Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Pussycats on parade

Some topics appear to be catnip to Feedback’s readers, and one of them is cats. In our 23 September edition, we described a study in which pet cats were fitted with accelerometers. This revealed that they spent the lion’s share of their time doing absolutely nothing, with 20.1 to 41.4 per cent of their time spent sitting down and a further 34.8 to 52.9 per cent devoted instead to lying down.

We suggested that these cats were a tad slothful, and might even be edging towards idleness.

We received some feedback on this opinion. Reader Jack Haley sent us a lengthy text “courtesy of Google AI” (put a pin in that; we’re coming back to it), recounting the experiences of , a geologist in Australia who took part in a in the 2010s.

The results, as outlined in Haley’s text, were startling: “Squid, a heavier ginger tabby, was mapped taking regular nighttime strolls to the local high school and a nearby shopping center. Semi, a black- and-white cat, went much further, venturing a staggering three kilometers away from home.”

Furthermore, “Studies like the Cat Tracker project have shown that roughly 40 per cent of cats whose owners believe they are indoors or close by at night actually range over a hectare or more, frequently engaging in secret, long-distance neighbourhood explorations.”

Curious, Feedback put our exploring paws on and eventually found that the was launched from the University of North Carolina before being in Australia (and there’s now a Cat Tracker 2.0). Its final results were in 2020 in Animal Conservation. “We worked with citizen scientists to track 925 pet cats from six countries, finding remarkably small home ranges,” the feline watchers wrote. The average range was “3.6 hectares” (0.036 square kilometres) and in the sample only three cats ranged over more than 1 square kilometre.

Readers may notice some subtle differences between how the AI framed the results and how the scientists did. Technically, if you think about it, the AI did get the core facts right, and yet, Feedback still thinks cats are quite lazy.

Meanwhile, assistant news editor Sam Wong sent us a study titled “Wealth, health, cats and Toxoplasma gondii: An ecological correlational study of subjective well-being across 93 countries”. This found that “national happiness was positively associated with cat density”.

They mean “population density”, of course, but Feedback is also pretty sure that cats with greater physical density have significant effects on the happiness of their human attendants. One of ours can contract until she has a density approximating that of a neutron star when she wants to sleep on one of her humans.

Raging hellfire

A lot of lectures suffer from a dire lack of relatability. What, a prospective audience might wonder, does the evolutionary divergence of Cambrian lophotrochozoans or a drag-induced skin effect in a Bose-Fermi mixture have to do with my life?

No such relatability limitations affected a on 8 October at Utah State University by Miranda Judson, a graduate student in philosophy at Arizona State University. The organisers noted that a announcing it had unexpectedly gone viral – and it’s no wonder.

The talk was titled “Welcome to Hell: A theodicy”. The subtitle went on to clarify that “This talk argues that the evidence of our world is such that the probability we’re in hell is surprisingly high. If we’re in hell, we’d expect to see the evidence we actually do see”.

Alas, the talk wasn’t streamed online, and Judson doesn’t appear to have yet published a paper on it. But honestly, given the general state of things, we feel it wouldn’t be too difficult to fill in the blanks. We’ll report back if we learn more, hopefully not via the medium of a demonic voice in our head.

Bedtime tales

Speaking of evidence that we’re in hell, readers may have heard of the AI engineer telling his wife that he doesn’t need to read to his kids at bedtime because he can just train an AI to do it for him. If you haven’t heard of this, well, now you have.

The engineer in question is Alvin Sng, who works for a company called Factory. Sng the following on X on 7 October: “My wife: Can you read our baby a book? Me: I can just play an audiobook from my phone. My wife: But then it won’t be in your voice. Me: I can train a voice model.” His conclusion was: “Parenting hits different when you work in AI.”

Feedback isn’t going to dunk on this, because a large proportion of the people with access to the internet already have, and at this point it’s too easy. However, we will note that Sng has since deleted the post, and on 8 October : “Ok, enough jokes for a while. I’ll go back to reading bedtime stories for now.” The replies to this post suggest that people don’t believe he was joking.

The trouble is, of course, that the claims routinely made by AI bros are so over the top that it is hard to differentiate a parody from the real thing. The internet adage Poe’s law describes this phenomenon for extreme views, which are frequently so ridiculous that any parody must be clearly marked as such.

Perhaps we need a corollary, something like: “Without a blatant display of humour, it is utterly impossible to parody antisocial AI hype in such a way that it cannot be mistaken for the genuine article”. We could call it Sng’s law.

