DAVID ADAMS writes about the odder side of life…
• What would you say to an alien? A new campaign, headed by Professor Christopher Riley from the University of Lincoln”s School of Film and Media, is calling for message suggestions so that one final message can be added to those carried on the two Voyager spacecraft – currently hurtling through the outer reaches of our solar system – before we lose contact. The two Voyager probes – named 1 and 2 – were launched in 1977 on a mission to explore space and both carry “golden records” containing music, greetings, sounds and pictures to communicate something of life on Earth should they encounter aliens. But Professor Riley believes the messages should be updated before the probes lose all on-board electrical power in around 3,000 days and has called for submissions for a new message to be added to reflect something of what’s happened over the past 40 years (no more than 1,000 characters long).
• Northern European leaders including British PM David Cameron, Danish PM Lars Rasmussen and Iceland’s PM Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson got to show off their Lego building skills (or lack of them) during a recent visit to Iceland. The leaders were reportedly each given six pieces of Lego and 40 seconds to make a duck out of them as part of what was described as a “creative bonding challenge” at a two day summit in the capital of Reykjavik. There’s apparently nine million different ways of combining the pieces to create a duck and from what we’ve seen (we won’t name names), the results were varied to say the least.
• Making your way through crowded city streets can be a time-consuming, frustrating process. So much so that a shopping centre in the UK city of Liverpool has reportedly decided to address the problem by trialling fast pedestrian lanes. The move comes as research shows almost half of all shoppers say they find the slow pace of walking the most annoying aspect of shopping. It’s not the first time the idea has been floated – last year Chongqing City introduced special walking lanes for smartphone users to clear other lanes.
