60 | NewScientist | 19 January 2013

FEEDBACK

WE MENTIONED recently that the New Mexico Museum of Natural History has devoted a whole issue of its Bulletin to the subject of coprolites – aka fossilised faeces (8 December 2012). This reminded Michael Ghirelli of the time he spent studying the geology around Shillington, a small village in Bedfordshire, UK.

Michael informs us – and we must warn you that things get scatological here – that: “Shillington was one of the foremost centres of the coprolite mining industry in England from the 18th century onwards. The word coprolite is Greek for ‘stony turd’, or fossilised poo, so it is not surprising that coprolites had been found to be a valuable source of phosphate for spreading on arable fields. In the mid-19th century, Shillington’s population nearly doubled as scores of local men, women, and children were employed working the coprolite seams.

“It was pure coincidence,”

Strolling round Rundle Mall shopping centre in Adelaide, South Australia, Christine Linton was disconcerted to see a sign offering “Organic Water for Sale”

Michael continues, “that the older name for the village at that time was actually Shitlingon, providing a nice example of topographic nominative determinism.

“In the 1881 census, however, the population surveyors decided that perhaps Shitlington might be a little shocking to Queen Victoria’s delicate ears should she suddenly on a whim decide to enquire of the modes of employment of her subjects in Bedfordshire. So the village had its name changed from a word meaning faeces to the word for a small silver coin of the realm – the now defunct shilling.”

You can read more about this charming village and its coprolite industry at shillington-history.org.uk. The change of name is referred to in the section “The Village and its Past”.

SPAM, SPAM, SPAM. Many readers will recall with horror the sensation of opening an email program in the

morning and being informed that it is downloading thousands of messages – especially when you know that you have to get through all of them to reach that last, important, missive you have been expecting. Mark Ribbands forwards an image of an online contact’s extreme example: “Updating cache directory,” it says: “received 16 of 18446744073707470119 headers”.

Feedback gets a lot of spam, but that’s just ridiculous. We were first tempted to compare this astounding number of messages with the age of the universe – roughly 432,329,886,000,000,000 seconds, implying about 42 messages per second since the big bang.

But that would be absurd. The first network email, in this universe at least, was sent some time in 1971 – about 1,294,000,000 seconds ago. Assuming Mark’s acquaintance was an early adopter, they’d have been receiving a very impressive 14 trillion emails per second ever since.

That really is a lot of spam.

AGE could explain why we’ve mislaid the name of the person who sent us an advertisement for avogel.co.uk and its Saw Palmetto capsules, which it carefully described as “a traditional herbal medicinal product used for the relief of lower urinary tract symptoms in men”. The kind reader drew our attention to the ad’s offer of a “Free prostate check online”.

With some trepidation, in case we might be about to discover an alarming advance in remote medical robotics, we visited bit.ly/prostatetest. So it was a pleasant surprise to find quite a sensible questionnaire about issues that men may have about urination.

Even so, and we say this with feeling, if you’re a man over 50 and you have any of the issues mentioned, consider consulting your family doctor for a check – rather more important than depending on websites promoting plant-based nostrums.

IN AN email titled “Confusing railway notice”, Robin Stevens sends us a photo of a notice beside a platform entrance at Reading station, UK. The display indicates that: “The next train is not scheduled to stop at this platform”.

Robin’s photo makes it clear, however, that this is a bay platform so, as he points out: “Failure to stop would result in the train ploughing through the buffers and a brick wall before careering across the station concourse. Given that this seems highly undesirable, I am confused as to the meaning of the sign.”

So is Feedback.

DOES the UK National Health Service’s IT operation need more female input?

The question was raised when Karen Ashworth tried to use the NHS “choose and book” website to re-arrange a gynaecology appointment in favour of one that wouldn’t coincide with her period.

She was offered only times that were exactly 28 days ahead of the original appointment.

FINALLY, when he was creating a new password at Nike.com, Terence Kuch was advised to include “At least 1 mixed case letter”. He says he would like to, but “I can’t find any in the alphabet”.

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.

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