FEEDBACK - key pirate

RECYCLING raises interesting psychological issues. Feedback recalls the London Borough of Tower Hamlets some years ago deciding to issue households with one bag for all recyclable waste – so we no longer had to sort out paper, glass and different kinds of plastic. A neighbour was most put out. Her native tongue was, as it happened, German. She had been deprived, it seemed, of the chance to sigh contentedly “Alles ist in Ordnung” as she filed the last piece of no-longerwanted stuff in its proper place.

NOWADAYS recycling, in Europe at least, involves reading small print. Or not reading it. Feedback thanks Perry Bebbington for alerting us to the fact that New Scientist delivery wrappers in the UK are no longer designated “oxodegradable”, which had reminded a number of readers of a locally popular gravy-making product (3 April 2010). Now these wrappers instruct  us to “Recycle with bags at larger stores – not at kerbside”. But what if you live far from a larger store? No problem: “If you are unable to recycle locally, you can return it to this address…” Perry imagines that “the resource cost of this far exceeds the recycling value of the wrapper”. He now wonders: if he does post a wrapper back, should he write on the envelope, “If you are unable to recycle this locally, you can return it to..."

DATA. We need data on this recycling mystery. So we inspect the week’s crop of magazines. The Journalist, from the eponymous National Union, comes in a wrapper that “is oxobiodegradable and can be fully recycled”. That for Stage, Screen and Radio from sister union BECTU “is biodegradable and can be added to your compost bin”. We wondered whether the company that mails New Scientist was suggesting that readers post their wrappers back, as discussed above, to avoid the requirements of German law, of schemes such as the  Grüne Punkt, or more generally of the EU Directive on Packaging. But both these magazines have readers throughout the European Union and neither feels that need. Our inquiries continue.

  WHEN UK newspaper The Guardian printed an impressive photo of star HR 5171 A on 13 March, it noted that it is “1300 times the diameter of our sun” and “one  of the 10 biggest objects to be found in our solar system”. Jamie Wallace is “surprised astronomers took so long to find it”. We applaud the newspaper for owning up on the same day and for resisting the temptation to be over-logical and argue that it was indeed found in our solar system, and that we cannot rule out observers in other solar systems finding scads of bigger things.

CAN Feedback now appease Muphry, whose Law points out that if you  write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault in what you have written, as we described on 1 March? Richard Mellish was at least the fourth reader to point out that New Scientist wrote in the same issue that “all extant humans are ancestors of those 2000 or so” who survived a population crash 70,000 years ago (p 34). So, Richard asks, do we think “we’re living backwards in time?” Searching our piling system, we discover that this ancestral problem is not new. Or has the instance that we appear to have corrected seven years ago propagated backward in time (5 May 2007, p 25)? How wide are Muphry’s powers?

DATA: do they have mass? Feedback has been pondering this for months. We have done so mostly in the bath, where it is of course inadvisable to type, which explains our silence since we last raised the issue on 30 November 2013. Now we remember reports of a measurement of the energy required to erase data (10 March 2012, p 10). In 1961 physicist Rolf Landauer put the fundamental minimum – ignoring the messiness of actual storage devices – at about 3 × 10-21 joules per bit. By Albert Einstein’s famous formula, that implies a mass of 3 × 10-38 kilograms per bit or, in marginally friendlier units, 0.3 yoctograms per gigabyte. But that would be the minuscule mass associated with data not being there any more; and we find it unsatisfying that this calculation takes no account of how interesting the erased data were. Can any readers help?

FINALLY, and closer to Earth, our thoughts about the mass of data remind us of the experience of Nicholas Solntseff. Back in 1967 he travelled home from Imperial College London to Australia, carrying an early Fortran language compiler program on punched cards. A customs official at Sydney  airport asked him to pay import duty on some 2000 pieces of cardboard. Nicholas thought for a moment, and declared he was interested in importing not cardboard, but the 160,000 columns of holes which,  he was sure, were massless and therefore not subject to duty. In the end customs let him through.