杏吧原创

Quaking on our bikes

Feedback doesn鈥檛 live in great fear of earthquakes. The last significant tremor in our neck of the woods 鈥� a 4.3-magnitude shocker that hit Folkestone, UK, in 2007 鈥� was, according to one eyewitness, like . This is how it felt the last time the earth moved for us, too, although admittedly that was even further back.

Still, you can鈥檛 be too careful, and the past couple of years have taught us nothing if not the value of the precautionary principle, although possibly not even that. Anyway, this is why we want an earthquake-resistant bicycle saddle of the type Kristen McAteer alerts us to on . It strikes us as a jolly good idea, not least because physicists still struggle to intuit how a bicycle stays upright at the best of times.

We note the saddle cushion is also 100 per cent leak-proof and easy to dry, important qualities when dealing with the emotional fallout of a sudden cyclequake. It is also 99 per cent antibacterial, the sort of claim that makes us think the surviving 1 per cent are left rubbing their hands.

Measured response

Completing a half-marathon pushing a buggy containing 4-year-old quintuplets, as runner Chad Kempel did at the Oakland Half-Marathon in California in March, must count as a feat of stamina and endurance. Although possibly not as much as having 4-year-old quintuplets. Our respect is only increased by learning that the load amounted to 鈥�108kg 鈥� roughly the weight of a baby elephant calf鈥�.

Duncan East asks whether the baby elephant is a recognised subunit of the standard elephant, like a centiphant or a milliphant. We make it about 18 milliphants, suggesting related but rival systems, much as the US and the UK can鈥檛 agree on the size of a pint.

On this subject, apologies to regular readers for our recent story on the errant mass of the W boson, which failed to include the crucial information from the corresponded to 鈥渕easuring the weight of an 800-pound gorilla to 1.5 ounces鈥�. That鈥檚 a tad over 3.3 babyphants to within 7 microphants, and thanks to Ian Stopher for flagging this omission.

Keep whatever distance

Meanwhile, Neil Williams gleans from a social distancing sign at a botanic garden in Australia that 1.5 metres is equivalent to 10 waratah flowers, three water dragons, 5 white-winged choughs, 7 secateurs or 1 tree fern frond.

And a partridge in a pear tree, we carol reflexively and aseasonally. As we often do in these instances, we find ourselves wondering just how big these things are. Neil points out that within a few dozen secateurs of the sign, resolutely non-normative water dragons were varying in length from around two-thirds of a tree frond right down to a tenth of a white-winged chough. This sounds like a variable social distancing policy just as we practised it in the Before Times, only choosing a safer distance from any scissorhands wielding seven secateurs.

Dark rental agreements

We like it when Feedback readers take things into their own hands, leaving ours free to do the devil鈥檚 work. So we are pleased that Marthinus Roos has calculated that combining just five characters should be enough to generate a unique URL for all of the world鈥檚 websites, given 104 keys on a standard keyboard.

This sets our hands fair racing across our keys to head off those of you who would take it upon yourselves to write in pointing out that some of these are function keys, the numbers appear twice, etc., etc. Marthinus is moved to his observation by encountering the URL of a car rental agreement that was 1400 characters long 鈥� enough, he points out, to generate a unique URL for every atom in the universe.

Or perhaps, he speculates, in some unobserved corner of the cosmos, there are simply unimaginable numbers of car rental agreements. Around 10¹³⁵⁸ per atom in the universe should be enough to justify the 1400-character thing. If so, we might have found what is making up all that missing matter and energy in the universe.

Koons to the moon

No sooner had we arched an eyebrow about an auction of NFTs, digital widgets often mistaken for art, that had been blessed in space (2 April), than we learned that artist Jeff Koons . There, we discover, , his sculptures 鈥渨ill be permanently housed in a transparent, thermally coated cube鈥�.

Given the lack, we presume, of a lunar exhibition-going public, we are puzzled as to why Koons would go to these lengths, until we read in the article鈥檚 subhead that 鈥渃orresponding digital renderings of the lunar-bound works will be sold as NFTs, obviously鈥�. Ah.

Koons鈥檚 art wouldn鈥檛 be a first: a 9-centimetre statuette called was left by the Apollo 15 mission in 1971 to commemorate those who had died during the US and Soviet space programmes. This caused a stir when the sculptor Paul Van Hoeydonck tried to sell limited-edition reproductions, violating NASA鈥檚 policy forbidding commercial exploitation of space. Oh the times, the habits.

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