‘Roughly 109.5 golden retrievers’: a new way to measure ice

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It’s raining cats and dogs

A new unit of measurement has disappeared – and in this case, the slang verb is doubly appropriate. Reader Alan Baker came across a weather report for CBS News in Austin, Texas, warning of freezing rain. Meteorologist Avery Tomasco noted that Central Texas could receive up to a half-inch of freezing rain, which of course would turn to ice upon landfall.

To explain how bad this was, Tomasco explained that “ice is HEAVY” and can easily knock tree branches into power lines (for example). Even half an inch of ice, he explained, was a big problem. “On a 30-foot-wide tree, that’s more than 7,000 pounds of ice, or about 109.5 adult golden retrievers,” he wrote.

That’s indeed a lot of affectionate, fluffy dogs. It’s unclear from feedback whether this image of more than 100 dogs slowly drifting up a tree actually helps people understand the risks of freezing rain, but we’re not going to quibble on that point.

We will, however, quibble with the expression “approximately 109.5”. There’s nothing approximate about 109.5. On the contrary: it’s a surprisingly accurate number of golden retrievers sitting on its tree, and actually slightly worrying when you start to wonder what particular accident happened to one of the dogs to cause it to be cut in half.

Nada to see here

In today’s field of AI nonsense, erasing Canada from the map might be one of the biggest. Apparently, someone asked an AI “how many countries end in ‘nada'”, only for it to respond that “there is no country in the world whose official English name ends with the letters ‘nada’.” The AI ​​went on to clarify that “Although the country of Canada contains the letter sequence ‘nada’, it ends with the letter ‘a’.”

There is also the little matter of Granada. To be fair, the response had some fine print underneath, warning that “AI responses may include errors.”

We should point out that this is based on a screenshot posted on social media, so it could be a fake. That said, the logo in the screenshot was that of Reddit, which has an AI-powered tool called Reddit Answers. Comments duly asked told AI the same question.

We were told: “No country ends in ‘nada’. This question appears to be based on a misunderstanding or a playful trick… It appears the question is designed to highlight the limitations or bizarre responses of the AI, rather than seeking a factual answer about country names.” Which is somehow smarter than the original answer, and also just as useless.

In a fit of pedantry, one of our editors pointed out that our question was worded slightly differently, so Feedback wearily posed the original question to the AI. The AI ​​stuck to its guns, insisting that “there is no country that ends in ‘nada.’ However, she admitted (and see if you can spot the problem here) that “there are a few countries that end in ‘anada’ and ‘ada’.”

The AI ​​then offered some examples. This time he succeeded in recalling the existence of Canada and Grenada. He also rightly pointed out that Granada shares the end but is not a country, but rather a city in Spain.

Everything was going so well, but then AI claimed that another country that ends in “ada” is Uganda. Then, just to make sure he got things straight, he gave us a “Fun Fact”: There is “a fictional country in the Marvel Universe” called “Wakanada.” If you are not By the way With Marvel’s stories about the superhero Black Panther, his fictional homeland is called Wakanda. We’re not sure what “Wakanada” is, but it looks like someone tried and failed to pronounce Oaxaca.

Comments can only offer one lesson from all this nonsense: When an AI tells you it has a fun fact to share, what follows is probably neither fun nor a fact.

Life, the universe…

Like much of the world, Feedback suffered from the 2025 fad of kids waving their hands and saying “six seven” in a sing-song voice every time that pair of numbers appeared. Now that the fashion has passed, we finally feel able to talk about it.

Of course, the whole point of “6-7” was that it made absolutely no sense. It comes from a song called “Doot Doot (6 7)” by Skrilla, an American rapper, but it’s not clear what that means in the song. Comments suggest it’s just there because Skrilla needed something to fill a void and “la la la” didn’t scan. Regardless, later uses of the phrase were often confusing and absurd. Feedback Jr, our best and only authority on under-20 issues, assures us that this means nothing.

However, we may have finally found the true meaning of 6-7. This comes to us from a screenshot of what appears to be an Instagram post, although we haven’t been able to locate said post.

Readers will recall that, in the work of Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxya supercomputer called Deep Thought brainstorms for several million years to find the answer to the ultimate question, only to announce that the answer is 42 and that the real problem is finding the question.

Hence this Instagram post, which says: “The ultimate question of life, the universe and everything else, is ‘what is 6 7?’ » The computer, unfortunately, misinterpreted space as multiplication. Now this would be the AI ​​blooper to end all AI bloopers.

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