THE BBC has gone a step further than Feedback ever dared in its use of strange units of comparison. A column by Michael Blastland posted on 24 November 2011 on the BBC News website, entitled (), invites us to imagine “that every year, every one of us gave birth to an eight-year-old made from steel”.
“According to the labelling, John Slaughter’s Pritt Stick glue manages to be both “Original” on the one hand while boasting a “New improved formulation” on the other”
Advertisement
Dan Joseph was “more than a little disturbed” by this invitation, and even more so by what followed: “Now go further. Imagine that you also gave birth – everyone, male and female, young and old, every year – to 10 cement, one plastic and three paper eight-year-olds and one new-born aluminium baby.”
This peculiar article turns out to be about the global average production per person of the materials mentioned, including how it goes up or down over the years, and to what extent it varies between countries. This is undoubtedly all very interesting but, to be honest, we would prefer to consider it without having to think about giving birth to children made of steel.
FOR the past two years, after recovering from a long period of illness, Dave Goodwin has been “frantically looking for work and getting nowhere fast”. So he was delighted when, on 7 December 2011, he picked up an email dated the previous day inviting him to an interview for the post of shop manager at the local Oxfam charity store. The only trouble was that the interview was to be held on 21 September 2011.
Dave is desperate to find out how he can achieve the necessary time travel to go to the interview, except that it occurs to him that since he doesn’t have the job, he must have failed the interview if he went to it. Then again, if he fails to achieve time travel, it may be that he lost the job because he missed the interview.
It gets worse. He worries that if he does find a time machine and attends the interview and gets the job, what will happen when 6 December 2011 comes round and it is time for the email to be sent?
After all, if he attended the interview in September and was appointed to the position, then there won’t be a job vacancy any more, so the email advertising it won’t be sent. In which case, he won’t be able to respond to it, so… Feedback’s head is beginning to hurt.
WATCHING the New Year’s Eve fireworks on TV, Alan Mayer was impressed – so much so that he did what many Feedback readers would do: reached for a calculator. He was particularly impressed by the number of bangs and flashes going on around the world. But how many were there?
The Sydney Morning Herald in his native Australia, , said it would include “about 11,000 aerial shells and 25,000 comets”, presumably in the 9 pm and midnight shows combined. Business news website , stating that “seven tons of explosives” were expected. However, that is well below Alan’s estimate of 80 tonnes of TNT equivalent – and we suspect his guess may be at least a bit informed.
Assuming 200 shows worldwide, and that Sydney’s was bigger than most, we estimate that the combined size of the explosions that rolled around the globe was between 1000 and 10,000 tonnes of TNT equivalent.
For comparison, the biggest deliberate non-nuclear explosion in history was 4000 tonnes TNT equivalent in the 1985 experiment on blast-proofing military kit at White Sands in New Mexico; the biggest human-made bang was a failed Soviet N1 rocket launch, equivalent to 7000 tonnes; and the nuclear explosion that destroyed Hiroshima is generally reckoned equivalent to 13,000 tonnes.
We have asked firework-makers for clarification but they haven’t answered yet – can any readers help?
LISTENING in to her husband attempting to renew their car insurance over the phone, Anne Morton was reduced to laughter by an exchange that went much like this: “And, sir, do you attend an evening class?” “Yes.” “And what is it, sir?” “Ancient Egyptian… will that make us more of a risk?” “I can’t tell you. It will have to be assessed.”
FINALLY, online deals site Groupon recently offered an “Express Home Teeth Whitening Kit” with the enticingly enigmatic sales pitch: “Brighter teeth make for confident smiles, better pictures, and are excellent at solving complex algorithms.”
Anna Langley is as perplexed as we are over how these words came to appear in this advertisement.