Feedback is New Scientist’s popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com
How the whale crumbles
More on the topic of unusual units of measurement, in particular how to communicate the size of information. Attentive readers will recall Christopher Dionne’s suggestion that the scale of large datasets could be conveyed by comparing them to the genome of the blue whale (12 April).
Bruce Horton writes in with a firm riposte. “The whole point of using blue whales to measure the size of things is that everyone knows how big a blue whale is, so we can easily visualise the length of anything measured in blue whales,” he writes. “But most people cannot visualise the size of blue whale DNA, so that idea won’t work well.”
He has a point. Feedback is still scarred by the era of the Human Genome Project in the early 2000s, when we had to find comparisons to get across how much information is carried on our DNA. These often involved stacks of Bibles reaching halfway to the moon. Nowadays, we would just use the collected Wheel of Time books.
Fortunately, Bruce has a solution. He points us to a 2005 study in the parody scientific journal Annals of Improbable Research, which describes SNAP: SNAil-based data transfer Protocol. The researchers attached a giant African land snail to a two-wheeled cart, the wheels of which were CDs or DVDs. While the snail moved slowly, the data nonetheless travelled at 37,000 kilobytes per second – meaning the snail-based system transferred information quicker than existing broadband connections.
SNAP, Bruce argues, “is a standard unit of measurement of data transfer that is easy for anyone to visualise and understand and is recommended for common use”.
Perhaps. While we await further correspondence, we wish to recommend a new unit developed by Ken Taylor and his wife. They have an orchard that includes some damson trees, which Ken describes as “notoriously variable in yield from year to year”. Hence they have established “the crumble”, which is a measure of how many desserts they can make per harvest. Ken reports: “2024 was a very bad year – just 3 crumbles.”
Shock findings
“Well who would have thought it,” says news editor Alexandra Thompson. “Stop the press.” She was drawing Feedback’s attention to a press release with the title: “Being hit by an SUV increases the likelihood of death or serious injury, new research shows”.
Compared with smaller cars, one of those great hulking SUVs is more likely to kill you if it hits you. Now, you might expect Feedback to snark at the sheer obviousness of this: yes, heavier objects hit harder than lighter ones, if they arrive at the same speed. But of course, one of the main virtues of science is the refusal to accept common sense for an answer, but instead to check things.
We hereby invite reader contributions in the category of “no shit, Sherlock”. The more painfully obvious the discovery and tediously long-winded the experiment, the better. Do people enjoy picnics less if they’re overrun by ants? Does your water bill go up if you have a leaky tap? At least one enquiring mind wants to know.
Licking badgers
Historian Greg Jenner made a noteworthy discovery in April. Writing on Bluesky, Greg says: “you can type any random sentence into Google, then add ‘meaning’ afterwards, and you’ll get an AI explanation of a famous idiom or phrase you just made up”.
Greg’s invention was “You can’t lick a badger twice”, which Google’s AI informed him meant “you can’t trick or deceive someone a second time after they’ve been tricked once”. Um, first of all, the US electorate begs to differ. Second, this is, and we can’t stress this enough, completely made up. Yet that didn’t stop the AI spooling out a detailed explanation. “‘Licking’ in this context means to trick or deceive someone,” it says, and “the phrase likely originates with the historical sport of badger baiting”. Badger baiting was a real thing; this etymological link is not.
In the replies, people submitted their own made-up phrases and Google’s “interpretations”. Kit Yates came up with “You can’t run a mile without hitting it with a hammer”, which is apparently “a motivational phrase often used to emphasize the difficulty or struggle involved in achieving a goal”. Feedback was particularly delighted by the use of “often” in that torrent of nonsense.
Kai Kupferschmidt offered “It’s better to have a tentacle in the tent than a rat in the rattan chair”. Google informed him that this is “a humorous idiom that suggests it’s better to be in a situation that is initially uncomfortable or unusual than a situation that is undesirable and/or dangerous”. Feedback has a number of thoughts on this, not the least: why should a rogue tentacle be considered uncomfortable but not dangerous? We’ve read H. P. Lovecraft: tentacles are a bad sign.
Alas, the “meaning” function seems to have been deactivated. We tried to persuade Google to give us a definition for “never rub a roe deer’s cabbages”, and it wouldn’t do it.
Of course, it’s mean to pick on the AI for doing what it was built to do: generating responses to questions. And it’s not like we haven’t met any humans that would rather spew nonsense than admit they don’t know the answer to a question.
But it perhaps highlights the issues with adding this technology to a page meant to be a source of accurate information. Feedback now no longer entirely trusts the results on Google, which ironically means the AI was right: you really can’t lick a badger twice.
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