Got a story for Feedback?

You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.

Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

To boldly cook

Various Trekkies in the New ������ý office have pointed out to Feedback that this year is the 60th anniversary of the venerable sci-fi franchise Star Trek (TV columnist Bethan Ackerley even wrote a whole article about it). Naturally, its corporate owners have marked the occasion by cancelling all the television shows still in production. A movie is currently in development, but since that has been continuously true ever since the last cinematic release in, er, 2016, it seems best not to hold one’s breath.

In the absence of, say, a special episode where the characters in a current show are inserted Forrest Gump-style into an episode of the original programme, fans must make do with what they have, and what they have is apparently an expensive range of Star Trek-branded cookware, one item of which was briefly sent into space.

For some reason, Star Trek has partnered with Le Creuset, makers of distinctively orange cookware. One can now buy a , including various casserole dishes emblazoned with trekanalia, a mug with a handle shaped like one of Spock’s pointed ears, and a spoon rest in the form of a Vulcan salute. A small prize, also, to whoever came up with the idea of the .

To draw attention to this new range, Le Creuset hired a company called , which describe themselves as “the industry leaders in filming products, items, and bespoke activations in space”. Sent Into Space used a balloon to take a Star Trek casserole dish to an altitude of 35 kilometres, which isn’t a sentence Feedback ever expected to write. One can, if one so chooses, this event on the Le Creuset YouTube channel, which is a thing that exists.

Chief subeditor Kelsey Hayes learned of this after being sent a promotional email about it. She notes that 35 km is “well below the Kármán line”, which is one standard definition for the edge of space and is somewhat arbitrarily set at 100 km altitude. So, it’s a matter of debate whether the cookpot went to space or just really high.

Feedback will say this: we prefer this stunt to that time Elon Musk sent a Tesla Roadster into space. That car is now orbiting the sun and will litter the solar system forever. In contrast, the Le Creuset cocotte was parachuted back to Earth.

Happily, the landing took place in an isolated field. As Kelsey says: “Imagine getting beaned by a Le Creuset Dutch oven dropped from 110,000 feet.”

Hey good-looking

Feedback is always keen on a new scientific acronym, and this one is new to us: self-assessed physical attractiveness (SAPA). As the name suggests, it refers to a person’s opinion of their own hotness. And according to a recent , a person’s SAPA can be linked to a host of other traits.

In the journal Evolutionary Psychology, two researchers report asking hundreds of volunteers to rate their own attractiveness and then answer questions to see what correlated with SAPA. “Participants rated their attractiveness on a 0–100 scale,” which Feedback finds immediately baffling because how do you choose between, say, 76 and 77? Surely 1 to 10 would do.

This one was sent our way by assistant news editor Alexandra Thompson, who flagged a key line in the abstract – “higher self-rated attractiveness was associated with being male” – and simply said “LOL”. We must tell you that higher SAPA was also associated with holding a university degree, greater optimism, being more religious, having a liberal political orientation and being able to tolerate ambiguity. In contrast, “cognitive ability showed a small negative association with SAPA”.

It seems to follow that the people with the highest opinion of their own attractiveness are men who have university degrees despite lacking cognitive ability. Upon having this realisation, Feedback had a flashback to our days as an undergraduate, and we can see the truth in it.

The researchers also did personality tests, but since they used the DISC test invented by the creator of Wonder Woman, which is decidedly non-evidence-based, we won’t bother about the results.

The point of all this is to try to understand the dynamics of our society. The authors write: “There is a vast literature on the beauty premium, which suggests that, in males, and possibly more in females, physical attractiveness is a considerable asset in all competitive situations such as mate selection.”

Feedback cannot quite get over how many people think of dating as inherently competitive. Our experience is that the main obstacle to securing a healthy adult relationship isn’t competitors who are more attractive, but rather one’s own devastating personality flaws.

Maybe that’s because Feedback is so ridiculously good-looking.

Monks gone wild

Our mission to explore the world of unfortunate tech-induced abbreviations and truncations is ongoing. Duncan King tells us that, in the 1970s, his job included teaching students how to use the Science Citation Index, an index of thousands of leading journals.

Duncan explains that the index used a KeyWord In Context system. However, on occasion this led to peculiar side effects. Notably, an entry that was supposed to read as “Atherosclerotic tendencies in monks” would be split by the format, appearing instead as “ATHEROSCL EROTIC TENDENCIES IN MONKS”.

Got a story for Feedback?

You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.