is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
Round house
There is a flourishing genre of content on YouTube and other video sites that can best be described as “gawping at real estate listings”. It can be beautiful, spacious houses that most of us can only dream of living in, or baroque explosions of horrific taste in interior decoration on par with whatever has happened to the White House lately.
So far, Feedback hasn’t been inclined to add to this content pile-up, but reporter Matthew Sparkes has lured us in with a listing on RightMove. It is for a building in Farnborough, England, on sale for £750,000. The listing has a link underneath the price that reads “Can you afford it?” Feedback didn’t click because we don’t need a website to tell us the answer.
The building is an upright white cylinder, with chunky extra bits on one side. The built area is about 1000 square metres. Feedback struggled to precisely count the rooms because the ground floor is partly open-plan, but there are at least 10 rooms on the ground floor and potentially around 20 on the floor above, though the top floor has a disappointingly scanty five.
Matt sarcastically described it as a “perfect family home”, and Feedback concurs with his sarcasm. Only a family whose members don’t enjoy each other’s company could use a building like this.
Readers wondering what this is doing in Feedback, wonder no longer. This building is the former Farnborough Centrifuge, which was used, starting in 1955, to train pilots to cope with the intense g-forces required for high-velocity flight and, later, space travel. The main cylindrical building houses the centrifuge, while the drive motor and bearings are in the basement. Helen Sharman, the first UK astronaut, used the centrifuge. No wonder the estate agents describe it as “a unique opportunity to purchase a piece of British aviation history”.
The Farnborough Centrifuge ceased operations in 2019, when a new and more modern centrifuge was built. It passed into the hands of a charity called the Farnborough Air Sciences Trust (FAST). However, in August 2024, FAST announced that it had been forced to close the centrifuge after the building’s owner asked for “a five-fold increase in rental payment”.
Two years later, it is up for sale. Does anyone have a spare £750,000 and fancy opening a museum? Feedback promises not to highlight it as unduly niche, because it actually sounds like somewhere we might go.
A quantum civil service
The ingenuity of the UK civil service truly knows no bounds. Not only can it outsource many of its functions to private companies, but it can also translate quantum phenomena into the macroscopic world.
How else to explain the sign spotted by reader Robert Milne outside the Twickenham job centre? It reads “Automated external defibrillator located inside”. Presumably the defibrillator is in superposition both inside and outside the building. Robert wonders if the same is now true of his job: “Am I now allowed to be both in full-time paid employment and on the dole at the same time?”
Feedback is further minded to inquire how much use the defibrillator is to cardiovascularly challenged members of the public during the many hours of the day when the job centre is closed and the defibrillator locked away.
We also want to know in what sense the defibrillator is “automated”. Does it have an internal AI and robotic arm, so it can snake out of its container and zap unwitting jobseekers?
Feeling resigned
Speaking of rogue AIs, readers may recall the actions of Anthropic’s Jacob Coxon, who on 9 September wrote: “I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.”
Feedback had a bit about this, but it was cut from a previous column because the editors said not enough people would get the reference. Feedback has reluctantly accepted the strong evidence, including book sales and talking to a normal person, that while many people have read J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy novels and The Lord of the Rings, far fewer have read his mythological epic .
is, we concede, pretty complicated. However, the essence is simple enough. There is a dark lord called Melkor. Melkor has a servant called Sauron, and they hang out in a fortress called Angband doing evil things. This includes creating the UrulÓki, more commonly known as dragons.
A lot of tech bros appear to have read this, although Feedback isn’t sure they have understood it fully. Famously, the surveillance company Palantir is named for the magical seeing-stones in The Lord of the Rings, a strong choice given that only two (speaking) characters make heavy use of the Palantir: one goes evil and the other sets himself on fire.
However, at least some readers of Tolkien do appear to have understood his works. Writing on Threads, a fan who goes simply by “bree” wrote the following, which seems to Feedback to cut to the heart of the matter: “I resigned from Angband today. I spent the last three centuries doing metaphysical research for both Sauron and Melkor. Neither dark lord is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to wingèd UrulÓki and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.”
Got a story for Feedback?
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.