FEEDBACK

64 | NewScientist | 22 August 2009

For more feedback, visit www.NewScientist.com/feedback

WANTING to travel from Great Britain to Ireland, Geoff Steedman looked up routes online. He was offered a route involving a ferry from Holyhead in Wales to “Dublin Ferry Port” – a location with which he was not familiar. Helpfully, the National Rail website he was using offers maps of the locations served.

Geoff clicked. He was presented with the railways’ double-arrow logo in the middle of a plain blue rectangle. Zooming out – a long way – he discovered that the National Rail computer holds the belief that Dublin Ferry Port is roughly 1000 kilometres due south of Accra, Ghana. That puts it somewhere out in the south Atlantic Ocean. If you get there before they read this, you can check via www.DLmap.notlong.com.

Perhaps the sudden appearance of “Dublin Ferry Port” stemmed from a desire to avoid explaining

Friends of the Earth sent Magnus Alexander a monthly Enews bulletin headed “Demand climate change”. But, he says, “I liked things how they used to be”

how to pronounce Dún Laoghaire, the proper name of the ancient town a dozen kilometres south-east of Dublin where the port was and, despite National Rail’s map, remains. (In the mouths of “the plain people of Ireland”, to use a catchphrase of the town’s funniest inhabitant, the late Flann O’Brien, it is pronounced “dun-leerie”.) The great and densely referential work Ulysses opens in this very spot, and James Joyce was, townspeople say, inspired by the ships venturing out across their wine-dark sea. Was National Rail in turn inspired by a coded reference to the south Atlantic somewhere in the book?

Lacking time to re-read Ulysses, we started playing with the latitude and longitude of Dún Laoghaire (53.30° N, 6.13° W). Transpose as we would, we couldn’t get to the south Atlantic… but, d’oh! It dawned

on us that the location shown by National Rail is the intersection of the prime meridian and the equator – 0° N, 0° W.

We now expect that in map-world, if not the real world, this is quite a crowded spot, populated with all the locations for which various database clerks thought “I give up” and entered zero for the co-ordinates. What else have you found mapped there?

DOES cascading synergistic jargon

make your brain hurt, too? Feedback

has on occasion resorted to handing

out corporate buzzword bingo cards

to enliven presentations by

managers in suits.

They took hours to set up. But

thanks to the marvels of information

technology, no more! Go to www.

robietherobot.com/buzzword.htm

and you will be rewarded with a fresh

card each time you visit. The top row

of the one in front of us now reads

“enable, geo-targeted, game plan,

dot-com, best practice”, which

sounds perfect for a presentation

on monetising the user-interactivity

of Interweb 3.1, or the like.

Print off bingo slips, hand them

to colleagues enduring the meeting

with you… and advise them to try to

avoid shouting “Bingo!” too loudly

when the presenter has completed

a row or a column of jargon. Failure

to exercise such self-restraint could

result in a dynamic downsizing

denouement – known in American

English as a pink slip, and to Brits as

a P45. In that unhappy event, though,

the ex-colleagues could always check

www.robietherobot.com/jobtitle.htm

for innovative income-stream

identifiers: it has just suggested

to us that we might seek work as

a “Graphic Filtering Guru” or a

“Dot-Com Evolution Administrator”.

COULD it be that some signs are quantumly determined, collapsing to a state of true or false when you observe them? Based on his observations, Neill Jones thinks that it could.

He gives the example of a sign

outside his house saying “No dog fouling”. Every time he has looked at it, he says, it has been true. This is also the case with another “No dog fouling” sign on a building a couple of streets away.

On the other hand, on Salisbury Plain in the south of England, where there are regular military manoeuvres, there is a sign by the road saying “Tank crossing”. This, says Neill, has collapsed to false every time he has looked at it.

There are, however, further complexities to this phenomenon. Some signs avoid a quantum collapse altogether, Neill notes. Take the “Gap ahead closed” sign he saw recently while driving up a dual carriageway (divided highway). If there was a gap ahead, he reasons, then it wasn’t closed. If it was closed, then there wasn’t a gap ahead. So the sign failed to be either true or false and was merely self-cancelling.

“Maybe I should get out more,” Neill suggests. “But then I’ll only find more signs. So maybe I should stay in more.”

WHEN Will Trend used Apple’s iWork

to proof-read an essay, his use of the

words “judgement day” met with the

program’s disapproval. “Each part

of a holiday name should begin

with a capital letter,” it admonished

him. “Consider replacing with

‘Judgement Day’.”

You can send stories to Feedback by

email at feedback@newscientist.com.

Please include your home address.

This week’s and past Feedbacks can

be seen on our website.

PA

UL

MC

DE

VIT

T