56 | New Scientist | 5 March 2022
Canada, sent in by Doug Thomson.
A clean-up after storms there in
January required the removal of
“145,000 tonnes of snow — about
20,000 large, frozen elephants
worth”. We can only imagine the
difficulties of dealing with these
homesick and discomfited beasts.
The icing on the elephants clearly
adds something to their weight,
as we conventionally take an
adult male African bush elephant
to weigh about 6 tonnes.
Even as we hear calls for a
standard prototype elephant kept
under glass somewhere growing
louder, news reaches us of a
breakaway movement in New
South Wales, Australia. Many of
you highlight news of the seizure of
9.7 hectares’ worth of illicitly grown
tobacco at Koraleigh “weighing
the equivalent of 13 bulldozers”.
How many bulldozers of tobacco
fit into Sydney Harbour, we wonder.Meanwhile, Brian Horton consults
the delightful website “What
Things Weigh” to find bulldozers
range from a baby 8 (good old
non-metric) tons to a fully grown
180 tons. Suffice to say, the amount
of tobacco seized at Koraleigh was
some 42 standard elephants.His mummy’s voice
The interwebs have delighted
themselves recently at a story first
reported by New Scientist in 2020,
that researchers have recreated
the voice of an Egyptian mummy
held at Leeds City Museum, UK.
The experience is slightly hard
to reproduce on the printed page,
but oddly, in some of the clips now
circulating, the mummy is clearly
saying “UUUUGRHH”, whereas
two years ago it was a far more
refined “EEEEERGH”. Mummies
could presumably have made
more than one sound, says a
colleague – not unreasonably,
with the qualification “when alive”.
“This is the replication crisis writ
large,” says another, damningly.Vive la résistance!
Much as we try to stop buttered
toast falling on our pages, right
side up or no, still it rains down.
But we are in a philosophical
frame of mind, so we are grateful
to J. Feralco for the reminder of a
corollary to Murphy’s Law, first
established by humorist Paul
Jennings in the 1940s: “The chance
of the bread falling with the buttered
side down is directly proportional
to the cost of the carpet.”
This came as part of his Report
on Resistentialism, a school of
philosophy encapsulated by the
phrase “Les choses sont contre
nous” – “things are against us” –
established on Paris’s Left Bank
by “bespectacled, betrousered,
two-eyed” thinker Pierre-Marie
Ventre. Resistentialism holds that
there are limits to the sway humans
can hold in a world of largely
hostile, uncooperative things. It
is worth rummaging around for
the whole essay online as a parable
for These Uncertain Times. ❚Sweet, if of its time. Following our
musings on how old the internet
thinks you can be (26 February),
at 180, we may have found our
oldest contributor.Standard elephants
Metrologists at the International
Bureau of Weights and Measures
in Paris may still be basking in
the replacement, in 2019, of the
international prototype kilogram –
a platinum-iridium hulk that would
feel exactly like 1 kilogram if
dropped on your foot – by a
fancy-schmantzy definition in
terms of various physical constants.
But as regular Feedback readers
know, they are missing the...
in the room. The elephant is
well-established as the actual
international standard unit of mass.
Proof positive, a report from
The Hamilton Spectator in Ontario,The order of not things
Cambridge – of Cambridgeshire,
not Massachusetts, before anyone
jumps in – is famed as the academic
home of Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore,
three philosophers who did much
to elucidate, not to say obfuscate,
language, logic and meaning. It is
very much in their spirit, we assume,
that Cambridge City Council recently
advertised an extra rubbish bin
collection following staff absences,
stating “bins will be collected in the
order in which they were previously
not collected”.
“Is it quantum mechanics
then that enables us to determine
the order in which things don’t
happen?” asks Alison Litherland,
we imagine hovering indecisively
over her bins. Quite possibly. Our
starting point must be the following
question: if a bin isn’t collected,
but no one sees it not collected,
has it been not collected at all?
In purely practical terms, the only
way of finding out is by looking in the
bin, making this a particularly pure
instantiation of Erwin Schrödinger’s
cat paradox. Maybe Schrödinger’s
trash didn’t have quite the same
ring to it. As far as your problem
goes, Alison, we fear that repeated
measurement of identical bins may
allow you to build up a picture of
when it wasn’t collected, but this
will only have statistical validity.Poet didn’t know it
Feedback is delighted to find,
while searching for something
else, that the physicist James
Clerk Maxwell (died 1879) is
listed as an author on the New
Scientist website (born circa 1996).
Further investigation reveals
a series of poems published by
Maxwell in these pages in 2011.
We are somewhat lacking context,
but his Valentine By a Telegraph
Clerk (Male) to a Telegraph Clerk
(Female) bears rereading, with its
culminating verse: “Through many
a volt the weber flew,/And clicked
this answer back to me;/I am thy
farad staunch and true,/Charged
to a volt with love for thee.”Got a story for Feedback?
Send it to [email protected] or New Scientist,
Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT
Consideration of items sent in the post will be delayedTwisteddoodles for New Scientist
The back pages Feedback