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The British Library’s new building at St Pancras has been in the news
again with a House of Commons select committee calling for yet another inquiry
into the delays that have plagued the project from its inception. This,
despite the fact that a year ago the library recruited David Lyman to the
post of St Pancras project director, with the brief of beefing up the team
preparing to supervise the move into the new building.

Lyman’s appointment was an intriguing one. For the preceding two years
he had been working as the engineering director of British operations for
Transmanche Link, the main contractor for the Channel Tunnel. Was he chosen,
Feedback wonders, because of the British Library building’s resemblance
to a railway terminus? Or because of the expertise in the matter of delays
he must have acquired while helping to build the tunnel?

Whatever the case, building a library has proved an even tougher nut
to crack than building a thirty-mile tunnel under the sea. The tunnel is
now completed, but the library management still can’t say when its new building,
which is described by the select committee as ‘one of the ugliest buildings
in the world’, will be open for business.

* * *

Is this the birth of another urban myth? A reader phoned in the following
tale the other day about Feedback’s sovereign, Queen Elizabeth. She was
driving through Windsor Great Park last month, the story goes, when she
reported to security officials on her mobile phone that she had spotted
some New Age travellers in the park.

The security people went out to inves-tigate, only to report back a
few minutes later: ‘Sorry, Ma’am, the individuals concerned are in fact
English Heritage archaeologists.’

‘Well, keep them out of my sight,’ Her Majesty is said to have retorted.

The archaeologists, of course, had been called in to sift through material
damaged in the fire that swept Windsor Castle two years ago. Which makes
an amusing story, we feel – except that a few months ago we heard an almost
identical story concerning a group of archaeologists working on an estate
near Avebury in Wiltshire. On this occasion, one of the group, a young man
with long locks and standard academic ‘casual’ clothes, was denied entrance
to the estate on suspicion of being a traveller.

Feedback invites readers to attempt to trace the genesis of this story
and the various permutations it has gone through.

* * *

To be a sumo wrestler in Japan, the rules say you have to be at least
5 feet 8 inches tall. Since the sport is engaged in with bare feet, there
is no way you can fool officials into thinking you’re high enough by wearing
stacked shoes. So 16-year-old Koji Harada, who was only 5 feet 2 inches
tall, tried another tack, according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle.
He had a 6-inch silicone implant inserted under his scalp.

Sadly, photographs of Harada with an extremely large hairy lump on his
head led to the Japanese Sumo Association banning the practice of scalp
implants and rejecting Harada’s application to join the sport. However,
three wrestlers who had implants and successfully qualified before the ruling
will still be allowed to compete.

* * *

Thanks to Gillian Wells and M. G. Harman for pointing out our misspelling
of Markush in our piece on patents and Markush groups (9 July). Harman goes
on to explain the origin of the phrase. It seems that at some time in the
19th century, the US patent office decided not to allow the patenting of
alternatives indicated by the word ‘or’, so that one could not say, for
example, ‘fluorine, chlorine, bromine or iodine’.

This ruling was greatly resented by industry, until the problem was
solved by a bright attorney during the 1930s, whose client was a certain
Mr Markush. The attorney devised the wording, ‘an element selected from
the group comprising fluorine, chlorine, bromine and iodine’. It was eventually
held that this linguistic device overcame the prohibition on the word ‘or’,
and Markush got his patent.

It’s a funny old thing, patent law.

* * *

Computer giants WordPerfect and Novell celebrated their recent merger
with a glitzy presentation of new software to the computer trade and press
at the Mayfair Hotel Theatre in central London. It was the kind of event
that Feedback especially enjoys: the kind where things keep going wrong

The new software can make slides for presentations. During the Mayfair
show, to an audience which included WordPerfect’s top 50 corporate clients,
one of the company’s top brass projected a slide which boasted that the
company had developed new software which has ‘compatability’.

‘It needs a spellchecker,’ shouted one of the audience.

‘It has a spellchecker,’ responded the top brass proudly, completely
missing the heckler’s point.

The presenters then demonstrated what the new software can do by connecting
a computer to a large TV projector. Halfway through the demonstration, the
computer threw up one of those messages that computer users in the real
world have grown to dread. ‘An error has occurred . . . terminate,’ pronounced
the large screen in the middle of the stage.

Excellent stuff. Oh, and by the way. On the way home Feedback happened
to look again at the various invites WordPerfect had sent out. All of them
referred to the ‘May Fair’ Theatre – no doubt a computer’s alternative to
Mayfair, a word which is not very likely to appear in a spellchecker dictionary.

And finally, another reminder to send in your entries to the Feedback
Summer Competition. You are invited to submit ‘backronyms’ for institutions,
processes, machines, materials, etc. connected with science – the BBSRCs,
CSIROs, LHCs and GMOs.

A backronym is an acronym turned back into words of your choice. Examples
are: ‘Cuban Invasion Agency’ for the CIA and (unfairly, we are sure) ‘Arrive
Late In Turin, All Luggage In Athens’ for Alitalia.

You may submit up to 10 backronyms. Thanks to the generosity of boeder,
the European computer and office supplies company, the five winning entries
will each receive a PC clock which is linked by satellite to the atomic
clock in Darmstadt and which will therefore only lose or gain one second
every million years. The 10 runners-up will each receive a box for computer
discs, also offered by boeder.

All entries should be sent to ‘Feedback Summer Competition’, New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ,
King’s Reach Tower, Stamford Street, London SE1 9LS, and must arrive by
26 August. The editor’s decision is final.