25 October 1997

WHAT DOES the word “safety” mean to the younger generation? The Green Cross Code man, perhaps, who ensures that children cross roads safely?

Apparently not. Michael Francis’s 11-year-old son had his first laboratory lesson at the beginning of this autumn term. The class was shown a video, Safety in the Laboratory, which emphasised the importance of wearing safety spectacles at all times while conducting experiments. Each student was then given a pair of identical safety spectacles to keep and, in order be able to distinguish their pair from their neighbour’s, they were told to mark them with a word that conjured up the image of safety to them.

When Francis examined his son’s spectacles that evening, they had been clearly marked with the name of a well-known brand of condom. It seems that at least one safety message is getting through.

TONY BLAIR’s new government wants Britain to embrace IT. The nation’s ability to be a beacon to the rest of the world depends on it, no doubt. So take pity on culture secretary Chris Smith, who has just proudly announced that the music industry earns Britain £2.5 billion a year, £1.2 billion of it from overseas sales of records. Or so he thinks.

Smith’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport employs the Central Office of Information to print and mail out its announcements. Unfortunately, the COI appears not to have mastered the IT mysteries involved. When the text file left the DCMS the figures were in pounds sterling. But while converting this into nicely formatted type, the COI used a software setting that was unable to cope with £ signs. So the COI’s mail-out had Smith talking gobbledegook about earnings of “#2.5 bn and #1.2 bn”.

“Thank you for pointing this out,” said the DCMS official who wrote the original text, when Feedback inquired. “We shall be having strong words with the COI.”

MOTORISTS IN the Australian state of Victoria are an ingenious lot. If bits and pieces of their cars don’t work, they simply improvise. One enterprising individual whose car had no steering wheel used a spanner to steer with instead. Another with fuel tank problems perched a can of petrol on his roof and ran a hose from it through a front window into the engine.

These cases are in the files of Nick Matthews of the Vehicle Safety Testing School, who teaches police how to identify unroadworthy vehicles. They were reported recently by theSunday Herald Sun, a Melbourne tabloid.

Feedback enjoyed reading them all, but our favourite was the car with no windscreen wipers. When it rained, the motorist leaned through the side window and used a hand-held squeegee to wipe away the water, giving a new meaning to the term “driving rain”.

DO YOU have a strange fascination with guns, knives, Nazism or the occult? Do you worry that if you reveal your secret interest you might be labelled as deviant, or indeed that you might be nurturing an inner psychopath?

These are not among Feedback’s preoccupations, but if they have been troubling you, worry no more. According to clinical psychologist Vincent Egan of the East Midlands Centre for Forensic Mental Health, such lurid interests are common among many apparently stable individuals.

Egan asked 196 people to complete a questionnaire measuring their interest in such topics. Presenting his results to a conference of the British Psychological Society’s Division of Criminological and Legal Psychology earlier this month, he said that it is not the subject matter itself that points to deviance, but an individual’s attitude towards it.

We should therefore take a more liberal approach to censoring such material, he concluded, pointing out that: “Some individuals get sexually aroused by Mothercare catalogues. Should we ban them too?”

RICHARD BROWN, a psychologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, is beginning to think that mice can count. He is looking into mouse parental care and wanted to replicate the situation in the wild, where mice have to go looking for food, instead of having it handed to them by a benevolent researcher.

Brown’s way of replicating the wild was to make the mice run 250 rotations on their wheels to earn a food pellet. But shortly after starting his experiments, he observed that the mice seemed to be able to run just the right amount of time, then hop off the wheel and collect the pellet.

Do the mice time themselves? Do they just get hungry? Or can they really count up to 250?

FINALLY, here is another of those ever-so-helpful manufacturer’s instructions. Frances Hinden’s parents recently bought a computer from Gateway 2000. It arrived in two large cardboard boxes. They carefully opened the boxes, sorted through the contents, and eventually found the “Installation Guide”.

One of the first things in the guide was the warning: “To avoid condensation forming, please allow the boxes to warm up to room temperature before opening.” Eminently sensible advice, of course— especially useful for people who can read a manual without opening the box it is packed in.


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