Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
Chill with a drop of oxygen
WOODLAND Park, Colorado, is at an elevation of 2580 metres. Gary Branum told us this a while ago in a message that promptly got lost in our piling system but has now resurfaced. “So it’s not surprising,” he added, “that some flatlanders have a bit of trouble adjusting to the lower oxygen availability. It is, however, somewhat astounding that I can solve that problem by buying ‘liquid oxygen’ and adding it to my drinking water.”
By way of an explanation, Gary sent us an advert from the Ute Pass Trader, a Woodland Park shopping guide. Under the headline, “Tourist says: ‘I can breathe again'”, the advert quotes the tourist, called Ned, as complaining that the altitude had literally taken his breath away. “My heart was pounding, my head hurt, and I was SO tired. But all that’s gone since I purchased the liquid oxygen supplement from the knowledgeable people at Whole in the Wall Herb Shoppe. I started to feel better in just 10 minutes, after putting 15 drops of Aquagen in a glass of water.”
Advertisement
Feedback never ceases to be impressed by all the wonderful things “liquid oxygen” can apparently do – especially since it is typically stored at -170 °C and would burn out your insides if you ever drank it.
The screenshot Hugh Lawton sent us shows that his download of the 39.5 megabyte MacKeeper program got to “4,100% complete” before he stopped watching it and did something else
Countries that Excel forgot
FEEDBACK knows some readers are allergic to Excel spreadsheets. If so, you have been warned… We, however, were as tickled as reader Tony Swash by last month’s headlines that economics PhD student Thomas Herndon had discredited a paper governments use to justify their current austerity measures (see ).
Herndon struggled for months to replicate the findings of Harvard professors Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, published in their seminal paper “Growth in a Time of Debt”. Finally, he asked them for a copy of the crucial spreadsheet – only to discover several errors.
Unbelievably, the most embarrassing was alphabetical. Reinhart and Rogoff had omitted the first 5 of the 20 countries their paper is based on, thereby ignoring figures for Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada and Denmark. Any spreadsheet-savvy reader will recognise this as an error that occurs if you take your finger off the mouse too soon when highlighting cells.
Feedback’s colleagues admit to similar mistakes but they do remember things being easier back in the days when a laptop was the size of a coffee table and Windows was new-fangled. Some even remember a program that allowed you to easily name a rectangular range of spreadsheet cells so everything updated automatically – thus avoiding the Harvard stars’ error.
Breaking the habit of a lifetime, one colleague consulted Microsoft’s Excel manual, and found you can make a self-updating “named range”. But there are 11 steps in the instructions. Why so laborious? Could it have something to do with a owned by IBM and a owned by Lotus, each concerning systems that make this mistake less likely to happen?
In the interests of sound economics, Feedback wonders if we should club together to buy Microsoft the necessary patent licence.
Cooking your electronics
HOW is this for a must-have gadget? Rob Milne introduces us to an unusual camping stove. “Thanks to its unique design, the BioLite Camping Stove can cook, heat and charge your electronic devices using only renewable biomass such as twigs, pine cones, wood pellets and other easily obtainable flammable materials,” according to the website selling the stove ().
Rob is disappointed that the product description doesn’t include any recipes. He would particularly like to know how to knock up a tasty SatNav soup.
Vortexing and vitalising
READER Richard Sturch forwards an email from his cousin Peter Dyer, who bought a remarkable bottle of water with his breakfast in Bacalod airport on the island of Negros in the Philippines.
“I didn’t realise what a find it was until reading the label later,” he says.
His email quotes the label on the bottle in full – and exactly the same claims are on the company’s website at : “People’s Purified Water undergoes a state-of-the-art multi stage water treatment process that includes carbon, micro, ultra and hyper filtration via a double reverse osmosis, sterilised through ultra violet and oxygenated and stimulated by vortexing process and vitalised through a bio-resonance and quantum science process.”
Can anyone tell us what on earth they are talking about?
How to mend magnetic socks
FINALLY, here is another message that got lost in our piling system. It’s a response sent in a couple of months ago to the question reader Michael Kolmet posed following our report on magnetic socks at the end of last year (22/29 December 2012).
He asked: “What do you mend them with?”
Louis Altman replies: “With a compass needle.”