Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
Stuff in its place
RECYCLING raises interesting psychological issues. Feedback recalls the London Borough of Tower Hamlets some years ago deciding to issue households with one bag for all recyclable waste 鈥� so we no longer had to sort out paper, glass and different kinds of plastic.
A neighbour was most put out. Her native tongue was, as it happened, German. She had been deprived, it seemed, of the chance to sigh contentedly 鈥�Alles ist in Ordnung鈥� as she filed the last piece of no-longer-wanted stuff in its proper place.
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Max Gibson saw a laptop from reduced from 拢1,199,998.80 to 拢358.32: did that mean it was the second ever made, the price of the first covering development costs, he asks
The small print of virtue
NOWADAYS recycling, in Europe at least, involves reading small print. Or not reading it. Feedback thanks Perry Bebbington for alerting us to the fact that New 杏吧原创 delivery wrappers in the UK are no longer designated 鈥渙xo-degradable鈥�, which had reminded a number of readers of a locally popular gravy-making product (3 April 2010).
Now these wrappers instruct us to 鈥淩ecycle with bags at larger stores 鈥� not at kerbside鈥�. But what if you live far from a larger store? No problem: 鈥淚f you are unable to recycle locally, you can return it to this address鈥︹�� Perry imagines that 鈥渢he resource cost of this far exceeds the recycling value of the wrapper鈥�. He now wonders: if he does post a wrapper back, should he write on the envelope, 鈥淚f you are unable to recycle this locally, you can return it to鈥︹��
More small print for compost
DATA. We need data on this recycling mystery. So we inspect the week鈥檚 crop of magazines. The Journalist, from the eponymous National Union, comes in a wrapper that 鈥渋s oxo-biodegradable and can be fully recycled鈥�. That for Stage, Screen and Radio from sister union BECTU 鈥渋s biodegradable and can be added to your compost bin鈥�.
We wondered whether the company that mails New 杏吧原创 was suggesting that readers post their wrappers back, as discussed above, to avoid the requirements of , of schemes such as the , or more generally of the . But both these magazines have readers throughout the European Union and neither feels that need.
Our inquiries continue.
A stellar retraction
WHEN UK newspaper The Guardian printed an impressive photo of star HR 5171 A , it noted that it is 鈥�1300 times the diameter of our sun鈥� and 鈥渙ne of the 10 biggest objects to be found in our solar system鈥�. Jamie Wallace is 鈥渟urprised astronomers took so long to find it鈥�.
We applaud the newspaper for owning up and for resisting the temptation to be over-logical and argue that it was indeed found in our solar system, and that we cannot rule out observers in other solar systems finding scads of bigger things.
Danger: Muphry at work
CAN Feedback now appease Muphry, whose Law points out that if you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault in what you have written, as we described on 1 March? Richard Mellish was at least the fourth reader to point out that New 杏吧原创 wrote in the same issue that 鈥渁ll extant humans are ancestors of those 2000 or so鈥� who survived a population crash 70,000 years ago (p 34). So, Richard asks, do we think 鈥渨e鈥檙e living backwards in time?鈥�
Searching our piling system, we discover that this ancestral problem is not new. Or has the instance that we appear to have corrected seven years ago propagated backward in time (5 May 2007, p 25)? How wide are Muphry鈥檚 powers?
Do data do that?
DATA: do they have mass? Feedback has been pondering this for months. We have done so mostly in the bath, where it is of course inadvisable to type, which explains our silence since we last raised the issue on 30 November 2013. Now we remember reports of a measurement of the energy required to erase data (10 March 2012, p 10).
In 1961 physicist Rolf Landauer put the fundamental minimum 鈥� ignoring the messiness of actual storage devices 鈥� at . By Albert Einstein鈥檚 famous formula, that implies a mass of 3 脳 10-38 kilograms per bit or, in marginally friendlier units, 0.3 yoctograms per gigabyte.
But that would be the minuscule mass associated with data not being there any more; and we find it unsatisfying that this calculation takes no account of how interesting the erased data were. Can any readers help?
Importing holes
FINALLY, and closer to Earth, our thoughts about the mass of data remind us of the experience of Nicholas Solntseff. Back in 1967 he travelled home from Imperial College London to Australia, carrying an early Fortran language compiler program on .
A customs official at Sydney airport asked him to pay import duty on some 2000 pieces of cardboard. Nicholas thought for a moment, and declared he was interested in importing not cardboard, but the 160,000 columns of holes which, he was sure, were massless and therefore not subject to duty.
In the end customs let him through.