56 | New Scientist | 29 January 2022
veneration of the feline form
beyond even that familiar from
ancient Egypt. Ken Hawkins
wonders whether it was discovered
using a CAT scan, a line that we will
file under “timeless”.Fine words, buttered
Talking of which, Feedback had
considered correspondence closed
on the age-old conundrum of why
toast lands buttered-side down –
except perhaps when its polarity
is reversed by being attached to the
back of a falling cat. Not so, judging
by our post since its reappearance
in our Twisteddoodles cartoon on
4 December last year.
”Howdy Dr Feedback,” booms
one missive from Heikki
Henttonen in Espoo, Finland –
a city where we seem to have
quite a following, judging by
our postbag – exhibiting bothforthright charm and a suitable
(and entirely justified) faith in
our academic qualification.
“How to make sure that your toast
lands butter-side up,” he writes
succinctly. “You should butter
your toast on both sides.”
Sensible advice. Although we
shouldn’t be at all surprised if a
double-buttered slice would never
hit the floor, but instead remain
suspended slightly above it,
permanently rotating, unsure of
which way up to land. You might
call that a physics-violating
perpetual motion machine;
we just call it resonance.The universe against us
The last word on the toast thing –
until the next one – goes to our
mathematics guru Ian Stewart
at the University of Warwick, UK.
“As regards toast landing butter
side down, you might be interested
in the article ‘Tumbling toast,
Murphy’s Law and the fundamental
constants’ by Robert Matthews in
European Journal of Physics 16
(1995) 172-176,” he writes.
We most certainly would, since it
contains the results of a model that
applies Newton’s laws of motion
with realistic parameters for the
height of intelligent bipeds, the
height of the tables they use and
the nature of their toast to conclude
that, if a slice of toast starts sitting
butter-side up on a table, it will
rotate more than 180 degrees
but less than 360 degrees for any
reasonable value for the initial speed
at which it is nudged off, thus almost
always landing buttered-side down.
Further expressing the relations
in terms of eight fundamental
constants, including the
gravitational and electromagnetic
fine-structure constants and
the Bohr radius, leads to a stark
conclusion: in any universe that
supports intelligent bipeds, toast
will almost always fall buttered-
side down. “This is the opposite
of cosmological fine tuning: there
is no way to fine-tune a universe
to prevent this outcome,” Ian writes.
“I call this the Anthropomurphic
Principle.” Also timeless. ❚heart”. We are unsure whether it is
the message itself that he expects
to give us the vapours, or the fact
that the chair of the World Heart
Federation advocacy committee
that released the report is Beatriz
Champagne. No cause for
celebration either way.Pussy galore
Our news report “Ancient Egyptians
used bandages for medicine too”
(15 January, p 20) caused ripples
in our inbox. For Ian Gammie, it
was our assertion that “until now,
Egyptologists hadn’t found
bandages used to dress the wounds
of living ancient Egyptians”. As he
points out, living ancient Egyptians
are hard to come by these days.
Others were more exercised by
the mention of a dressing placed
over a “puss-filled wound”. This
seems to imply a degree ofNo-vax’s good vibrations
“If you wish to understand the
Universe, think of energy, frequency
and vibration.” This quote,
attributed to the visionary electrical
engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla,
possibly in his distinctly odd late
phase, has long been beloved of
those with a vibrantly different
understanding of the universe.
Feedback hesitates to use the
word “fruitloopery”, particularly as
we now encounter the quote on the
website of QuantBioRes, a company
whose blameless existence
investigating alternative treatments
for covid-19 has recently been
disturbed by the revelation that
its majority shareholder is world
men’s tennis no. 1 and vaccine
refusenik Novak Djokovic.
“At QuantBioRes, we work in
utilizing unique and novel Resonant
Recognition Model (RRM),” we
read on the company’s website.
“The RRM is a biophysical model
based on findings that certain
periodicities/frequencies within
the distribution of energies of
free electrons along the protein
are critical for protein biological
function and interaction with
protein receptors and other targets.”
Following the paper trail a little
further, we discover that, in the case
of covid-19, the crucial frequency
is 0.3145. We aren’t entirely sure
what units that is in for those
inclined to try it at home. Sadly,
clicking what we hoped were links
to a battery of exciting tests already
performed produces no vibration
on the internet’s surface, so we are
left none the wiser as to progress.
These things can take time.
In the meantime, we point to
the existence of highly effective
vaccines, whatever your resonant
frequency may be.Champagne’s moment
David Myers writes from the
shores of Lake Geneva in
Switzerland – nice work if you can
get it – asking us to sit down as we
imbibe the revelation contained
in an article from CNN that “No
amount of alcohol is good for theGot a story for Feedback?
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