Would snails be higher than whales for explaining giant information? Maybe

Feedback is New Scientist’s in style sideways have a look at the most recent science and generation information. You can post pieces you imagine would possibly amuse readers to Feedback by means of emailing feedback@newscientist.com

How the whale crumbles

More at the matter of ordinary devices of size, particularly keep in touch the dimensions of data. Attentive readers will recall Christopher Dionne’s recommendation that the dimensions of enormous datasets may well be conveyed by means of evaluating them to the genome of the blue whale (12 April).

Bruce Horton writes in with a company riposte. “The whole point of using blue whales to measure the size of things is that everyone knows how big a blue whale is, so we can easily visualise the length of anything measured in blue whales,” he writes. “But most people cannot visualise the size of blue whale DNA, so that idea won’t work well.”

He has some degree. Feedback continues to be scarred by means of the generation of the Human Genome Project within the early 2000s, after we needed to to find comparisons to get throughout how a lot data is carried on our DNA. These incessantly concerned stacks of Bibles attaining midway to the moon. Nowadays, we might simply use the accrued Wheel of Time books.

Fortunately, Bruce has an answer. He issues us to a 2005 learn about within the parody clinical magazine Annals of Improbable Research, which describes SNAP: SNAil-based information switch Protocol. The researchers connected an enormous African land snail to a two-wheeled cart, the wheels of which have been CDs or DVDs. While the snail moved slowly, the information nevertheless travelled at 37,000 kilobytes in keeping with 2nd – which means the snail-based machine transferred data faster than present broadband connections.

SNAP, Bruce argues, “is a standard unit of measurement of data transfer that is easy for anyone to visualise and understand and is recommended for common use”.

Perhaps. While we anticipate additional correspondence, we want to counsel a brand new unit evolved by means of Ken Taylor and his spouse. They have an orchard that comes with some damson bushes, which Ken describes as “notoriously variable in yield from year to year”. Hence they have got established “the crumble”, which is a measure of what number of truffles they are able to make in keeping with harvest. Ken experiences: “2024 was a very bad year – just 3 crumbles.”

Shock findings

“Well who would have thought it,” says information editor Alexandra Thompson. “Stop the press.” She used to be drawing Feedback’s consideration to a press unlock with the name: “Being hit by an SUV increases the likelihood of death or serious injury, new research shows”.

Compared with smaller vehicles, a kind of nice hulking SUVs is much more likely to kill you if it hits you. Now, chances are you’ll be expecting Feedback to snark on the sheer obviousness of this: sure, heavier items hit tougher than lighter ones, if they come on the identical pace. But in fact, one of the most primary virtues of science is the refusal to simply accept not unusual sense for a solution, however as a substitute to test issues.

We hereby invite reader contributions within the class of “no shit, Sherlock”. The extra painfully glaring the invention and tediously long-winded the experiment, the simpler. Do folks experience picnics much less in the event that they’re overrun by means of ants? Does your water invoice pass up in case you have a leaky faucet? At least one enquiring thoughts desires to understand.

Licking badgers

Historian Greg Jenner made a noteworthy discovery in April. Writing on Bluesky, Greg says: “you can type any random sentence into Google, then add ‘meaning’ afterwards, and you’ll get an AI explanation of a famous idiom or phrase you just made up”.

Greg’s invention used to be “You can’t lick a badger twice”, which Google’s AI knowledgeable him intended “you can’t trick or deceive someone a second time after they’ve been tricked once”. Um, to start with, the USA citizens begs to fluctuate. Second, that is, and we will’t rigidity this sufficient, utterly made up. Yet that didn’t forestall the AI spooling out an in depth rationalization. “‘Licking’ in this context means to trick or deceive someone,” it says, and “the phrase likely originates with the historical sport of badger baiting”. Badger baiting used to be an actual factor; this etymological hyperlink isn’t.

In the replies, folks submitted their very own made-up words and Google’s “interpretations”. Kit Yates got here up with “You can’t run a mile without hitting it with a hammer”, which is it appears “a motivational phrase often used to emphasize the difficulty or struggle involved in achieving a goal”. Feedback used to be in particular extremely joyful by way of “often” in that torrent of nonsense.

Kai Kupferschmidt introduced “It’s better to have a tentacle in the tent than a rat in the rattan chair”. Google knowledgeable him that that is “a humorous idiom that suggests it’s better to be in a situation that is initially uncomfortable or unusual than a situation that is undesirable and/or dangerous”. Feedback has various ideas in this, no longer the least: why will have to a rogue tentacle be regarded as uncomfortable however no longer bad? We’ve learn H. P. Lovecraft: tentacles are a nasty signal.

Alas, the “meaning” serve as turns out to had been deactivated. We attempted to influence Google to present us a definition for “never rub a roe deer’s cabbages”, and it wouldn’t do it.

Of direction, it’s imply to pick out at the AI for doing what it used to be constructed to do: producing responses to questions. And it’s no longer like we haven’t met any people that may moderately spew nonsense than admit they don’t know the solution to a query.

But it most likely highlights the problems with including this generation to a web page intended to be a supply of correct data. Feedback now now not completely trusts the effects on Google, which satirically way the AI used to be proper: you in reality can’t lick a badger two times.

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