64 | NewScientist | 18 June 2011

FEEDBACK

WE ARE relieved to hear that the US Centers for Disease Control is geared up to tackle zombies should it prove necessary. Its online catalogue of Emergency Preparedness and Response plans at bit.ly/cdczombieplan includes “Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse”. And guess what? The CDC manages to calm public fears about dealing with a zombie attack by the simple expedient of making the whole issue so boring even the zombies will lose interest.

“If zombies did start roaming the streets,” the CDC intones, “CDC would conduct an investigation much like any other disease outbreak. CDC would provide technical assistance to cities, states, or international partners dealing with a zombie infestation. This assistance might include consultation, lab testing and analysis, patient management and care, tracking of contacts, and infection control…”

We had intended to quote more from this lengthy document, but sadly we fell asleep.

Paul Brown directs us to Jim Legans’s photostream on Flickr and a photo of a sign outside a New Mexico restaurant that says, worryingly, “Come in. We’re closed”

WIKIPEDIA is a wonderful phenomenon, though like many of the best things its wondrousness lies as much in unexpected results as in the intended purpose. It is frequently claimed that the online encyclopedia is proof that society can rely on volunteers to do the best of our cultural work – a claim somewhat undermined by the stern warnings on many Wikipedia entries that they fail to sufficiently reference the work of professional scientists, journalists and so on, whose efforts are their livelihood.

Now we think reader Henry Howard has discovered Wikipedia’s real use, which is to map concept connections. How? He credits, properly, fellow undergraduate Martin for reporting that “if you pick a random Wikipedia article, click on the first blue hyperlinked word not in brackets or italics, then recursively keep on clicking on the first such word in subsequent articles, you will always end up at ‘Philosophy’.”

So we tried it, with the page we had open at the time: Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011). And sure enough, then the sequence went: “poet, poetry,

literary, fiction, narrative, latin, italic language, Indo-European, family (language), human, living (extant species), biology, natural science, science, knowledge [getting warm!], facts, information, sequence [colder again], mathematics, quantity, property (philosophy), modern philosophy, philosophy.” We can clearly hear this little found poem recited by Scott-Heron, the grandfather of rap.

A friend of Feedback, fellow Scott-Heron fan Pennie Quinton, asks: what happens when you start at “philosophy”? The answer is that you get back to philosophy – it takes around 20 steps.

Howard writes that he “felt that the proper authorities needed to be informed of this discovery, so of course, I am writing to Feedback”. We are therefore delighted to announce what we shall call the “Martin metric” – though the history of the discovery is now buried in several hundred tweets on the topic.

The metric is the number of clicks from a given entry to “philosophy”. Oddly, many obviously concrete words have low Martin metrics – “rock” has a Martin metric of about 10 – perhaps because their “obvious concreteness” lies in a philosophical abstraction.

Feedback takes no responsibility for the thousands of hours that readers may collectively waste as a result of this observation. We would appreciate, though, news of strange attractors in Wikispace other than “philosophy”.

ON HIS holiday last year, Colin Deady passed through Nepal’s Kathmandu international airport, where he was disconcerted to find

his hand luggage had to fit into a one-dimensional bag: “Maximum size per cabin baggage must not exceed a total dimension of 115 cm”, a notice advised passengers.

“Despite sitting on my bag and squashing it every which way, I just could not remove the extra two dimensions,” he says.

WHEN booking a flight with Easyjet, passengers are required to provide personal identification details such as passport number and date of birth. The date entry is supported by drop down lists of numbers for day, month and year of birth. The latter, Fred Nind noted with pleasure, gives options going back to 1850.

“I am glad that this facility will allow me to give my details easily when I book tickets towards the end of my second century of life,” says Fred.

QUANTUM Bit Induction Technology sets out its lofty aims at quantumbit.com. “The Company,” we are told, “is developing quantum control applied to the superposed realities of many worlds. We are working on ‘Reality Bender’ technology for our Stockholders.”

Colin Watters, however, is not so sure about this. “Is there much demand for reality bending?” he asks. The investors they seek may wish to ponder this.

FINALLY, where should Mark Ribbands put bottles of beer in his new Miele K9757 refrigerator? The instructions, he tells us, state that “the coldest area in the refrigerator is directly above the PerfectFresh zone,” but they go on to say, “however, the PerfectFresh zone is even colder”.

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