I’ve just had to e-mail a science education website (which shall remain nameless) to explain that the interior of the Sun is probably not, as it claims, around 107 Kelvin. By way of comparison, water freezes at about 273 Kelvin.

The problem seems to be a typical copy-and-paste problem in software: the power notation in 10⁷ has been lost at some point. (A scan through a few online sources suggests estimated temperatures for the core of the Sun cluster around 1.5 x 10⁷ K.) I wonder how many such errors are propagating, seldom noticed, through the Internet: the dords of our day.

Update: I received the following response: I understand that the [page] is speaking about absolute temperature and the Planck temperature, and it is in this context that the Sun's interior temperature is mentioned as only 107 K. It seems to me to be something different to what you are expecting to read, which would be the Sun’s interior temperature of 1.5 X 10**7 Kelvin. This is only my opinion, however I will ask for a second opinion to our scientists. Given that the page in question also refers to what things were like 10-43 seconds after the Big Bang, I think I’ll stick to my interpretation...

Here’s a hypothesis about the moral psychology involved in deciding priorities in the politics of child safety: it must create a huge sense of responsibility, mustn’t it? The kind where you’d lie awake at night, wondering whether children had been left endangered because you chose a wasteful use of resources? The kind where you’d want to consult with great care before recommending a new and untested course of action, lest it prove only a useless, intrusive distraction?

What actually happens is that policy in this area is announced by a man who doesn’t know a hash from a hashtag.

I have a small collection of quotations, sporadically extended, for use with fortune (which ensures that Internet Explorer, for one, will probably throw away the *nix-style line breaks). The taxonomy has proved unfortunate: worldliness and world-weariness have turned out to suggest rather more items for inclusion than unworldly or otherworldly dreaminess. Still, since some of these dicta are quite obscure or worth a second look, I decided to make some files public. (More may be added at some point: I have one with video game quotations, for example, but it really needs an edit.)

‘Who owns the past?’ (or some variation) is a common question in debates and disputes involving heritage. Here’s a similar question from the world of intellectual property law: ‘Who owns a family’s history?’

The Borghese family is a prestigious Italian family whose lineage can be traced back hundreds of years. [...] In the 1950s, Princess Marcella Borghese partnered with Revlon to launch a cosmetics company bearing her name. By 1976, Revlon owned the company outright, having purchased Princess Marcella’s remaining interest from her. [...] Among the IP included in the acquisition by Revlon were

“the words and phrases BORGHESE, MARCELLA BORGHESE, PRINCESS MARCELLA BORGHESE, and all … variations thereof, whether used as a personal name, trade name or trademark,”

as well as an exclusive licence to the Borghese family history and crest.

As commentary in the linked article suggests, one might have thought that ‘a family history, to the extent there are even any underlying IP rights, would belong jointly to all members of the family’. Though I’m fascinated by the notion that I could buy (okay, exclusively license) someone else’s family history if, I suppose, I were dissatisfied with my own. (What would you do with such a thing? Well, collect them, of course. Have a different family history for each day of the week...)

Some of the debates about ‘cultural appropriation’ have been about who gets to tell the story or stories of a (usually indigenous) group of people. One of the matters at stake is that the ‘issue of privacy can be particularly sensitive when we are dealing with the representation of small cultures. Some Indigenous cultures are often very like extended families.’¹ Perhaps the logical corollary is that some families are like small cultures.

Maybe it’s only a matter of time until ‘kitchen table lingo’ becomes protected as a form of traditional cultural expression.

1. James O. Young and Susan Haley, ‘“Nothing Comes from Nowhere”: Reflections on Cultural Appropriation as the Representation of Other Cultures’, in James O. Young and Conrad G. Brunk (eds.), The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation (2009, Oxford: Blackwell), p. 281. ↩

One odd thing about the CharityJOB recruitment site is that there isn’t, as far as the F.A.Q. seems to indicate, any requirement that advertisers must actually be charitable under some plausible definition or legal registration. Cosmo Coffee’s advertisements for such skilled professional work as graphic design, administrative support, H.R. support and market research, among other roles, list these as home-based voluntary work. Graphic and Web design are presented as competitions: if yours is the winning entry, you hand over the rights in exchange for a year’s service as a prize. (Submit a website design and you ‘can use your design for your portfolio and we will even through [sic] in a reference if needed’.) This is voluntary in the sense that any competition is, but not the sort of ‘volunteer’ work the word normally conjures in the mind. Then there are the other ‘volunteer’ roles, which, of course, also pay in coffee. Plus miscellaneous other things that are also not money, such as this one: ‘Your name included on our website and annual reports.’ This appears to be ‘voluntary’ work in the sense of doing what’s really a job but not getting the salary due to a worker.

For reasons unknown, these adverts are showing up under CharityJOB’s ‘Arts, Culture, Heritage’ category: not a consistently reputable sector of the economy when it comes to exploitation of workers, but still strange company for a coffee shop. Not a museum or gallery coffee shop; not a coffee shop promising to serve coffee through the medium of mime and dance; just ‘a modern, Italian styled coffee company’. They claim to be ‘an excellent employer and value [their] staff’, who, presumably, are worth their weight in coffee. They do not, however, appear to serve any charitable purpose; although, weirdly, their recruiter profile appears to link them to a charity called Urban Youth, as does that of a media outfit called Dark Majesty Productions, which at least proclaims itself to be not for profit. As for Cosmo Coffee, an advert for a training support worker on another site says that they’re ‘looking for some volunteers to help [them] get the company off the ground’. Some startups offer shares; others, it seems, offer coffee. I’d like to offer a charitable interpretation of these adverts, but, well, selling coffee isn’t a charitable aim. Though they do get bonus points for not using the word ‘internship’.

Update: CharityJOB have removed the Cosmo Coffee adverts after being notified that they lacked a charitable aim, so clearly they do impose that requirement when told about breaches. The linked advert on gumtree.com also seems to have disappeared shortly after being reported.