18 July 2020 | New Scientist | 55The back pages Feedback
Going forward
Feedback is always grateful
to readers who take the time to
write in, but this week we give
our particularly heartfelt thanks
to Robert Pleming. Much to our
delight, he discovered a competition
run in this very column back in
1993, wherein we challenged
readers to imagine what the
world would look like in 2020 –
27 years thence.
As with all imaginings of the
future, the clipping he has sent
in is deeply redolent of its time.
It imagines a 2020 where the
National Enquirer is still obsessed
with the allegedly late Elvis Presley,
Euro-Disney is a hot new attraction
and the scientific status of global
warming remains uncertain.
In other ways, though, it is
scarily on the money. Take this
entry, for example, meant to capture
the goings-on of April 2020: “The
virtual office arrives. Office staff no
longer have to leave the home to
work. Donning a virtual reality suit,
they can attend their office, interact
with their colleagues and retain
social contact.”
We don’t know about you, but
that reflects Feedback’s April to a
tee. Apart from the virtual reality
suit, of course. We’ve spent most
of the year so far in our pyjamas.
All of the predictions can
be found on the New Scientist
website in the issues of 18 and
25 September 1993, and they make
for terrific reading. If any readers
with similarly long memories dig
up other predictions that Feedback
once made for the future, do please
bring them to our attention.Motion sickness
Every year, as regular Feedback
readers will be aware, the Annals
of Improbable Research magazine
awards the IgNobel prizes as a wry
counterpoint to the annual Nobel
bonanza in Stockholm.
In 2005, the IgNobel prize for
fluid dynamics was awarded to
Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow and
Jozsef Gal for – and we quote the
contemporary New ScientistTranslating this into human terms,
the researchers calculate that a
person with the same rectal
pressure could projectile poop a
distance of 3.13 metres. “He/she
should not use usual rest rooms,”
they point out. We would say not.Love in a cold climate
Staying with penguins – bit nippy
in here, isn’t it? – Twitter teaches us
this week that the Kyoto aquarium
in Japan has a flowchart on display
to represent the former and existing
relationships between its current
penguin occupants.
The image’s scale and complexity
remind us why we never stuck with
graph theory. It resembles nothing
more than the allegedly helpful
family trees to be found in the
opening pages of great Russian
novels, laying out which of the
two Vladimir Trofimoviches is thewealthy cousin of the Duchess
Alexandra and which is the violent
deserter hell-bent on revenge for
the devaluation of the rouble.Nick names
A few weeks ago, Feedback raised a
sceptical eyebrow as to the alleged
existence of a police station on
the aptly named “Letsby Avenue”.
Rab Scott writes in to silence
our doubts with a screenshot of
Sheffield’s South Yorkshire Police
Operations Complex (postcode
S9 1XX, for them that’s counting),
located between Europa Link
and – of course – Letsby Avenue.
It’s a fair cop, Rab, thank you for
the clarification.
A debt of gratitude is also owed
to Stuart Arnold, who informs us
that the Cambridgeshire town in
which he grew up once had a police
station on Pig Lane. “The situation
didn’t last for long however,” says
Stuart, “as the spoilsports renamed
the part of Pig Lane where the
police station was ‘Broad Leas’ ”.Going backward
Having opened the floodgates to
your frustrations about misused
language, it is only fair that we
bail the floodwater out again in
your general direction. The phrase
getting on multiple people’s goats
this week is “going forward”. Chris
Rundle succinctly describes it as
“a ridiculously overemployed
alternative to ‘in the future’ ”.
Meanwhile, “it has not escaped
my notice that ‘forward’ is the
only direction one can go in a
temporal sense”, says Alan Laird.
“Going sideways or up or down
just hurts my head!”
We feel your collective pain,
goat-havers of the Feedback
community. We promise that
going forward – or, rather, over the
inevitably contiguous increments
of monodirectional time currently
bearing down on us – this phrase
shall not appear in any of our
content verticals. Thanks to
all of you for reaching out. ❚Written by Gilead Amitarticle on the topic –
“a theoretical analysis of penguin
poop propulsion”. The work in
question, however, didn’t delve
sufficiently deeply into the
subject for the tastes of two other
researchers. Earlier this month,
Hiroyuki Tajima and Fumiya
Fujisawa uploaded a paper to
the arXiv preprint server in which
they point out that Meyer-Rochow
and Gal neglected to consider the
arcing trajectory of a penguin’s
motions, satisfying themselves
exclusively with the horizontal
component of said motions’,
well, motion.
Redoing the calculations,
while also taking into account
Bernoulli’s theorem and viscosity
corrections via the Hagen-
Poiseuille equation, they come up
with a penguin rectal pressure of
28.2 kilopascals. This is 40 per cent
greater than previously measured.Got a story for Feedback?
Send it to [email protected] or
New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street, London WC2E 9ES
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