Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
The meme economy
It isn't often that Feedback has a bone to pick with the Society for Conservation Biology. Its cause is admirable, its intentions pure and its disdain for bone-picking internationally acknowledged.
But the Soc for Conny B, as it pleases us to call it, has recently committed a mammoth faux pas. Its fauxest pas, arguably, since failing to conserve the biology of the mammoth.
In a recent issue of its journal, Conservation Biology, a paper was published entitled “Effects of amusing memes on concern for unappealing species”. In it, the authors reveal that entertaining internet memes can help boost funding for animals they call “unpopular and unappealing”.
In other words, when coupled with a suitably humorous caption, an unattractive photo of a toad can generate just as many clicks online as an adorable snapshot of a panda. Feedback is well acquainted with this phenomenon from our own childhood days, only back then we called it cyberbullying.
Sucks to be you
One of the perils of having children, Feedback is reliably informed, is that at some point your creations turn against you. There you are, teaching them to catch a ball or preparing their dinner, when they bite your ankle and start shedding all over the furniture. Or maybe that's dogs. We have always struggled to tell the difference.
Far safer instead to create an artificial intelligence. Polite, respectful and guaranteed not to embarrass you in front of your friends – or so you might think. Mathematician and computer programmer Stephen Wolfram recently proved this hypothesis wrong when he appeared on Lex Fridman's AI podcast.
In a bid to show off the power of his celebrated Mathematica software, he fed it a photograph of himself and asked it to identify the person depicted. A second or two later, the answer came back. “Oh wow,” said Wolfram. “It says I look like a plunger.” Not to worry, Stephen: the Society for Conservation Biology has some ideas for how you could turn that to your advantage.
Eel problems
In these turbulent times, it is all too easy to be consumed by one's own problems and forget about the real victims of the coronavirus crisis: the eels. To be precise, the garden eels at Tokyo's Sumida aquarium.
According to a report in The Guardian, these delicate creatures are so absent-minded that the dearth of visitors during the outbreak is making them forget what humans look like. Feedback can empathise – we are starting to feel that way about sunshine.
This short-term memory loss is worrying the eel keepers, however, who fear that their charges may start hiding from them as they pass by. To remind them what humans look like, the aquarium has introduced what it calls a “face-showing festival”, setting up tank-side iPads and encouraging fans to FaceTime directly with the eels.
“Given the animals' natural bashfulness,” reports The Guardian, “they are requested not to raise their voices.” An excellent piece of advice, and one that Feedback will pass on to our line managers immediately.
Frank Swiss
For reasons too tiresome to enter into at present, Feedback occasionally receives postal communications from the Swiss Embassy. As you might expect from an official organ of the Helvetic Confederation, their correspondence is always timely, informative, easy to read and almost antiseptically humourless.
This week, however, Feedback received a selection of coronavirus-related leaflets so surprisingly jolly that we seriously suspected postal fraud. In an attempt to keep our spirits up, the embassy had included a checklist of activities that it suggested we engage in during these uncertain days.
“Tidy up a messy drawer”, ran one. Tick. “Try yodelling through an open window”, ran another. Also tick.
“Pickle vegetables of your choice” was another that we breezed through, before deciding to “call someone with children and read them a story by phone”. We didn't ask for permission, mind, we just broke straight into Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and carried on until Thursday. Tick.
Now all that's left for us to do is “write down the story of your life” and “compile your best jokes”. Oh wait – tick, tick!
Time flies
Some weeks ago, Feedback pointed out a technical snafu on the part of New Scientist's Twitter account, one appearing to imply that a parallel universe travelling backwards in time was likely to be an unattractive shade of brown. We are grateful to James Henriksen for reminding us of an article we published in 2002 that suggests this was no accident, but the revelation of a profound cosmic truth.
“In our past, and the other universe's future, New Scientist published that our universe is beige as well,” he wrote. “Or could our universe have just made a U-turn in time?”
We are putting our best reporters on it, James – stay tuned for an update in about a week ago.
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