60 | NewScientist | 8 June 2013FEEDBACK
PROGRAMMERS at a Famous
Web Search Engine are forever
trying to find new ways to be
helpful – and to keep us coming
back. Clive Jones was recently
looking up exchange rates
between the British pound and
the US dollar. He discovered that
if you put a figure and a currency
in the search box, the search
engine makes “a decent stab at
providing an instant conversion
without the need to select a
website and search around”.
Later, he accidentally typed
“pound pound dollar rate” into
the search field and received the
result: “1 British pound pound
U.S. dollar = 0.677349486 kg U.S.
Dollars^2 ”. After studying this, Clive
says he “can only conclude that
they have attempted to provide
the weight of a pound of dollars”.
What the intriguing unit the
kilogram-dollar-squared might
represent continues to elude him,
though, as it does us.Brian Robinson sends us a photo of a
large sign outside a showroom in what
he describes as “rural Virginia”. It says:
“Antique tables made daily”Ignoring Clive’s warning that
we were in danger of opening
the floodgates of permutation,
we tried “euro euro dollar rate”,
which wasn’t recognised as a
currency conversion; then
“euro pound dollar rate”, which
we were informed was “1 Euro
pound U.S. dollar = 0.584544487 kg
U.S. Dollars^2 ”.
Something similar happens for
yen. Disappointingly, “blue whale
pound dollar rate” gives the usual
selection of links, many to pages
that do not mention whales. One
links to the news, attributed to
Fox, that “Trillion Dollar Coin
Would Equal Weight Of 89 Blue
Whales” – taking us into the outer
reaches of fiscal strangeness.OUR “missing floors in buildings”
theme has inspired readers to
send us stories about buildings
around the world equipped with lifts
that miss out certain floors (4 May).Now Alan Chattaway sends us the
strangest one yet.
“Here in Vancouver, Canada, one of
our tallest buildings has four missing
floors,” he says. “The One Wall Centre
is so narrow that it would have
swayed in high winds or earthquakes.
To prevent this, 400 tonnes of water
are on the roof to increase inertia,
and four floors below are filled with
concrete cross-bracing.”
Alan concludes that “the missing
floors may not be obvious to those
using the elevators”. We think this is
just as well. The knowledge of all that
water and concrete just above your
head when you reach the “top floor”
would not be reassuring.INEVITABLY, Feedback readers
have sent in further responses to
our mentions of the T-shirt slogan
that there are “only 10 types of
people in the world: those who
understand binary and those who
don’t” (16 March and 11 May). John
Hartley suggests an alternative:
“There are {{},{{}}} types of people
in the world – those who
understand the construction of
ordinal numbers in axiomatic
set theory, and those who don’t.”
Feedback’s resident
mathematics guru agrees.
The symbol “{}”, he explains,
represents the empty set, which
has no members; and {{}}
represents the set whose single
member is the empty set – which
is how we get to “one” in set
theory. And so on to “two”, and
the rest of arithmetic.
All of which may well be true.
However, Feedback suspects that
the market for this T-shirt will be
somewhat smaller than that for
the binary variant.AS HE was about to send a parcel
via myhermes.co.uk, Tim Walker
decided to check first that it wasn’t
too big or heavy, so he clicked on the
link to “check parcel size”. Here he
was presented with the statement:
“max volume up to 225cm.”
He had a bit of a struggle with
“max volume up to”, wondering howit was possible to have more than one
maximum, but decided to treat this
as mere tautology. But this still left
him with a one-dimensional volume,
leading him briefly to wonder how
many one-dimensional parcels
you can fit in a three-dimensional
delivery van.
He assumed, of course, that they
had omitted “cubed” after “cm”. Then
he noticed that the website includes
a handy “UK volume calculator”, so
he decided to check if its definition
matched the one he knew. He put
in “10 cm” for parcel length, parcel
width and parcel height, hit “calculate
size” and was given a “combined size”
of “50cm”.A SIGN in Roger Calvert’s local
ASDA supermarket proclaims
“Tried, Tasted and Chosen by You”.
The two displays it refers to, Roger
tells us, are for liquid laundry
detergent and plastic bin bags.FINALLY, Feedback frequently does
a double take when a disembodied
voice on London’s Underground
admonishes passengers to “take all
your belongings with you” when
leaving the train. Would they really
appreciate us wedging the doors
open while we unloaded 1000 books,
the cast-iron cookware and the
shelves they sit on?You can send stories to Feedback by
email at [email protected].
Please include your home address.
This week’s and past Feedbacks can
be seen on our website.For more feedback, visit newscientist.com/feedbackPAul MCDEviTT130608_Op_Feedback.indd 60 31/5/13 14:43:57