From Jonas Hermansson
The debate on how to multiply ghosts (Feedback, 19 February and Letters, 26 February) has overlooked an important factor: since ghosts should be considered to be of unnatural origin we shouldn’t stick to natural numbers only. Two ghosts could easily be multiplied by 6.5 or four ghosts by 3.25. They all end up as 13. Being a teacher I look forward to a interdisciplinary lesson with DVD and calculators.
From Leslie Martin
The assumption is that terror is indivisible. However, recent films have carried the warning “contains mild terror”, which implies that there is a fraction of terror.
What is needed is a unit of terror and I suggest the “karloff” as the main unit based on, say, the Frankenstein films. Thus you could have half a karloff of horror in any Hammer Horror film, rising to a kilokarloff for Friday the 13th.
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Greenford, Middlesex, UK
From Paul Brown
Greg Roughan’s integer-prejudiced “multiplied by what, dumb-ass?” ignores the recent revelations regarding fractional students at the University of Dundee (Feedback, 15 January). If we can have fractional people, I’m sure “real” ghosts are possible; so how about “multiplied by 2, smarty-pants (assuming an initial population of 6.5 ghosts)”.
For those who consider ghosts to be imaginary, a similar calculation in the complex domain will suffice.
Cotton Tree, Queensland, Australia
Malmö, Sweden
