Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
Stick to the rules, worldwide
REQUESTS to 鈥渁dhere鈥� to instructional signs are spreading. Hugh Carter was told in Toronto, Canada, that he 鈥渕ust adhere to traffic personnel鈥� (14 December 2013). Now Henry Shipley informs us that carriages run by Arriva Trains Wales contain no-smoking signs with the rider that 鈥淔ailure to adhere to this notice may result in prosecution.鈥� What a quandary: risk arrest or get well and truly stuck on a train?
Packets of barbecue flavour Arnotts Shapes biscuits announce 鈥淏iscuits not actual size鈥�. Philip Ross wonders: do they ever achieve actual size, or are they Schr枚dinger鈥檚 biscuits?
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Trying train translation
SIGNS on Arriva Trains Wales are, naturally, bilingual. We asked a famous web search engine to translate the Welsh rendering of the 鈥淔ailure to adhere鈥︹�� notice, 鈥�Gallwch gael eich erlyn am beidio ag ufuddhau鈥檙 hysbysiad hwn鈥�. Prosaically, it replied: 鈥淵ou can be sued for failing to obey this notice.鈥� But by the pricking in our thumbs 鈥� and remembering the same translation engine鈥檚 camel/beauty mix-up (21/28 December 2013) 鈥� we mildly suspect that this may be correct only by accident: is it right to ask allwch chi helpu?
Average performance
AVERAGES continue to mean trouble 鈥� and the example that Matt Ashmore sends is at a rather higher level than the BBC鈥檚 report that 鈥渘early half of the co-educational state-funded schools鈥� are actually doing worse than average鈥� at countering gender bias in science subjects (4 January).
The UK鈥檚 House of Commons Select Committee on Education was . Committee chair Graham Stuart asked: 鈥淚f 鈥榞ood鈥� requires pupil performance to exceed the national average, and if all schools must be good, how is this mathematically possible?鈥�
Gove replied: 鈥淏y getting better all the time.鈥� And to the rejoinder, 鈥淪o it is possible, is it?鈥� insisted: 鈥淚t is possible to get better all the time.鈥� Stuart then asked: 鈥淲ere you better at literacy than numeracy, Secretary of State?鈥� only to receive the strange reply, 鈥淚 cannot remember.鈥�
Feedback accepts that it is possible for all schools to be better this year than last year鈥檚 average. But we suspect that if results were 鈥済etting better all the time鈥� in this way, the minister would be inveighing against grade inflation, or even railing against the Flynn Effect, which is the steady rise in unadjusted IQ scores (8 September 2012, p 26).
A tweet in time
TIME travellers: are they about to have existed? How could we tell? Feedback shares the pleasure of other commentators at the innovative method reported in a paper 鈥淪earching the Internet for evidence of time travellers鈥� by Robert Nemiroff and Teresa Wilson of Michigan Technological University, at .
The authors hypothesised that time travellers from the future might, either to tease us or by accident, refer in social media to events that have not yet occurred. Rather than enter into the resource-intensive and will-to-live-sapping enterprise of reading the whole internet, they searched for Twitter hashtags such as and , looking for any that popped up prematurely. They found none.
Never too late
THE Time Tweet study above replicates, in a sense, the possibly more elegant search initiated by Emily Singer鈥檚 to the first and only Time Traveler Convention, held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on 8 May 2005. As we noted on 14 May 2005, were you to be a time traveller, whenever you read this wasn鈥檛 too late to remind you to attend, though you鈥檒l have to change the past in which you didn鈥檛.
Beyond briefer blogging
MEANWHILE, reports that Facebook is 鈥溾�� , or even 鈥溾��, reached us just as we gathered courage to refer to the site without explaining what it was. Apparently it鈥檚 cooler to use Twitter (a 鈥渕icro-blogging service鈥�, Your Honour).
This prompted a contributor to a discussion site () to for 鈥渂lurt鈥� 鈥� a nano-blogging service characterised by a maximum of eight characters per message, plus an optional three-character suffix. The internet name is already taken, so one might have to fork out for a top-level 鈥渄ot blurt鈥� domain, alongside the new-ish-fangled 鈥�.name鈥� addresses.
Name, rank and title
FINALLY, research papers sometimes have titles that just jump out at you. Consider 鈥溾�� in the January issue of Evolution and Human Behavior. Said 鈥渂astard鈥� men take extreme risks, apparently making other men consider them physically larger. The Crazy Bastard hypothesis holds that they take such risks to signal to other men that they are formidable competitors, writes anthropologist Daniel Fessler of the University of California, Los Angeles.
The aggressive title, designed to draw the attention of journalists looking for easy news stories, thus appears to Feedback to be an example of what it describes.