56 | New Scientist | 8 January 2022
Look on the buttered side
Andy Bebington intervenes
from Croydon, London, with
a philosophical solution to the
long-standing scientific puzzle
in our Twisteddoodles cartoon
on 4 December 2021: why toast
always lands butter-side down. It
is because we buttered the wrong
side. We await explanation of
how attaching buttered toast to the
back of a falling cat retrocausually
flips right side to wrong side. It is
probably something to do with
quantum theory; it usually is.How low can you go?
Did monkeys really sail the oceans
on floating rafts of vegetation?
we asked in our super soaraway
holiday edition (18/25 December
2021, p 50), answering the question
with a firm “yeah but no but yeah”.Brian Horton of the floating raft
of vegetation that is Tasmania
takes exception, not to that, but
to our description of a riverine
floating island that “covered
an area about the size of two
Olympic swimming pools”.
“Surely everyone knows that
area is measured in football
pitches and swimming pools
are only for volume,” he
fumes. “Please ensure that
the appropriate units are used
in New Scientist articles to
maintain standards.”
We hear you, Brian, while
countering with Malcolm Drury of
Ottawa’s clipping from a CBC News
website article on oil sands tailing
ponds in Alberta with a storage
capacity “the equivalent volume
of more than 560,000 Olympic-
sized swimming pools, which
would stretch from Edmonton to
Melbourne, Australia, and back if
placed end-to-end”. Measurement
standards are clearly slipping – to
lower and lower dimensions.In their element again
Many thanks to those of you
who responded to our appeal for
elemental names from across the
world (11 December 2021). Sergio
Frosini from Genoa, Italy, wins the
prize of a gram of unobtanium in a
virtual tote bag with his list of actors
Franca Rame (copper) and Turi Ferro
(iron), journalist Tito Stagno (tin)
and horror film director Dario
Argento (silver).
Sergio further enriches us by
informing us that Stagno’s principal
claim to fame is as the first person
in the world to announce the
Apollo 11 mission’s touchdown on
the moon – a full 56 seconds before
it happened. Miring ourselves
briefly in the nether regions of the
Italian-speaking web convinces
us that those most liable to
bring up this striking instance of
retrocausality have well-defined
views of the moon landing. Having
seen the grainy footage ourselves,
we are prepared to accept it was
cock-up, not conspiracy. Which is
a pretty good guiding principle for
life, come to think of it. ❚in San Francisco demanding that
the company change its logo.
For a while, we had a similar,
special theory of avian unreality
concerning the implausible, yet
undoubtedly ornamental, pelicans
of St James’s Park in the heart of
London’s government district. We
gave it up on the basis we couldn’t
work out who ordered the poop.
Now, as The New York Times
revealed last month, the general
theory of unreality has been
revealed as a prank dreamed
up to demonstrate the absurdity
of conspiracy theories.
This is all pretty, well, meta. We
are left pondering the truth value
of the statement “this conspiracy
theory is false”. While we do so,
we offer up the fact that, although
birds might exist, fish, reptiles,
worms, wasps, jellyfish and a host
of other things don’t. That isn’t
a conspiracy, it is phylogenetics.Nailed it
Gazing into the alternative reality
featured on the other pages of this
magazine, we have mixed feelings.
That’s a generally valid statement,
but it applies especially to the
metaverse that The Company
Formerly Known As Facebook and
others are building (see page 39).
Or it does until we realise it gives
our influencer franchise a (glittery)
golden opportunity to mention
Metaverse Nails™ (patent pending),
“the only product in the WORLD that
allows you to adorn your digital and
physical self with customisable
holograms”. “Glam wearable tech”
is very much our bag – see our tote?
It’s totes virtual – although our
community service order still stands
after going too far with Gucci’s
virtual clothing line in lockdown
(3 October 2020). Collectible
fashion accessories that interact
with a 3D social app to trigger
a dazzling range of interactive
hologram nail stickers that can be
snapped and shared in real time to
social networks seem a safer bet.
As was reported last year, TCFKAF
might have agreed: shortly after its
metamorphosis in October, it briefly
suspended the Instagram account,
@metaverse, of the driving force
behind Metaverse Nails™ (patent
pending), Thea-Mai Baumann,
for “pretending to be someone
else”. Far be it for us to question
motivations, but if being someone
else isn’t the point of the metaverse,
we aren’t sure what is.Flipping the bird
Feedback is relieved to be
informed by our man in a hide
with a pair of binoculars, Jeff
Hecht, that birds are real. For those
who hadn’t realised there was any
doubt, we urge you to marinate –
but not for too long – in the social
media conspiracy theory that
birds used to be real, but were
replaced by US government spy
drones. The walls of the metaverse
being decidedly porous, this has
seen billboards pop up in major
US cities and a demonstration
outside Twitter’s headquartersGot a story for Feedback?
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