What’s the smallest unit of time? In my ignorance, I had thought it might be a nanosecond, but it seems that Planck time could get the nod.

Whatever it is, it took me only that long to realise, on receipt of an email, that I had not won two million pounds in the British National Lottery Promotion.

Just for fun, though, I checked with Mr Google, who came up with a Consumer Fraud Report on the BNLP.

This confirmed that no, I would not be planning a trip to faraway places, buying a little summer place in Tasmania, swapping my Forester for the latest in environmentally friendly hybrids and investing the rest in gold.

This is just another scam, and I suggest that if you do receive an email (in very bad English) from Mr Brown Walter, Mrs Kate Ross or anyone else congratulating you on a big win but wanting your personal details and/or money before you can be paid, hit the delete button there and then.

Ah! the wonderful world of cyberspace. It’s like the curate’s egg, good in parts. A world of fast, inexpensive communication and a superb resource of information at your fingertips.

Trouble is, it’s opened up another world, a whole new one of opportunity for latter-day carpet baggers, con artists and assorted scammers slavering over the suckers in their sights.

And as for the mass of information available on the internet, it’s well to remember that there’s also such a thing as misinformation. Anyone can put just about anything out there; and correct me if I’m wrong, but I see precious little in the way of mandated checks on its authenticity.

This worries me, particularly in the field of health. The very fact that a claim for a product or a treatment is on the net seems, for some people, at least, to make it trustworthy.

Should we sanction a sanction?

Words on words: Tom Hulett has this week turned his back on the cut and thrust of local politics and applied himself to pedagogy.

The former Maroochy Shire councillor has shared with AAT the results of his research on the two puzzlingly opposite meanings of the word “sanction”, which I used last week to illustrate the glorious inconsistency of our language.

After confirming that the meanings of “sanction” depend on whether it is used as a noun or a verb, teacher Tom asks teasingly: “Should we agree to sanction a sanction on the word ‘sanction?’ ”

Nice one, Tom. And I use “nice” not in the sense of niceness, but of nicety. There’s a nice difference there, too.

And Another Thing:

Racking my brain for just one word to describe the skill of texting, I came up with “texterity”.

Those of us who have not acquired this thumb-testing skill and have been told that we’d be crazy not to do so, can perhaps take heart from an American Journal of Psychiatry article that says obsessive texters may have a mental illness. So who’s crazy now?

rich.29@bigpond.net.au