56 | New Scientist | 22 January 2022
The back pages Feedback
Can’t find the words
The Guardian reports rage and
distress at copycat app versions
of the online word game Wordle
that assault the original’s innocent
ethos of freedom from both
charge and data hoovering. For
those who haven’t yet fallen down
this rabbit hole, Wordle confronts
its players with a blank series of
five letters to fill in, giving them
six attempts to arrive at the actual
five-letter word that the computer
was thinking of, once told whether
their letters appear in that word.
As Fields medal-winning
mathematician Tim Gowers has
highlighted, this gamifies entropy
in an information theory sense,
as the information required to
specify a given object. This makes
it Solid Science, but Feedback has
now fallen down the rabbit hole at
the bottom of the rabbit hole withSweardle, a game that does the
same thing with a more limited
set of four-letter words, and
Letterle, which gives a maximum
of 26 goes to guess a single letter.
We know all of this is contributing
to the heat death of the universe,
but we can’t stop now.Tin lid on it
Of which, many thanks to those
of you who wrote in varying degrees
of delight and distress over our
fiendishly difficult holiday word
search featuring the names of all
the known fundamental particles,
the chemical elements and the
amino acids that make up life’s
proteins (18/25 December 2021,
p 43). We are treating it as a
slow-burning abvent calendar –
a term we just invented, and we
expect letters about – finding one
a day as Christmas recedes.
For those of you whose year is off
to an even slower start, we forward
Bob Ladd’s query, which we take as
expressing both delight and distress,
asking how you might design the
same word search with no accidental
instances of TIN – apart from those
required in TIN and ASTATINE, say.
That sounds like a case for the
entropy theory of information to
us. And in response to Mike Clark’s
query, we don’t know whether it is
SULPHUR or SULFUR yet, either.Whale units
Still in holiday mode, Harry
Lagoussis writes from Athens
concerning our statement that
a lump of ambergris, or ancient
whale poo, the size of a human
head “could fetch you £50,000 or
more” (18/25 December 2021, p 56).
“Does that make the ‘shithead’
the standard unit of ambergris
volume? And, perhaps more
importantly, if 1 shithead =
£50,000, does that justify the
use of the selfsame unit when
discussing the global financial
system, celebrity net worth etc.?”
he asks. At a punt, it’s no and no,
but we will ask our ever-vigilant
subeditors. And with that, we
tiptoe out of the room. ❚correspondent Alice Klein provides
an addendum to our item last week
about alcoholic overindulgence in
the animal kingdom with the story
of Broome Veterinary Hospital in
Kimberley, Australia, which ABC
News reported in December was
treating a spate of red-winged
parrots apparently boozed up
on fermenting mangoes.
As Michael Considine, a
biologist at the University of
Western Australia, pointed out,
volatile compounds released by
the fermentation of fallen mangoes
attract the birds, encouraging them
to propagate the plant’s seeds –
even if, by whumping into windows,
falling over and generally sitting
around dazed and vulnerable to
predators, the parrots’ own chances
of survival aren’t exactly enhanced.
Evolution in the raw, and a
reminder to the rest of us not
to drink and fly.Guess the planet
Feedback has always been mildly
sceptical of, not to say narked by,
requests to click on pictures of
bicycles and fire hydrants to prove
we aren’t a robot. True, no one has
ever seen an algorithm riding a
bicycle, but when the shape-shifting
terminator bots finally arrive, they
will probably take on innocent
forms such as fire hydrants. It
might take one to know one.
At least they won’t be able
to get social security benefits in
Spain. Genís Cardona from Solsona,
Catalonia, reports accessing an
official Spanish government portal
for tax and welfare services and
being requested to answer a quiz
question: “Which of the following
is a planet? A. Banana; B. Pluto;
C. Scissors; D. Bee”.
A decade and a half on, Pluto’s
controversial demotion from
planethood clearly still rankles
in some quarters. Like Genís, we
appreciate the spirit of this open
defiance of the International
Astronomical Union’s edicts. Come
to think of it, though, does anyone
know which side the robots are on?Flipping bird
Our mention of “New Zealand’s
most annoying tūī” (1 January)
prompts Matthew Arozian to
write from Baltimore, Maryland,
with the heartfelt insight that
the Carolina wren – Thryothorus
ludovicianus, we savour on our
tongue – weighs approximately
18 to 22 grams yet produces calls
that can reach 110 decibels.
He asks us to imagine the
cacophonous circus of a brood
being taught to fly just outside
his home-office window. We close
our eyes, rapidly open them again
and sympathise. Mind you, the
transcendent benefits for our
well-being of being within and
bonded to nature are well known,
Matthew. Call it home delivery.Polly the pickled parrot
Staying with our feathered
frenemies, our AustralasiaGot 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