Feedback is New Scientist’s popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com
Dirty videos
Feedback is nothing if not productive. Even when it looks like we are mucking about doing nothing, we are actually working. We are the epitome of #grindset. For instance, we recently wasted a lot of time on online videos and now we are going to tell you about it.
Feedback, as so often happens, fell down a YouTube rabbit hole. Fortunately, it wasn’t anti-vaccine conspiracy theories or the manosphere. Instead, we just watched a lot of footage of people cleaning carpets and rugs. This sounds unbelievably boring, but we liked that one of the cleaning companies uses devices called R2-CLEAN2 and Dirt Reynolds.
Furthermore, we found it was weirdly satisfying to watch layers of dirt being stripped away and the patterns of the rugs gradually reappearing. Hours passed. The stresses of daily life fell away. Feedback was a Zen master, our mind empty and crystal clear. There were no urges, no pressures, no past or future. There was only the rug, gradually being cleaned.
Then we came out of the trance and realised that there were some fascinating dynamics at play: an interaction between humans and technology. You see, there has clearly been an arms race among the various cleaning YouTubers to be the one to clean the filthiest rug, and therefore create the most dramatic header and thumbnail image. After all, if millions of people don’t watch you clean the rug, you don’t get a meaningful amount of advertising money.
As a result, you will struggle to find any videos showing a rug that is merely dirty. The typical rug in a cleaning video looks like it has been transported down a muddy ravine, colonised by fungi and passed through the digestive system of a dyspeptic hippopotamus. In some cases maggots are involved. The videos show people spending hours and hours, using litres of water and buckets of cleaning products, to get rid of the muck.
The whole thing is a strange microcosm of the world in which we live, in which even the most banal of activities – cleaning a rug – has been driven to its most exaggerated and ridiculous form, not because anything is achieved by it, but because a technology company is trying to make money by grabbing our attention.
Right, enough of the philosophising. That video of someone speedrunning Super Mario Odyssey isn’t going to watch itself.
Ramble rumble
In common, we suspect, with many readers, Feedback has been agog at the ongoing claims about Raynor Winn, bestselling author of The Salt Path and other books about long walks. The Observer newspaper accused her of having misled the public about how she and her husband came to be homeless. It also raised questions about quite how ill her husband is, and how much he recovered while the pair walked the UK’s South West Coast Path. Winn has denied all wrongdoing.
This all came out just weeks after the film adaptation of The Salt Path was released, causing maximum embarrassment for everyone involved, but as far as Feedback is concerned, the biggest shock is that Winn’s official name is the distinctly apt Sally Walker.
Literary devices
In July, Feedback wrote about a potential new use for generative AIs like ChatGPT: rewriting difficult literary novels to make them more accessible. In particular, we looked at pithier rewrites of some famous opening lines, none of which lost anything of importance in the abbreviation. This evidently struck a chord with you.
Eric Bignell highlighted Macbeth’s despairing soliloquy from act 5, scene 5: “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day / To the last syllable of recorded time; / And all our yesterdays have lighted fools / The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! / Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more. It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing.” That is all a bit much, isn’t it? Eric asked ChatGPT to simplify, which it did: “Life is short, meaningless, and full of empty noise.”
A lot of you also wrote in with your own suggestions for how an AI might rewrite various famous passages. Consider the instantly sinister opener to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” David Aldred boiled it down to: “It was one in the afternoon on a bright cold day in April.” See? Nothing lost, really!
By far the most popular choice was the opening line of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” Ian Glendon suggested a gleefully literal reimagining: “The clock was fine when I bought it, now it no longer works”. However, three people – Simon Bird, David Strachan and Rod Newbery – all came up with essentially the same simplification, which Feedback thinks may be impossible to top: “On average, it was OK.”
Simon also had an alternative to the infamous first line of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford: “It was a dark and stormy night”. Bird suggests something we suspect even the best AIs wouldn’t come up with: “Welcome to Scotland.”
However, Stuart Bell gets the last word, suggesting letting an AI loose on James Joyce’s legendarily impenetrable Ulysses. Not because it would make it any better, but because the book “should break any AI, or at least give it a headache”.
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