DING! We have new mail. Michael Harvey tells us he is munching from a packet of Walkers Thai sweet chilli flavour crisps (chips, transatlantically). The packet proudly proclaims: 鈥渕ade with real ingredients鈥�, and Michael wonders what the alternative is.
Within the hour Paul Gardner writes with an answer, inspired by a packet of poppadoms from the same company, which 鈥渃ontains only real ingredients鈥�. He expresses relief, having been 鈥渃oncerned for some time now about the use of imaginary ingredients in snacks鈥�.
Checking back in the Feedback piling system, we discover that the enterprising Rob Buckland pre-empted both by a day. His 8-year-old daughter Ash had asked what other kinds of ingredient there were, and he writes: 鈥淚 am looking for investors in my new venture 鈥� crisps made with virtual ingredients.鈥� After packaging costs he anticipates quite good profit margins.
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Our piling system has lost track of the number of other readers who alerted us to this bizarre claim: virtually hundreds have done so.
鈥淧roudly announced on a litre of Tesco鈥檚 UHT British semi-skimmed milk: 鈥淣othing added, nothing taken away鈥�. Where, Peter Howell wants to know, do they get the semi-skimmed cows?鈥�
IN THESE difficult times for investment decisions, we were initially delighted and pathetically grateful to Charles Tait for reminding us of the Time Travel Fund. When we last mentioned this, in the apparently financially secure climate of 30 July 2005, we described it as a scheme to allow the miracle of compound interest to turn a mere $1 into a fortune over the next 500 years or so. You would just have to promise to turn over part of the resulting mountain of money to any time traveller who comes back to our time and transports you forward to theirs, where your fortune awaits.
Revisiting we see that it claims $1 invested with a steady yield of 5 per cent net of tax and inflation would after 500 years be $39 billion. At once we feel less secure. So these are old-fashioned, 2005-style investments, whose value may go down as well as up, as the gabbling voice on the radio says?
What we need is a means of making investments in the future 鈥� not in the sense of the pat phrase that G20 finance ministers will likely use at the , but actual investments in an actual future year 鈥� 2059, say. If anyone鈥檚 ever going to find an economic system that actually works, that should give them time enough to do so.
Perhaps surprisingly at first sight, this is more practical than the Time Travel Fund. The best current prospect for time travel is wormholes in space-time (New 杏吧原创, 5 April 2008, p 36). As far as Feedback understands, the problem with these is stopping them collapsing when any mass enters. But money is inherently massless. Problem solved?
We await with some trepidation the page of equations that describes the infinitesimal wormhole through which you stuff your savings鈥� and a discussion of the effect on this of the labour theory of value, which suggests that the fundamental unit of money is the hour.
KEY to funding success is devising the proper acronym for your project. That thought must have guided the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, best known for its role developing US nuclear weapons, and as the long-time home of Edward Teller, father of the US hydrogen bomb.
Livermore director George Miller extols the lab鈥檚 latest project in its in-house magazine, : 鈥淟IFE is a concept to help solve an enormous 21st-century problem: the combination of global warming and the increasing demands for clean energy worldwide.鈥�
Yes, Livermore has redefined LIFE as an acronym for Laser Inertial Fusion Energy, a nuclear-energy project supposed to follow up the lab鈥檚 long-delayed and just-opened National Ignition Facility, a building filled to the brim with the world鈥檚 largest laser. That鈥檇 be the strand of research that started off simulating features of nuclear explosions, while side-stepping the terms of nuclear test-ban treaties, in the interests of DEATH.
ARCHAEOLOGISTS delving into our piling system have discovered several Feedback readers alerting us to a book review in the London Sunday Telegraph magazine a few months back. The of Mary Beard鈥檚 Pompeii in paperback contained a remarkable assertion: 鈥淚 hadn鈥檛 realised until I read this book that the larva that engulfed Pompeii in AD 79 was not by any means as sudden as I鈥檇 always thought鈥︹��
FINALLY, Rob Eason draws our attention to a paper in Applied Physics Letters () entitled 鈥淰alue of electron diffusion constant in GaAs for high electric field鈥�. Its authors are Andr茅 Castelain, Robert Perichon, Eug猫ne Constant and Alain Le Borgne.
鈥淪o,鈥� observes Rob, 鈥渁 paper on the e constant, by an author E. Constant.鈥� That was in 1974. Can it be long, Rob asks, before we have 鈥減apers on gravitational attraction by G. Force鈥�?