says Neill, has collapsed to false every time he has looked at it.
There are, however, further complexities to this phenomenon. Some signs avoid a quantum collapse altogether, Neill notes. Take the 鈥淕ap ahead closed鈥� sign he saw recently while driving up a dual carriageway (divided highway). If there was a gap ahead, he reasons, then it wasn鈥檛 closed. If it was closed, then there wasn鈥檛 a gap ahead. So the sign failed to be either true or false and was merely self-cancelling.
鈥淢aybe I should get out more,鈥� Neill suggests. 鈥淏ut then I鈥檒l only find more signs. So maybe I should stay in more.鈥�
WHEN Will Trend used Apple鈥檚 iWork to proof-read an essay, his use of the words 鈥渏udgement day鈥� met with the program鈥檚 disapproval. 鈥淓ach part of a holiday name should begin with a capital letter,鈥� it admonished him. 鈥淐onsider replacing with 鈥楯udgement Day鈥�.鈥