Feedback: How big is my landslide?-The New Scientist Magazine

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Feedback: How big is my landslide?
02 September 2011



How big is my landslide?

FEEDBACK understands the motivation for expressing unfamiliarly large quantities in blue whale units, and so forth (19 June 2010). But what can have been going through the mind of a journalist on the New Zealand Herald? That paper published on 19 August the news that "the Manawatu Gorge is likely to be closed for a week after a slip reported to be 'bigger than Ben-Hur' came down last night following heavy rain."

Mike Kean asks whether road contractors in his country are "so slow that a Charlton-Heston-sized slip takes a week to clear?" That led us to the invaluable discovery of www.celebheights.com - a website dedicated to answering our next question: how tall was Heston? Apparently, 1.9 metres when he played Ben-Hur.

Or would the comparison be to the film itself? It's 212 minutes long, which is 7270 metres of 70-millimetre film, not counting any overlaps between reels. That would be a long landslide. Or are we to compare the landslide with the most famous scenes, set in a stadium in Roman Jerusalem (Aelia Capitolina) - which very likely had no stadium?

Flaming forest fields

MEANWHILE Graham de Vahl Davis tells us that the August issue of Choice, the publication of the Australian Consumers' Association, reports that Malaysian and Indonesian orang-utan habitats are being destroyed, as forests are cleared to make way for palm tree plantations, at the rate of 300 soccer fields a day.

Should the agile orange primates, called in Malay "men of the forest", form some teams, before it's too late?

Victorian veldt vehicle

MELBOURNE, Australia, has an even less zoologically correct unit of large mass. Road safety signs there say, "If a rhinoceros on a giant skateboard was headed your way, you'd get out of the way, right?" That we would, just before trying to enumerate last night's refreshment in detail. "Well, guess what," it goes on, "a tram weighs about the same as 30 rhinos..."

Howard Arber wonders "how many rhinoceroses could fit in a tram", which makes all the difference to the conversion to blue whale units.

Voting while absent

IT DID mean something after all. We couldn't understand the import of a sign in an Australian polling station saying "Absent voters queue here" (15 January). A person going by the nickname Catprog sends us a quote from the Australian Electoral Commission's "Frequently Asked Questions", explaining: "Absent vote: Electors who are out of their division but still within their home State or Territory, may cast an 'absent vote' at any polling place in that State or Territory." That's a relief to know.

Our ancestors will thank us!

THE "Confidential Intelligence Briefing" supplement to The Week magazine, Cary Seidman reports, contains an article entitled "How Darwinism will create a conservative dynasty in America", which considers the "profound implications for what kind of society we leave our ancestors". Time to read Darwin again, then.

Strange ways of the City of London

LAZY Sunday afternoon - and it's time for a colleague to browse an east London local council's free newspaper for planning applications. One catches the eye: "Proposed development of 38-40 Trinity Square... any owner of the land or tenant who wishes to make representations..." And "tenant" is footnoted. The colleague, being a Feedback reader, reads the footnote: "'tenant' means a tenant of an agricultural holding any part of which is comprised in the land".

We sort of understand why, legally, this had to be included - in the same sort of way we understand, quantum mechanically, that the electron goes through both slits. Perhaps there was an agricultural tenant at some point. But the land in question is a stone's throw from the Tower of London (started AD 1080) and even closer to - on the inside of - a surviving fragment of the wall enclosing Roman Londinium (about AD 220).

It is, to be fair, possible that there was agricultural use around AD 500, when Londinium seems to have fallen into desuetude: we make a note to ask an archaeologist. It's likely, though, that this site has been continuously urban for 2000 years.

But then the penny drops. This is legal language. It concerns the City of London. What are the tax advantages of being an "agricultural tenant" there, we wonder.

East Enders' evasion

AND finally: the Bow district in London's East End has never been reputed for its slavish adherence to laws. It was here, for example, that Sylvia Pankhurst chose to launch her anti-war and pro-working-class feminist movement by lobbing a flint through a funeral director's window in February 1913. She got headlines in the papers.

It's not an enormous surprise, then, to see a sign in a taxi office there: "Driver's wanted".

Since the office in question is next to the courthouse, which is across the road from the police station, the question must be: why has the sign been there for a year or more? Could it be that the local forces of law and order have become complacent about breaches of the laws of punctuation (30 April)?