1
64 | NewScientist | 23 March 2013 FEEDBACK BIOLOGIST Peter Lawrence was thrilled to discover how highly valued his classic book The Making of a Fly seemed to be. We found this out when reader Colin MacLeod alerted us to a blog post by biologist Michael Eisen which forensically deconstructs how Lawrence’s thrill came to pass. Fascinated, we contacted Eisen for an update – to be told that Lawrence regaled guests at his 70th birthday party with the news that his book was being offered on Amazon.com for $23,698,655.93. The way Eisen tells it, one of his graduate students was the first to spot interesting pricing for The Making of a Fly, with two copies on offer at prices from $1,730,045.91 (plus $3.99 shipping). Eisen checked back the next day and found that both had gone up substantially. Continuing to track the prices, he deduced that each day seller A was pricing their copy at 0.9983 The label on Bill Ross’s jelly dessert purchased from the company cafeteria said, “Best Before Feb 30, 2013”. Bill wonders when this will be and how he will get there times seller B’s price – and seller B immediately raised theirs to 1.27059 times the result. Or, rather, both sellers were running software that repriced the book daily – until the price reached $23 million and, Eisen deduces, someone other than he took a look and decided that this was a bit much. Seller A’s strategy was clear enough – to fractionally undercut other sellers. Eisen suspects that seller B didn’t in fact have a copy, but that they were hoping to capture a buyer, get the book from seller A, send it to the buyer and pocket the difference. That was a while ago, but runaway pricing continues, presumably with the same sort of software involved. One wet Sunday afternoon recently, Feedback searched Amazon Books by price. The first entry listed six second-hand copies of The Law of Mortgages by Edward F. Cousins on sale from $58,146,323.61 to $83,999,266.57 – expensive, even for a law book. But bioscience continued to reign supreme, with one copy of Recent Advances in Epilepsy listed at $59,780,802,831,736.00, nearly four times the US national debt. You would need to consult a very special bank manager before clicking “buy”. When we checked back a couple of weeks later, however, the epilepsy volume was available for $0.02 plus shipping. What would happen if the national debt showed the same volatility? BELGICA, an asteroid discovered by the Belgian Eugène Joseph Delporte in 1925, was named after Belgium. The country famously consists of two regions, Flemish-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia, which don’t always see eye to eye. In fact, some Flemish politicians want to split the country into two independent states. How apt, then, that a team of Italian and American astronomers discovered at the end of last year that Belgica actually consists of not one rock but two similar-sized ones circling each other. So does this mean that Belgica is about to split into two independent states? Or does the astronomical finding simply confirm what non-separatist politicians have always said: that the two entities are not independent, but form a confederation within the Belgica system? Either way, the two rocks won’t be named “Flanders” and “Wallonia”, as the name Wallonia was awarded to an asteroid discovered in 1981. HEALTH centres in the UK are adopting the use of touchscreens for people to self check-in when they arrive for an appointment. When Steve James approaches the screen in his local centre and touches it to start, the machine asks him if he is male or female. Then it asks him the day and month of his birth. Finally, it asks: “What year were you born?”. The two options presented to him for an answer to this are: “1975” (the year of his birth) or “None”. He says he is always tempted to select “None”, just to see what happens. LOOPY quote of the week is provided by Dave Harris, who found it on preventdisease.com at bit.ly/ TalkDNA. The article there on expanding DNA strands “kinda looks OK until you hit para 10,” says Dave. “Then, Whoa!” “There is evidence for a whole new type of medicine,” says the article at this point, “in which DNA can be influenced and reprogrammed by words and frequencies WITHOUT cutting out and replacing single genes.” Feeling a bit under the weather? Your DNA obviously needs a bit of a talking to… FINALLY, Bernice Brewster informs us that telecoms giant BT has just launched its new website and “paper-free” billing. The updated system seems to suggest the company is surprisingly relaxed about payment. On downloading her bill, Bernice was told: “Please make sure your payment reaches us by: 31 DEC 9999.” You can send stories to Feedback by email at [email protected]. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website. For more feedback, visit newscientist.com/feedback PAUL MCDEVITT
