FEEDBACK

FEEDBACK is covered in shame, and more confused than usual. Tom Roche was just one reader who posted a comment on newscientist.com to say that Dublin Ferry Port – which the UK’s National Rail online map located at 0° N, 0° W (on the equator in the Atlantic ocean, 1000 kilometres south of Ghana) – isn’t at Dún Laoghaire, as we asserted on 22 August , either. That was just the first result of our search on a famous web map service.

It is in fact at the mouth of the river Liffey, closer to Dublin itself.

Sometimes it is, anyway. Tim McCulloch has spotted it in the Netherlands. Our link to the National Rail site didn’t work for him, so he visited www.directferries.co.uk/dublin.htm – where, as you will see if you get there before they read this, the ferry port is located on a smallish inlet called Simonsgat, near

The packet of sweet peas bought by John Priestland from online garden centre Van Meuwen assured him: “Your pants have been grown in a perfect greenhouse environment”

Groningen. At least this location has the essential requirements of land near water.

We can offer an explanation: Dublin Ferry Port is close to coordinates 53.35° N, 6.2° W and Simonsgat is at53.35° N, 6.2° E. And thus it appears we have another challenge to issue – where else have you spotted Dublin Ferry Port in its migrations?

In response to our earlier request to list the places populating 0° N, 0° W in map-world, John Arthur reports finding “surprisingly many” houses for sale out there in the south Atlantic. Fearing rising damp, if not worse, he has eliminated the vendors involved from his enquiries.

Simon Norton, meanwhile, has investigated the National Rail website further and discovered that, when he looked, Corby and East Midlands Parkway railway stations in the UK were also

mapped to 0° N, 0° W. He is pleased, therefore, to conclude that he can avoid crossing the Irish Sea and get from London to Dublin by train in just over an hour, taking the new direct service to Corby, “which is in the same place” as Dublin Ferry Port. And logically it is, if not in the real world.

WE HAVE written before about the

fates of iPods that went through

the washing machine or fell into the

toilet ( 8 September 2007 ). Now

the MacInTouch website reveals an

interesting way in which the puddle

can come to the iPod rather than

the usual way round.

As Rob Gilgan tells it , a family

friend noticed that the sound of a

game on his iPod Touch irritated his

Shetland sheepdog, so he made a

point of teasing the dog with it. In

retaliation, when his owner left the

iPod unattended on his coffee table,

the dog climbed up and urinated on

the source of the noise. As Rob

writes, “He found his iTouch pooched

in a puddle of pee. Deader than a

parrot in a Monty Python parody.”

Some iPods recover from other

types of soakings, but this one was

still dead after six weeks, so the

victim took it to the Apple Store,

prepared to buy a replacement.

Much to his surprise, a technician

there couldn’t find any sign of

moisture damage – which would

void the warranty – and gave

him a replacement.

“Guess sheltie pee doesn’t leave

any evidence. Sure does in the

neighbour’s lawn, though,” writes

Rob, evidently drawing on experience

of neighbourhood disharmony.

RESIGNED acceptance is the only sanity-preserving response to the myriad program error message synonyms for “computer says ‘no’ ”. But Feedback is impressed by the message presented to Lucy Taylor while she was trying to find out how much credit she had left in her University of Sussex printing account: “Error:

Unwilling To Perform”. She wondered why the university has not trumpeted its acquisition of a computer with built-in free will. But then she realised it would probably get criticised for wasting British taxpayers’ money on a machine that just can’t be bothered to do what it was built to do.

AN ADVERTISEMENT that appeared

on Jemma Pollari’s Facebook profile

exhorted her: “Get your own pair of

ballerinas made from all recycled

materials.” What could this possibly

mean? Perhaps the picture of a pair

of shoes beside the advertisement

offered a clue.

FINALLY, the latest heroic attempt at virtual printing comes from the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Browsing DEFRA’s website, Rob Fitzmaurice was struck by images of the UK’s latest nasty pest, the citrus longhorn beetle. Keen to know more, he clicked onto the website’s illustrated information about the bug , where he was informed that what he was reading was: “Printed on material that contains a minimum of 100 per cent recycled fibre for uncoated paper and 75 per cent recycled fibre for coated paper.” That’ll be binary paper, of course.

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72 | NewScientist | 12 September 2009

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