Feedback is New Scientist’s a popular side view of the latest science and technology news. Items you think readers might find interesting can be submitted to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com
A pile of sheds
In a previous installment of our ongoing crusade to identify the world’s strangest units of measurement (March 7th), Feedback made a definite point. At the end of the extended section on the use of polar bears as a unit of snow mass, we quoted reader Steve Tees as quite surprised at how big the titular shed is in the term “sliding”, as in “‘sliding load xxxx’ causing reverse on various highways”.
Email after email has been loading into our inbox ever since. If only there was a word we could use to express the concept of an excessive amount of something.
Two readers independently offer a possible etymology of the word. Bryn Glover and John Newton both have the same connection to highway accidents: “A lorry has apparently shed its load”.
F. Ian Lamb suggests that we think of “relief” as an “endogenous relative scaling (ERS) unit”. This means that one person’s perception of big may differ from someone else’s depending on past experiences. For example, £1,000 may be a loss to a person living in poverty, but a billionaire may spend the same amount just to eat at a fancy restaurant. “I’m sure there must be other units with these features,” says Ian. Readers may send any examples of ERS units to the usual address.
But maybe the solution lies in some pretty fundamental physics. William Croydon writes us that the shed is a unit that is used in nuclear physics. This may require a bit of explanation. In particle physics, researchers spend a lot of time shooting infinitesimal particles at each other and watching what happens when they collide. As a result, they needed a label for very small cross-sectional areas.
This is where the “barn” unit comes from, which William explains is 100 square femtometres, or 10-28 square meters. This is the approximate cross-sectional area of the nucleus of a uranium atom, which of course is what you’re trying to hit if you want to start a nuclear reaction. This ridiculously small area appears to be the nuclear physics equivalent of the broad side of a barn in terms of being easily hit.
William adds that a “smaller ‘shed'” was also used in the past, but admits it’s “foggy” because it’s so much smaller. Feedback looked online and discovered two smaller derivatives of the barn. The first, defined as 1 millionth (10-6) barn, is apparently called an outbuilding. A far smaller yoctobarn, defined as 10-24 from the barn, there is a shed.
Feedback Not sure what the physicists were thinking when they decided the shed would be an order of magnitude smaller than the shed. Regardless, William is clearly correct when he says that even a very large load of shelters would indeed be “too small to cause problems on the motorway”.
Finally, Tony Lewis offers a solution that creates a whole new problem: “Steve Tees wants to know the size of the shelters involved in the xxxx shelters blocking the freeway. I can’t give him the dimensions, but it has to be xxxx load of the shelter.”
The pencil is stronger
Feedback is enjoyed by the former The new scientist puzzle book by consultant Rob Eastaway Much ado about numberswhich examines how William Shakespeare was influenced by the mathematics of his time.
No legacy is as rich as honesty, so Feedback admits to feeling a little Shakespearean as he’s encountered not one, but three Settlement-next-door movies in the last few months: Riz Ahmed’s modern adaptation; Scarlettgender swapped Settlement taking place in what appears to be the afterlife; and an Oscar winner Hamnet. We can’t think why a story about a corrupt state in terminal decline led by a morally bankrupt would be so in vogue.
Still, we were intrigued to learn from Rob’s book that “black lead,” otherwise known as graphite, was used to write implements as early as Will’s lifetime, so he may have used a pencil instead of a quill to scribble at least some of his funny skirmishes.
This has been covered Stationery News under the heading “2B or not 2B?”, which is very good. However, the article tacitly admits that all the pencils used by Bard would be pure graphite, meaning “the pencil would be 9B, not 2B”.
Six sides of water
Reader Joseph Olechno forwarded us a marketing email touting the benefits of “hexagonal water”—which is apparently “10 times healthier than lemon water“.
Hexagonal water, in case it wasn’t obvious, is water that has undergone an unspecified treatment that causes the molecules to line up in hexagonal arrays. A cursory glance at the behavior of molecules in a liquid will tell you that such an arrangement is unlikely to last more than a fraction of a second.
Still, the idea seems to have enduring appeal. A look in our archives reveals an attempt to make wine from hexagonal water, not to mention adjacent terms like “vibrationally charged interactive water” and “sexy water” (don’t ask).
The main feedback question is: why hexagons? If you wanted to maximize the magical potential of your water, you would arrange the molecules into pentagrams. But maybe that would be a temptation of fate. After all, a careless drinker could create a satanic inverted pentagram by simply turning his water bottle upside down.
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