15 June 2019 | New Scientist | 53The back pages Feedback
State nanny
The Children’s Commissioner for
England, responsible for protecting
the rights of the little ’uns, is
unhappy with big tech firms
that insist they can’t block
under-13s from their platforms.
“Can it really be the case that
they can create driverless cars, see
inside black holes and programme
computers to beat the best human
players of complex games like
Go, but not find ways of making
digital platforms fit for purpose
for children?” wrote Anne Longfield
in The Daily Telegraph. “Of course
not. And for the record, I’ve been
reassured that it is all very possible.”
There is a lot to unpick here.
We are surprised to learn that the
likes of Instagram have beaten the
world’s astrophysicists to peering
inside a black hole – is there no
magic that a photo filter can’t work?
They should say immediately what
they found there. Hopes, dreams,
a sense of self-worth slowly eroded
by mind-numbing hours swiping
through pictures from the perfect
lives of others on their platforms?
But most of all we are keen to
know who verified to Longfield that
age verification is “very possible”,
and what their experience is of
the low cunning of the pre-teen.
Clapped in irons
“Isn’t it ironic,” Canadian-
American singer-songwriter
Alanis Morissette once wrote and
sang about, among other things,
“ten thousand spoons when all
you need is a knife”. Not so
much ironic, thinks Feedback;
more an alarming sign of
incipient kleptomania.
Or perhaps Uri Geller is in the
’hood. The self-proclaimed psychic
and cutlery bender has tweeted a
video showing stacked boxes of
spoons, telling his followers: “Our
target is to amass ONE MILLION
spoons from all over the world
from kids! Spoons for peace!!!”
It isn’t immediately clear how
an impressively stocked cutlery
drawer will deliver peace, but
Geller moves in mysterious ways.
become “liberty stones”, perhaps,
or tar sands “democracy sludge”.
The same principle in reverse
could apply to alternative energy
sources. Wind power? Commie
fans. Solar cells? Terror cells, more
like. Remember: if you drive an
electric vehicle, the bad guys win.Axes of evil
Staying in the US, officials have
come up with a clever way to
alleviate those doom-laden
climate predictions. The head of the
US Geological Survey, James Reilly,
has directed that climate models
look only 20 years into the future,
rather than until the end of the
century as was previously the norm.
As a service to the scientifically
unscrupulous, Feedback has some
other useful ways, besides lopping
off the end of the x-axis, to make
your climate charts less scary.- That temperature chart going up
too fast towards the end? Just make
the y-axis logarithmic. Boom! Bye
bye hockey stick, hello pool cue.- Carbon dioxide levels are
measured in parts per million, or
ppm if you must. So it is only right
that the y-axis starts at zero and
ends at 1 million, right? Huzzah:
440 ppm doesn’t look so scary now. - Sea level rises should be
expressed only as a per cent
increase in total ocean depth.
Nothing in it, is there?
With these tips and more, you can
rest assured that it will be business
as usual – at least until the US
Capitol is demolished by the last
iceberg to float out of the Arctic.
Ghost in the machine
A recent article on making your
own electrical gizmos by Hannah
Joshua (4 May, p 51) reminds Mike
Egan that all electrical devices work
by smoke. How so? “Proof ”, he
says, “is that when the smoke
comes out, they stop working.” ❚In April, he claimed responsibility
for a burst water pipe that flooded
the House of Commons, saying
it was an attempt to stop the UK
government’s pursuit of Brexit.
Perhaps the spoon collection
is part of a dastardly next stage,
disorienting the British political
elite still further by depriving
them of essential tea-making
equipment. For the wider goal
of world peace, however, Feedback
worries that the kids will be too
busy evading age-verification
schemes on the internet to
donate their spoons. Ironic.By any other name...
Our nominative determinism
garden keeps blooming. Dominic
Driver alerts us to the Highlands and
Islands Woodland Handbook, which
bills itself as “a comprehensive
guide to establishing, managing
and utilising woodland” in the
north of Scotland. Its author
is one Bernard Planterose.
Meanwhile, a colleague reports
the arrival of an unsolicited email
from one Ben Pester of Pester PR,
“although just the one, so far”.Fuelling democracy
Can you bottle a feeling? How
about an ideal? A patriotic
employee at the US Department
of Energy renamed natural gas as
“molecules of US freedom” in a
press release celebrating increased
future exports from the Freeport
LNG terminal on Quintana Island,
Texas. This conjured up more
than a whiff of “freedom fries”.
Those sticks of deep-fried
potato were briefly served in
Congressional cafeterias in 2003
in place of the Gallic variety, in
protest against the refusal of
France to support an invasion
of Iraq. Going further back,
some may even recall that when
anti-German sentiment reigned
during the second world war,
sauerkraut in the US briefly
became “liberty cabbage”.
But how else might US energy
exports be rebranded to win
hearts and minds? Coal couldWhat does Liana Finck?
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