56 | New Scientist | 11 December 2021
while not activating noisy
bathroom fans. “I think they
are an energy and sleep saving
triumph and more people should
give them a try,” he says. Right of
reply granted, Graeme – we aren’t
entirely convinced, but we are at
least going through the motions.In their element
Ilpo Salonen writes in from
Espoo, Finland, deploring the lack
in our pages of late of a certain
deterministic name phenomenon we
shall not name. It being December
and the season of goodwill, we
hold back from sending the usual
cease-and-desist letter. Especially
as, by way of compensation for
our oversight, Ilpo points us to the
existence of a now sadly retired
science correspondent at the
Finnish Broadcasting Company,
Yleisradio Oy, called Maija Typpi.That’s Mary Nitrogen to her
English fans. It is fair to say we are
enjoying rolling these departures
from Indo-European word roots
around our tongue. We also find
naming people after chemical
elements, rather than the other way
round, a fun excursion. Although
by no means a unique one, come
to think of it. The computer scientist
Stephen Wolfram is a reminder
of why there is a W in the periodic
table, although no element officially
beginning with W. We welcome
other examples of elementary
names from across the globe to
enrich our cultural experience.While we’re there...
The former captain of the Geneva
firefighting force was Marc
Feuardent (or Captain Strong Fire),
there is a BBC wildlife documentary
producer called Giles Badger and
a 2004 paper in the IEEE Journal of
Oceanic Engineering was “Structure
and mechanics of nonpiscine
control surfaces” by Frank E. Fish.
We are mentioning these purely
on the principle of not fouling our
own nest. Or, as the French say,
don’t piscine the...All aflutter
Moving swiftly onwards, backwards
and almost undoubtedly inwards
to black holes, Jon Sparks raises
suspicions that we are now trying
to generate our own column inches
with a choice experiential unit.
He notes that our colleague Leah
Crane, discussing the supermassive
black hole at the centre of our
galaxy in her Launchpad newsletter,
writes “Sagittarius A* is more
than 4 million times as massive
as the sun. An NBA basketball has
a mass of 0.62 kilograms. So if
Sagittarius A* had the mass of a
basketball, the sun’s mass would
be 0.16 milligrams – about the
average mass of two eyelashes.”
Eye-watering. The thing is, Jon,
you might have been wondering
about the eyelash thing, but while
everyone was distracted by the
basketball, a gorilla waltzed across
the back of the page. ❚per kilowatt-hour of electricity
generated. That should have been
235 grams. We apologise for the
rather large error.”
Indeed, fifteen orders of
magnitude large. Our schadenfreude
is tempered with a healthy dose of
“there but for the grace...”. With
weary experience, we call into being
the journalistic version of the gorilla
effect, where you don’t see the big
thing because you are too busy
concentrating on the small things.Motions in the dark
Balance being another great
journalistic trait, we are compelled
to give space to Graeme Flint, who
professes no financial interest in
the matter, but writes in defence
of motion-sensor toilet bowl lights
(27 November). He points out that
they enable you to do night-time
business in low-light conditionsAncient aromas
It can sometimes get a little – what’s
the word – ”close” in Feedback’s
stationery cupboard cave. It is to
this that we attribute a colleague
advancing with pegged nose,
thrusting our way on a pair of tongs
an advert for the perfume line
“Neandertal® for modern human”.
“This pair of fragrances take us
on an olfactory journey deep into
humanity’s past giving voice to a
lost civilisation whose DNA lives
on today only through ourselves,
while also celebrating the future
they were never able to see,” we
read among very many other words,
not all of which necessarily make
much sense to us. “The results are
contemporary, highly original, and
experimental fragrance structures,
free from conventional and
traditional perfumery standards.”
”With notes of BO and tooth
decay?” a colleague asks, unkindly.
Foliage, ginger, pink pepper,
grapefruit and pine, apparently.A temporary blimp
Keith Macpherson from Somerset,
UK, reports being informed by
DHL of the imminent arrival of a
parcel with a weight of 1 kilogram
and a volume of 32,884 cubic
metres and wondering who
ordered a blimp. He later found
this corrected to a weight of 1 kg,
but a volume of 0 cubic metres,
and wondered who had ordered
a black hole singularity. “My
daughter asked if we had been
given a delivery window. My son
replied no, an event horizon,”
Keith reports – proof that,
whatever it was that eventually
arrived in Somerset, the dad joke
seems safe for another generation.Gorilla journalism
Many thanks to the many of you
who allowed yourselves – and
us – a chuckle at an erratum in a
recent edition of The Economist:
“Correction: Last week, in a chart
accompanying a piece on nuclear
power, we said Britain produced
235 gigatonnes of carbon dioxideGot a story for Feedback?
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