1 June 2019 | New Scientist | 53The back pages Feedback
Walking dread
Move over product placement: this
season, it’s about planet placement.
The British Academy of Film and
Television Arts – better known as
BAFTA and for hosting awards
ceremonies – has launched an
initiative of that name to improve
the visibility of climate change
on our screens.
BAFTA commissioned research
to establish the frequency with
which environmental terms were
mentioned compared with other
topics in the subtitling of 128,719
UK TV programmes between
September 2017 and September
- Goggle-eyed, Feedback
hopes that this process was at
least partially automated.
In general, the exercise reveals
much about British preoccupations,
with “beer” (21,648 mentions),
“dog” (105,245), “tea” (60,060),
“cake” (46,043), “sex” (56,307)
and “Brexit” (68,816) among the
most frequently uttered words.
“Climate change”, meanwhile,
merited just 3125 mentions, only
just pipping “zombies” at 2488.
The often-comical inaccuracy
of British television subtitling, with
its history of outlandish bloopers
such as rhino porn being the world’s
most valuable commodity, leads
Feedback to question some of the
finer details. However, we, too, are
concerned about climate change
scoring just one notch above the
walking dead. At least zombies
have an excuse: they are famously
never named as such in dramas
and movies about, errrm, zombies.
TV producers concerned about
the screen profile of both zombie
and climate apocalypses could take
a leaf out of George R. R. Martin’s
books. The wild popularity of the
Game of Thrones series adapted
from them doesn’t seem to have
been hurt by featuring both extreme
environmental conditions and
armies of the dead.
Blue-sky research
...and dragons. With Game of
Thrones finally wrapping up, one
girl in New Zealand has turned to
diseases. He has been a vocal critic
of the movement against measles
vaccination in the US, including in
our pages (20 April, p22). Having
accused Hotez on Twitter of being
in the pocket of big pharma,
Stickland was unassuaged by
Hotez’s reply that he didn’t take
money from the vaccine industry.
The congressman told him to
“make the case for your sorcery
to consumers on your own dime”.
Cases of measles continue to
soar in the US, following a record
dip in the number of vaccinated
children that has left millions
unprotected against the potentially
deadly disease. If Stickland’s
opinions are at all representative
of his constituents, subscribers to
the post-Enlightenment order may
wish to steer clear of this part of
the Dallas-Fort Worth conurbation.
Ignorant paranoia looks to be
contagious, and as the Houston
Chronicle put it in a recent cartoon,
there’s no vaccine for that.Ocean view
If you don’t want to know the score,
look away now. Traffic slowed to
a crawl on the Courtney Campbell
Causeway near Tampa, Florida,
when rubberneckers did indeed
divert their gaze... towards a dozen
manatees engaged in a rare
behaviour, known as a mating ball.
It is a case of flippers not slippers,
as females kick off these hotly
contested mating rituals every two
to five years. Feedback assumes
it is this sort of behaviour that led
the US Fish and Wildlife Service in
2017 to reclassify manatees as
merely “threatened”, after decades
on the endangered list.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife
Conservation Commission told
reporters that manatee mating
season runs until November,
and has warned local drivers to
anticipate further delays. Feedback
hopes the mammals don’t suffer
from performance anxiety. ❚higher powers for her fix of the
pyrotechnic reptiles that blaze
a trail through the series. The
11-year-old sent a letter to prime
minister Jacinda Ardern, asking
her to launch a dragon research
programme, and including a
NZ$5 note to get things moving.
The grant proposal also outlined
a side project into telekinesis,
because how else would we
communicate with dragons?
Sadly for the budding scientist,
Ardern returned the five dollars and
declined to open a dragon research
project. While applauding the idea
that politicians should never accept
bribes, however noble the cause,
Feedback is worried that this is
somewhat short-sighted. How can
we say dragons don’t exist if we
aren’t prepared to even look for
them? Physicists who are engaged
in the unsuccessful hunt for dark
matter, for example, have been
making similar arguments for years.
Feedback thinks the unnamed
child might have better luck
petitioning UK politicians to fund
cryptozoology research: after all,
they have spent the past three
years looking for unicorns.Carrier wave
Waiting for his next package, Tim
Robinson has misgivings about
Quantum View, the parcel-tracking
service offered to UPS customers.
“Does that mean my package
might pop in and out of existence,”
he wonders, “or that it might be
delivered in a parallel universe?”
Feedback is uncertain, and thinks
it could be a service that can tell
you when your package is due,
or where it is, but never both.Medicine man
News reaches us of a row in Texas
House District 92, an electoral ward
where state congressman Jonathan
Stickland has accused a respected
vaccine expert of witchcraft.
Peter Hotez is head of the Baylor
College of Medicine National
School of Tropical Medicine in
Houston, where he develops
vaccines to combat neglectedWhat does Liana Finck?
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