This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- Nit-picking literature — Little things bother some people. Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace wonders why little things failed to bother Robinson Crusoe, the hero of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel, who spent 28 years documenting his plight as a castaway on a tropical island. “[W]here are the mosquitos, the wasps, the worms, or the pests that should be ravaging Crusoe’s island?” asks Wallace…
- Wrong cocktail — When is a cockatiel a cocktail? When it is a typographical error. This particular error – Feedback trusts it is an error – occurs in a study called “Avian gastric yeast (macrorhabdosis) in cockatiel, budgerigar and grey parrot: a focus on the clinical signs, molecular detection and phylogenetic evaluation” published in the Iranian journal Veterinary Research Forum….
- Baby radar — Adults who know that radar tracks aeroplanes and missiles might be delighted to learn that sometimes radar is used to track babies. Human infants.Zheng Peng and his colleagues at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands took a look at the newest techno-methods…
- Generously lettered — Astronomers are known as a generous bunch. Astronomer Virginia Trimble was moved by the implied plight of the unnamed person, mentioned in Feedback on 15 July, who is known to list these credentials with his signature: BSc (Honors), MASc, PhD, MTMS, MGDMB, MCIM, MSME, MAIST, MISIJ, MSigmaXi, MIFAC, MACS, MASM, MMRS, MACerS, MECS. Trimble writes: “He is missing (at least) one distinction…