25 January 2020 | New Scientist | 53The back pages Feedback
Reverend spooner
Just as the bowl of a telepathically
bent spoon arcs back ceaselessly
towards its own handle, Feedback
finds itself magnetically drawn to
international man of cutlery Uri
Geller. He has graced our pages on
numerous occasions since he first
rose to prominence, most recently
(20 April 2019) when he claimed
to be able to influence the UK’s
Brexit negotiations conducted
by Theresa May’s government.
Those particular interventions
proved about as useful as a gelatin
spork, but that hasn’t stopped him
seeking out the limelight once
again. After Downing Street adviser
Dominic Cummings posted a job
advert looking for “assorted
weirdos” earlier this year, Geller
has put himself forward as the
ideal candidate. In an interview
with Reuters, he said that he is
probably the only prospective
applicant with genuine telekinetic
powers. Good guess, Uri – but your
numbers are off by one.
Seacret agents
Iran’s alleged move towards
nuclear weapon capabilities is
much debated. But amid the
geopolitical brinkmanship of the
past few weeks, Feedback is grateful
to Military.com for identifying the
country’s real super-weapon.
Per the publication, at around
the turn of the millennium, Iran
acquired a number of military
dolphins from Russia, some of
which – assuming low attrition
rates for flipper-to-flipper
combat – could still be alive.
Menacing though the fleet of
“communist killer dolphins”
envisaged in the article may be,
there is no doubt they represent
a cuddlier alternative to a third
world war. The most sickening
aspect of war, it is often said, is
that it has no porpoise.
Presidential dropout
If there is one thing we learned
from politics in the 2010s,
Feedback would like someone
coming into work every day for
decades, and the only planet we
have successfully identified is the
one we are sitting on.
Our inner cynic eagerly sniffs
out conspiracy. Perhaps the
engineers at NASA deliberately
avoid some low-hanging
planetary fruit in order to reward
their interns, just as truffle
farmers supposedly seed their
fields to keep the pigs hungry.
Alternatively, of course, NASA
could just be particularly good at
identifying the best and brightest
young minds in the solar system.
Feedback, on the other hand, is
still wondering where that is.Twitter snowstorm
In these deeply polarised times,
it can sometimes feel as though
certain politicians are living
on a different planet. So theTwittersphere wasn’t entirely
surprised to find that the Trump
administration had tweeted a
photo celebrating the “first snow
of the year!” on a day when highs
in Washington DC exceeded 20°C.
What was going on? Elaborate
photoshopping in the service
of climate change denial? An
unexplained microclimate
surrounding 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue? Or yet another attempt
to troll the liberal snowflakes who
supposedly populate the internet?
A detailed examination by
Newsweek revealed that the
White House had simply used
a photo taken a week earlier on
7 January, the actual date of the
first snowfall of 2020.
An easy enough mistake
to make, though perhaps the
administration should consider
buying whoever runs their social
media feed a window. ❚to tell us what it was. Well, maybe
that’s too harsh. We could, at a
pinch, concede that the number
of unexpected political results has
taught us a valuable lesson about
the unpredictability of elections,
and that a much-ridiculed political
candidate with a habit for odd
tweets can still, somehow, be
elected president.
It is with an abundance of relief,
therefore, that Feedback notes
that spiritual adviser Marianne
Williamson has abandoned the
race for the US Democratic Party’s
2020 presidential nomination.
Williamson, we should remind our
less ardently political readers, was
the candidate so widely disparaged
in the mainstream press as – in her
words – a “crystal woo-woo lady”
that she felt obliged to state:
“I’ve never had a crystal, I’ve never
written about crystals. I’ve never
talked about crystals. I’ve never
had a crystal on stage with me.”
This may well be true. But she
is also the candidate who tweeted:
“Let’s see angels surrounding the
nuclear reactors, pouring cold water
over them, keeping radiation from
escaping into the atmosphere” of
the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and
that “A new moon eclipse in Pisces
tonight means huge cosmic forces
make enlightened dreams come
true. Just saying’:)”.
Let’s just say that if she did
have a crystal on stage with her,
we would have happily voted for
it over her. Just saying’:)Some watcher of the skies
They say that social media can
affect a person’s self-esteem,
presenting them with a highlight
reel of everybody else’s life while
skating over the difficulties. That’s
a gross overgeneralisation: regular
media can do that, too. Take the
story covered in The Times last
week of 17-year-old Wolf Cukier.
On his third day at an internship
with NASA, he discovered a
previously unknown exoplanet,
now named TOI-1338b.
That feels like a personal
attack, doesn’t it? His third day.
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[email protected]Twisteddoodles for New Scientist