This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: A sick experiment —The phrase “what goes up must come down” isn’t obviously relevant to the insides of a cat. The countervailing “what goes down must come up” is, when that cat has swallowed something of dubious […]
This patent describes (among other things) an automated way to perform the Roman Emperor’s decision (indicated in the old days — reputedly — by a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down signal, displayed by the emperor) as to whether a gladiator should live or die: “Monitoring of crowd response to performances,” US patent #6885304, issued Apr 26, […]
Google’s new tool, the books ngram viewer, lets you track the relative occurrence of different words in lotsa books over a long period of time. We used it to gain insight (or whatever) into two phenomena: UP and DOWN had their ups and downs over time. Note that they seemed to go up and down […]