16 May

one should be wary of the eagerness of friends to help one out. An astronomy postgraduate at Cambridge was trying to find a Chinese version of the quote he wanted to put at the front of his thesis. In English, the quote is: "It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness." His friends were becoming concerned at the amount of time it was taking him. The postgraduate was delighted when an anonymous piece of paper with some Chinese characters and the English phrase turned up on his desk. He checked a couple of the symbols with an Internet dictionary and found that at least one of them tallied with a word in his quote, so he hurriedly put the quote into his thesis, which was due to be handed in. As it turned out, the quote conveyed rather a different message than he had intended. A friend had copied the characters from the back of a noodle packet. Their meaning? "Store in a cool dry place and avoid direct sunlight." Apparently, the victim of this jape does not yet know that his thesis has this motto on it, but the rest of his department does. All of them, we are told--including the victim--are regular readers of this column. As the saying goes, you read it here first. forget the millennium bug. The Euro bug could cause us all a lot more trouble. Many people are only just learning how to get their PC to print out the correct sign for pounds sterling. All too often it comes out as a hash sign, either on screen, on paper, or both. They will have even more difficulty with the sign for the new Euro currency. The Euro sign is an odd E with two lines added. The European Commission says the E was inspired by the Greek letter epsilon, and is also the first letter of Europe. The lines represent the hoped-for stability of the currency. "The sign is very convenient and will soon be on every new computer or typewriter keyboard," says the Commission. Maybe. But it cannot be found on any existing keyboard, nor is it included in any existing computer character set. Never one to miss an opportunity to tell people why they need to buy the new Windows 98 operating system when it goes on sale in June, Microsoft has already jumped in with the pledge that Windows 98 will "support the Euro currency symbol". Windows 95 can be upgraded to display and print the symbol, but Microsoft is doing nothing about Windows 3 or DOS. Meanwhile, nowhere in the four pages of Microsoft puff is there any sight of the Euro sign itself. Could this perhaps be because Microsoft's own office computers cannot print it yet? Oh no, says Microsoft. "It's just that we didn't put it in." james morley tells us that he was somewhat less than reassured by the statement on the front of a Department of Trade and Industry questionnaire he received about employee relations. It says: "Everything that you say in the questionnaire will remain confidential...After the answers have been entered into a computer, the questionnaire will be destroyed." the idea that space is a place of purity, silence and serenity gets further dented with every day that the Mir space station stays in orbit. The latest problem the Mir astronauts are facing is space junk. According to NASA, so much junk is hitting the station that some scientists say the outpost looks like a battered Ford Escort with a dodgy paint job. Objects taking their toll on Mir include human waste, parts of discarded satellites and paint flecks, to say nothing of the usual sprinkling of space dust. One wonders how much easier the beleaguered astronauts on board will sleep at nights after NASA's announcement that instruments placed outside Mir and recently returned to Earth have registered "a lot more damage than we expected". feedback has no great sympathy for most criminals, but nevertheless feels a twinge of pity for the Polish thieves who stole an Austrian lorry carrying diplomatic mail in Warsaw last month. Unknown to the robbers, the lorry was fitted with a satellite positioning system that meant the police were able to locate exactly where it was. The vehicle was reported stolen at 7 am. Some four hours later it was stopped by a police blockade and the puzzled thieves were arrested. the division of electronics giant JVC which handles video and computer equipment has just launched a website which "gives an insight into the scale of the company's activities" in sectors such as multimedia. The Internet address looks a bit strange, though. According to the press release, the site's address is "Error! Bookmark not defined". JVC has now followed the press release with urgent faxes begging magazines to print the correct address "www.jvcpro.co.uk". The original text, says JVC, was "corrupted by a software problem". Well, that's multimedia for you. this, surely, is an example not so much of nominative determinism as its opposite. A colleague was wandering down the street he lives in a few nights ago and happened to glance up at the placard on the church--The Temple of Truth--next to his flat. The placard read: "The minister is L. Bent." On what, we wonder. finally, the Red Lion pub at Lacock in Wiltshire offers whisky-flavoured condoms for sale. The small print at the bottom of the machine advises: "Warning--Do not drive while using this product." Has something funny happened to you or to someone you know? Send it in.