Stewing magazine wrappers in gravy
MANY readers have told us of their surprise, on receiving their subscription copy of New Scientist, that it comes in a polywrap described as “Oxo-degradable”. They have gone on to ask if this means that the wrap will dissolve in gravy (a question that may seem obscure to those who have never made culinary sauces with Oxo stock cubes).
We asked New Scientist‘s production editor Mick O’Hare about this, and he asked our parent company’s senior account manager Monica Baghi, and she asked Norman Billingham, professor of chemistry at the University of Sussex in the UK, who said: “Oxo biodegradable plastics are conventional polyethylenes modified by the use of an additive which promotes their oxidation… The lifetime of the film, from manufacture to disintegration, is easily controlled by the ratio of prodegradant to stabiliser.”
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Monica also discovered that “lovely little Wikipedia” has a spiel about ““. It tells us: “OBD plastic will degrade when subject to environmental conditions to produce water, carbon dioxide and biomass. The process is shortened from hundreds of years to months for degradation and thereafter biodegradation depends on the micro-organisms in the environment.”
So now you know. Gravy, indeed.
“The ingredients of the Kashi breakfast cereal enjoyed by Earl Arnold in California included “evaporated cane juice crystals”. “A rose by any other name,” comments Earl, sweetly”
PHPECTS – sorry, that should be “aspects” – of spelling on the internet are growing weirder. Readers recently explained the numerous web appearances of the non-word at the start of this paragraph by speculating that website managers carelessly run a “find-and-replace word” macro to expunge all references to the Microsoft web-page-generating language ASP, and replace it with the independently-produced language PHP (27 February).
But has anyone, for example, replaced ASP on their website with plain old HyperText Markup Language (HTM or HTML)? Indeed they have: John Alderson has been digging around and has found not only a punnet of “rphpberries” but also one “rhtmberry”. The latter, he notes, is a googlewhackblatt – a word that produces exactly one result when you type it into a famous web search engine (14 August 2004). Or, as happened back then in regard to another example, it was a googlewhackblatt until just now when we published the fact online.
John also finds a specifying that some unfortunate person’s “responsibilities shall include all htmects of developing…”. This is among hundreds of other , or indeed , of the matter.
We wonder whether people are also replacing suffixes on web addresses, such as org, net, com and so on, but have found no orgpendium of results, yet. We did find the googlewhackblatt netprehend, which passeth all netprehension. John, thinking along the same lines, tracked down caring orgmunities and co.ukmunities.
These search-and-destroy word-replacing missions – which we shall call netplications – are not limited to the acronyms favoured by IT geeks. Some years ago, following the takeover of the Midlands Examining Group (MEG) by the Oxford Cambridge and RSA Examinations board (OCR), physics students were suddenly required to learn all about “ocrawatts” and “ocrabytes” (14 January 2006). We haven’t yet come across any netplications using real words. Perhaps our mind is now too discomanised to think of any to try.
PREPARING for a mountaineering trip, Michael Francis thought he was pretty well equipped for all climatic eventualities with his “four season” sleeping bag. But then his fellow travellers started bragging in a shared forum about their “” equipment.
Michael wants to know if five-season sleeping bags are produced in the same factory that produced the guitar amps in the movie This is Spinal Tap, the ones that “go all the way up to 11”.
Travelling in opposite directions
NEWS reports of a road crash by the Irish broadcaster RTE included the sentence: “Both vehicles were travelling in opposite directions,” Jerry Holt tells us. His initial reaction, he says, was to scoff at the tautology, but given the weirdness of quantum mechanics and the recent discovery of monopoles, he now commends the RTE newsroom staff for their circumspection and offers other scoffers this devastating question: “Suppose only one of the vehicles had been travelling in an opposite direction?”
FINALLY, studying the menu in a restaurant one evening while on holiday in the Austrian Alps, Maurice and Joy Bourne were surprised to be offered a choice of grilled lamb racks with rosemary sauce or “Grilled fish filet of printer trolley”. Had the Austrians discovered a previously unknown species of fish frozen into a glacier, they wondered? If so, they thought it was unlikely to be fresh, so they went for the lamb.