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Congratulations to John Johnson of Beckenham, Kent, for provoking the
Advertising Standards Authority and its chairman Timothy Raisin into revealing
their ignorance by endorsing a flagrant error in an advertisement.

Johnson had complained about an advertisement for an Electrolux fridge
which appeared in the Sunday Times last year in which energy was expressed
in ‘watts per hour’. Since a watt is a joule per second, describing units
of energy as ‘watts per hour’ makes no more sense than, say, describing
the speed of a motor car in terms of ‘miles per hour per week’.

Just the same, the ASA wrote back to Johnson saying: ‘We understand
that the general method of measuring electricity is in watts per hour. We
would have no objection under the British Code of Advertising to this measurement
being used in the advertisement.’ And when Johnson pursued the matter by
writing to Raisin in person, he replied: ‘In terms of consumer understanding,
the expression of electrical energy in terms of the equivalent watts per
hour appears to present no problems.’

Tut tut, boys and girls. Next time you get a letter about a scientific
issue, try doing a little homework before you reply.

* * *

It seems that our item on unfortunate brand names (27 February) only
scratched the surface of a rich seam. Readers from around the world have
sent in dozens of further examples of the brand-namer’s art. Thanks to everyone
who wrote in. Feedback has been most interested to learn that there is a
toilet paper in Germany called Bum, a tool shop in Pagnacco, Italy, called
Smut, a brand of biscuits in Mexico called Bimbo, a soft drink in Ghana
called Pee Cola, and a French high-fibre breakfast cereal (with, one assumes,
excellent laxative properties) called Crapsy.

But it is in Holland that brand-naming soars to particularly imaginative
heights. They have a floor surface there called Poxy, a fizzy drink called
Prik, an aftershave called Vaccine – or, if you don’t fancy that, another
one called Gammon – and, most startling of all, a shampoo rejoicing in the
name of Glans.

It works the other way, too, as reader Johan Hjelm of Sweden reminds
us. How unfortunate for the respected pharmaceuticals company Fisons that
the firm’s name sounds the same as the Swedish word for ‘fart’.

* * *

Is this a record? On 5 February, J. W. Donovan of the Australian Institute
of Health and Welfare received a returned questionnaire that the institute
had posted on 15 October 1982.

* * *

Get your diaries out: on 22 April at the Copthorne Hotel in Birmingham
the Operational Research Society is holding a meeting. Boring, you yawn?
Not at all. This one caught our eye in particular because of the speaker
and his subject. To be precise, the topic is ‘Successful management information
systems’ which, according to the blurb, will ‘identify the critical success
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The speaker? Keith Rapley from British Airways. What – the company whose
employees hacked into the parts of its computer system which it had hired
out to Virgin Airlines, in order to obtain information about Virgin passengers
it could poach? Yes, the very same company. Should be a cracking good speech.
Perhaps Richard Branson would like to go along and ask some questions, just
to pep it up?

* * *

The Young Ornithologists’ Club has written to tell us that it is organising
a ‘country-wide phone-in for birds’. Feedback’s mind boggled at this, until
further reading revealed that the phone-in is to be about birds, rather
than conducted by them. Children all over Britain are encouraged to join
in a national survey of migrating birds as they arrive in the spring, and
to phone 0891 600 209 whenever they sight one. But, the press release wisely
cautions, they ‘should make sure they have permission from their parents
to do so’, since calls cost 36p per minute cheap rate and 48p at all other
times.

* * *

The new internal phone book for the Office of Science and Technology
gives some surprising insights into the likely priorities of the white
paper on science and technology to be published on 17 May.

You might have thought that ‘Defence R&D and interaction with the
civil sector’ would be a pretty important topic. But no, that subject –
along with nine others including energy, transport and the commercial exploitation
by industry of the science base – has been allocated to a single Grade
7 civil servant.

Another Grade 7 has been given the task of coordinating contacts with
countries outside the European Community . . . and that’s it. And, at last,
the ‘brain drain’ (their quotes) has acquired institutional recognition.
Another Grade 7 has been given responsibility for that – to try and catch
the people who have left the country in exasperation over their inability
to talk to the overworked first Grade 7, perhaps.

* * *

Life in a hospital casualty ward, as television serials endlessly remind
us, can be full of surprises. But not even a TV scriptwriter has yet thought
up the kind of patient who was admitted to the Massachusetts General Hospital
earlier this year. Michael Schwarzschild was examining a ‘stuporous, inebriated
man’ with a routine computed tomographic scan, when it revealed a one-inch
nail stuck in the man’s brain near the back of his skull.

The patient later admitted that 12 years ago he had attempted suicide
by firing a carpenter’s nail gun between his eyes. Miraculously, the nail
went right through his brain without killing him, and the only symptoms
he has now are a slight limp and a right-sided facial drop.

A story, you might say, which hits the nail in the head.

* * *

Next year, the chemistry department of the lucky old University of Queensland
in Australia will get an automated high abundance sensitivity solid source
thermal ionisation mass spectrometer. Aren’t you jealous?