Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more In July, Feedback reported that geologist characters in movies were surprisingly likely to die, often from “work related” causes like volcanic eruptions, but remarkably frequently by murder. We wondered how other scientists fared. Andrew Hardwick flags The Avengers – not the Marvel superheroes, but the British spy series from the 1960s.
Meanwhile, David Hawke pulls us up on a detail. We claimed that one indicator a character will die is that he is played by Sean Bean. David argues that Bean’s breakout role was the heroic Richard Sharpe, in the TV adaptations of Bernard Cornwell’s historical novels.
While some of Bean’s characters “meet their doom”, David says, “surely playing Sharpe more than compensates for this”. Feedback feels David underestimates just how often Bean dies on screen. A YouTube supercut spanning 1986 to 2016 shows him meeting his maker no fewer than 24 times.
However, our main focus here is a missive from Andy Chapman. Andy notes “an unhealthy death rate” in many of these franchises, albeit with a caveat. He spent his time “working largely in British commercial archaeology ahead of quarrying and construction projects”, which tended to yield less treasure or cursed swords, and more “boxes of broken pottery and animal bone”.
Such finds, informative as they are, “don’t often lead to homicide”. Feedback is feeling a bit wiped out from the alleged “summer holidays”, which just mean we have to work while also ferrying Feedback Jr to their various social engagements. So we wanted a wellbeing hack, and reader Graham Lansdell was on hand to tell us about one.
Through a convoluted sequence of events, Graham had become aware of GEOTRAN, “a coding language for the inner bio-computers”. Promisingly, the official website informs us that “GEOTRAN is a numeric-geometrical dialect which speaks directly to the body’s information fields (memory fields). It works similarly to entering new information into a computer system.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
