56 | New Scientist | 11 June 2022
the arrival of covid-19. Gustatory
mischief-makers Bompas and
Parr (more usually found mixing
transformative cocktails) have
released a follow-up to Salute to
Puke, their wipe-clean (no, really)
anthology of anecdotes drawing our
attention towards one of the surer
indicators that urban nightlife is
recovering – what Feedback, with
customary daintiness, will call the
urban traces of a good night out.
In the pages of The Atlantic,
standards of social etiquette
are far higher. Witness the
exhaustive algorithm design that
mathematician Daniel Biss has
brought to his recently featured
“What Time to Arrive At a Party
Calculator”. Answer some simple
questions about yourself, your
peer group and your upcoming
event, and Biss’s calculator will
ensure you arrive to catch the
funniest stories and meet thebest people. Feedback is dusting
off its party clothes now.Buzzing off
According to a recent decision
by the California Court of Appeal,
bumblebees are fish. This isn’t as
unlikely as it may seem, given the
California Fish and Game Code
decided (for the purposes of an
admirable brevity) that the
definition “fish” included any
“mollusk, crustacean, invertebrate
(or) amphibian”, be it terrestrial
or aquatic. If it looks like a fish and
it swims like a fish, then it’s a fish;
also when it doesn’t.
Poor Linnaeus must be
spinning in his grave. Also likely
to be unhappy at the outcome is
the Almond Alliance of California,
which argued that insects have no
legal protection in the state, even
when endangered. Is it a mixed
metaphor too far to suggest the
alliance now has egg on its face?Judge not
No sooner did reader Philippa
Sandall call for a means to describe
people who expound on matters
from a position of ignorance
(4 June), than our friend Anthony
Tasgal leapt into the fray with
“ultracrepidarian”.
According to Pliny the Elder, in the
4th century BC, the painter Apelles
of Kos invented the customer
survey. Hidden behind his paintings,
he would listen to the comments of
potential customers. After a passing
cobbler remarked on a figure’s poorly
rendered sandal, Apelles made
amendments. The cobbler passed
by again and complained about the
figure’s leg. Apelles realised what
a horror he had visited upon the
world, and snarled: “Ne sutor ultra
crepidam iudicaret” (a cobbler
shouldn’t judge beyond the shoe).
In 1819, William Hazlitt coined
the word “ultracrepidarian” to
tick off critic William Gifford for
his cluelessness.
Crouched in the shadows behind
60-plus years of back copies of New
Scientist, Feedback welcomes all
comments and observations. ❚European Space Agency astronaut
Thomas Pesquet talk to Schmid
and De La Pena as though they
were actually on the station.
VR wheezes are all very well,
but on NASA’s news page, Schmid
said “it is a brand-new way of
human exploration”. He goes on
to explain how “our human entity
is able to travel off the planet. Our
physical body is not there, but our
human entity absolutely is there.”
Feedback feels this is a sentiment
worthy of the goofier end of
Thomas Mann’s notoriously
ambiguous The Magic Mountain.
More prosaically, the aim is to
bring VIPs onto the space station
to visit astronauts. That should
brighten Pesquet’s day.Modern manners
Another day, another fractional
adjustment to the world afterDinner by moonlight
Around a tenth of the 21.5
kilograms of moon rock the Apollo
11 astronauts brought back to
Earth on 24 July 1969 ended up as
food. In Building 37, at what is now
known as NASA’s Johnson Space
Center in Houston, Texas, it was
ground up and fed to various
microbes, insects and aquatic
animals. Would they sicken or die?
Would they acquire strange powers?
Eight cockroaches were among
the diners, and Feedback is now
digging through the penny jar in a
frantic attempt to raise enough to
bid for the traces of their meal. Three
of the insects have already reached
over $21,000 on the web page of
RR Auction, a Massachusetts firm
specialising in space memorabilia.
NASA had sent a vial containing
the pickled cockroaches to Marion
Brooks-Wallace, an entomologist at
the University of Minnesota. Brooks
dissected them, looking to see if
the moon rock had done them
any damage (it hadn’t). On her
retirement, she hung the stuff of her
study in a display case on her wall.
And there the story would end,
except that, according to RR Auction,
“The original vial of extracted
material was broken, spilling its
contents into the display... The
ground fines and glass shards
were then meticulously separated
into two larger glass vials.”
Eight cockroaches. A meal of
moon dust. A broken phial. And an
auction lot of three cockroaches?
Feedback believes there are many
worse screenplay ideas and is even
now downloading Final Cut.Orbital entities
Having done all it could to ensure
outer space is free of moon dust-
munching bugs, you would think
NASA would want to keep the
place free of ghosts. But no: on
8 October 2021, Josef Schmid, a
NASA flight surgeon, shimmered
into existence on the International
Space Station alongside Fernando
De La Pena Llaca, CEO of Aexa
Aerospace. Aexa wrote the
software that let orbitingGot a story for Feedback?
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