The order of not things
Cambridge 鈥� of Cambridgeshire, not Massachusetts, before anyone jumps in 鈥� is famed as the academic home of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, three philosophers who did much to elucidate, not to say obfuscate, language, logic and meaning. It is very much in their spirit, we assume, that Cambridge City Council recently advertised an extra rubbish bin collection following staff absences, stating 鈥渂ins will be collected in the order in which they were previously not collected鈥�.
鈥淚s it quantum mechanics then that enables us to determine the order in which things don鈥檛 happen?鈥� asks Alison Litherland, we imagine hovering indecisively over her bins. Quite possibly. Our starting point must be the following question: if a bin isn鈥檛 collected, but no one sees it not collected, has it been not collected at all?
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In purely practical terms, the only way of finding out is by looking in the bin, making this a particularly pure instantiation of Erwin Schr枚dinger鈥檚 cat paradox. Maybe Schr枚dinger鈥檚 trash didn鈥檛 have quite the same ring to it. As far as your problem goes, Alison, we fear that repeated measurement of identical bins may allow you to build up a picture of when it wasn鈥檛 collected, but this will only have statistical validity.
Poet didn鈥檛 know it
Feedback is delighted to find, while searching for something else, that the physicist James Clerk Maxwell (died 1879) is listed as an author on the New 杏吧原创 website (born circa 1996).
Further investigation reveals a series of poems published by Maxwell in these pages in 2011. We are somewhat lacking context, but his Valentine By a Telegraph Clerk (Male) to a Telegraph Clerk (Female) bears rereading, with its culminating verse: 鈥淭hrough many a volt the weber flew,/And clicked this answer back to me;/I am thy farad staunch and true,/Charged to a volt with love for thee.鈥�
Sweet, if of its time. Following our musings on how old the internet thinks you can be (26 February), at 180, we may have found our oldest contributor.
Standard elephants
Metrologists at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris may still be basking in the replacement, in 2019, of the international prototype kilogram 鈥� a platinum-iridium hulk that would feel exactly like 1 kilogram if dropped on your foot 鈥� by a fancy-schmantzy definition in terms of various physical constants. But as regular Feedback readers know, they are missing the鈥� in the room. The elephant is well-established as the actual international standard unit of mass.
Proof positive, a report from The Hamilton Spectator in Ontario, Canada, sent in by Doug Thomson. A clean-up after storms there in January required the removal of , frozen elephants worth鈥�. We can only imagine the difficulties of dealing with these homesick and discomfited beasts. The icing on the elephants clearly adds something to their weight, as we conventionally take an adult male African bush elephant to weigh about 6 tonnes.
Even as we hear calls for a standard prototype elephant kept under glass somewhere growing louder, news reaches us of a breakaway movement in New South Wales, Australia. Many of you highlight news of the seizure of 9.7 hectares鈥� worth of illicitly grown tobacco at Koraleigh .
How many bulldozers of tobacco fit into Sydney Harbour, we wonder. Meanwhile, Brian Horton consults the delightful website . Suffice to say, the amount of tobacco seized at Koraleigh was some 42 standard elephants.
His mummy鈥檚 voice
The interwebs have delighted themselves recently at a story first reported by New 杏吧原创 in 2020, that researchers have recreated the voice of an Egyptian mummy held at Leeds City Museum, UK.
The experience is slightly hard to reproduce on the printed page, but oddly, in some of the clips now circulating, , whereas two years ago it was a far more refined 鈥淓EEEERGH鈥�. Mummies could presumably have made more than one sound, says a colleague 鈥� not unreasonably, with the qualification 鈥渨hen alive鈥�. 鈥淭his is the replication crisis writ large,鈥� says another, damningly.
Vive la r茅sistance!
Much as we try to stop buttered toast falling on our pages, right side up or no, still it rains down. But we are in a philosophical frame of mind, so we are grateful to J. Feralco for the reminder of a corollary to Murphy鈥檚 Law, first established by humorist Paul Jennings in the 1940s: 鈥淭he chance of the bread falling with the buttered side down is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet.鈥�
This came as part of his Report on Resistentialism, a school of philosophy encapsulated by the phrase 鈥淟es choses sont contre nous鈥� 鈥� 鈥渢hings are against us鈥� 鈥� established on Paris鈥檚 Left Bank by 鈥渂espectacled, betrousered, two-eyed鈥� thinker Pierre-Marie Ventre. Resistentialism holds that there are limits to the sway humans can hold in a world of largely hostile, uncooperative things. It is worth .
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