Feedback–

REMEMBER when the joke was that on the internet, no one knows you’re a dog? Perhaps that should now be changed to: no one knows for sure if you’re a raving loon. We keep stumbling upon and puzzling over web pages like www.americanchronicle.com/articles/66764 – which reports that the US government secretly holds the fossilised remains of a flying saucer that crashed 150 million years ago, complete with the decomposed remains of its alien pilots.

That might make an interesting science fiction tale, but it’s written as a news story, and it’s not on a tongue-in-cheek website like Weekly World News . It’s on a site called American Chronicle, which publishes a blendof news and the writings of unpaid columnists. Is it a hoax, the product of someone with too much time on their hands, the ramblings of a conspiracy theorist, sheer madness, or a meta-conspiracy to distract us all from the vital “Face on Mars” question?

How can we tell? Not having too much time on our hands, we leave this as an exercise for the reader.

UNPACKING his new printer, Rob Bogue encountered a packet bearing a warning beginning with the familiar “May contain…” No, not traces of nuts. It was:

“products from Switzerland”. Feedback is as puzzled as Rob over how to take this news: “How would I know – and what should I do?” he asks.

“THE average termite eats 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” according to a TV ad for insect-control services seen by Jim Shilliday. He was impressed, and points out that since no termite could ever eat more than 24/7, it follows that no termites eat less, as this would reduce the average.

He says this could be good news, because if all termites eat all the time, they can have no time left over for sex – in which case there will be no need to call in the insect control services.

LAWYERS, Feedback suspects, have been at work on the web page www.recolight.co.uk/go/recycling, where it is written: “Eye protection and gloves should be worn during lamp changing or handling… Placing [the lamps] in a suitable container protecting them from accidental mechanical breakage or scratching, will avoid glass fracture and possible ejected fragments.” Jan Rockett is sceptical of the need for this advice. He asks: “When one of their own house bulbs goes, do they rush for the goggles?” And they don’t even remind us not to stick our fingers in the socket.

FURTHER exploration of the legal niceties of eco-friendly lighting took Jan Rockett to the terms and conditions on www.biggreenswitch.co.uk, a site set up by Northcliffe, owners of London’s Daily Mail and many other newspapers. Apparently they’re going to solicit user comments, and it looks like they’ve got lawyers too.

The site declares: “By submitting any material to us, you: automatically grant us a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable licence to use, reproduce, modify, edit, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such material (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed for the full term of any rights that may exist in such content.” So your words are utterly and completely all theirs.

Professional contributors to printed publications – including this one – expect this sort of thing, but we’ve

never come across it before in a blog.The stinger for would-be green

switchers may, however, be the next bit: you also “waive all your moral rights in such materials”. In English, that means they can change your writing in any way they want and use it without credit, and you have no comeback. Or, as they may prefer to say, they can “recycle” it in their newspapers.

SPAM filters have a drawback in that you can never be sure they aren’t blocking real messages. Fergal Dalton’s workplace recently started using the Ironport anti-spam software, which sends a daily report of all the email it has blocked – so he can spend time double-checking the list. He was quite pleased when he discovered that the spam filter had started blocking its own daily reports, and he’s fully confident that it’s doing all the double-checking for him before it rejects itself.

FINALLY – if not at the end of civilisation itself – we thank R. J. Driscoll for providing Feedback’s award for probably true but quite sickening research paper title of the week. In 2005, on the 50th anniversary of the test of the first Soviet two-stage thermonuclear bomb, the journal Physics-Uspekhi (vol 48, p 1187) published G. A. Goncharov’s opus: “The extraordinarily beautiful physical principle of the thermonuclear charge design”.

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A brochure for a research symposium at the University of Maryland states: “Please note: We’ve gone paperless.” Mike Adams was left wondering what he was holding

72 | NewScientist | 19 July 2008 www.newscientist.com

PAUL

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EVIT

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