Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
Fry is immune
SERIOUS gaps in Feedback’s cultural corpus are filled by a reader who informs us that the QuWave Defender (31 August) brings to mind “a theme in the animated TV show Futurama“. The device’s promoters ask potential customers: “Are you constantly being… Subject to Remote Brain Manipulation?” We observed that it does more than “wonderfully merge the realms of conspiracy theory and nonstandard nostrums”: and it does resemble a theme in Futurama.
Following (and preceding) an accident involving a time machine, the main character in the show, Philip J. Fry, is his own grandfather. He is also the only human, our reader assures us, to lack “Q-waves”, rendering him immune to telepathic attack.
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But when we consulted the oracle of Futurama fans at , we read that it is delta brainwaves that Fry lacks. In the spirit of paranoia embodied in the alleged product, we conclude that “They” have been through the entire digital archive changing references to Fry’s abnormality to cover their tracks. Possibly. Will “They” also post-edit this piece?
“Tapioca must be a hitherto unknown superfood,” says Terjei Jensen. According to , a 28-gram serving provides 728 grams of carbohydrates and 3033 calories – a day-and-a-half’s worth
Pesky caveats
SEVERAL readers were less than convinced by Feedback’s suggestion that German customs officials might have been suspicious of the amounts of fluoride exported to Syria (5 October). The shipments were, according to German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, .
We calculated that they were sufficient to make 1.1 kilograms of fluoridated toothpaste for every Syrian citizen each year. Alan Dix was one who did his own sums and said he could get through that much.
Should we have specified that we used some journalists’ rules of thumb for scepticism about averages? For Syria’s fluoride imports not to raise suspicions would require that every last inhabitant was an enthusiastic brusher, or, expecting a skewed distribution of enthusiasm, that some got through so much toothpaste that they brought the national annual mean consumption to 1.1 kilograms – and also that Germany was Syria’s only source of fluoride.
Alan responds with a crisp summing-up of Feedback’s working life: “I know, it wouldn’t have sounded so funny with all the caveats.”
Fluoride fantasy fear
MEANWHILE, for other peoples’ translations of the , Feedback was saddened but not surprised to find that fruitloops were instantly on the case. First up was a with the description “Fluoride is used to make Sarin gas, yet they say it is okay for your drinking water and toothpaste?”
Yes, yes, but both of these contain much more of the notoriously dangerous substance “dihydrogen monoxide” (chemical name H2O), the vicious trade in which Feedback has oft exposed since 18 May 1996.
Exponentially expanding error
OVER-HELPFUL machinery is one of Feedback’s pet hates. Reader Rowland Coles reported one example: the attempts by his “smart” phone to assist with names leading it to dub the home number of a friend with initials KW “Kilowatt home” (29 June).
Tom Dobbs updates us. Driving in France, he encountered roads labelled with both their national and their European designation – such as the “A 20 E 9”. His satellite navigation gizmo spoke this aloud as something like “A twenty times ten to the power nine”.
Now we come to think of it, any self-respecting computer programmer would, when on duty, read “20 E 9” as (slightly off) for a large number. But that’s not much help on holiday.
With luck, such effortful expositions will go the way of Microsoft’s “Clippy” digital assistant, exterminated after much derision (27 November 2010, p 32). Then we can go back to computers doing what they’re good at: obedience, whether or not our instructions make sense.
How much is undiscovered?
UNDISCOVERED oil – how much is down there? Brian Cain alerts us to the Financial Times reporting that: “A record decline in Arctic sea ice has been widely seen as economically beneficial until now, as it opens up more shipping and drilling in a region thought to contain 30 per cent of the world’s undiscovered gas and 13 per cent of its undiscovered oil.”
“If the gas and the oil is undiscovered how do they know?” Brian asks, reasonably. Our colleague who keeps a slide rule on a shelf next to their laptop mutters that they can make justifiable guesstimates. Build a model in computer software, feed in the distribution of rock formations that ask the geologists “why not drill here?” – formations that based on past experience may harbour oil – plus the success rate of previous exploratory wells, and so on…
“But then,” our colleague complains, “governments and oil companies spoil all the elegant maths by fibbing, for political and share-price-related reasons, respectively. As for Arctic melting being ‘beneficial’… to whom?”
A drain by any other name
FINALLY, from New Zealand, Rosemary Fineman sends a document awarding a Pressure Sewerage Equipment Supply contract to Ecoflow Ltd of Auckland – giving as contact person at Ecoflow one Karl Stench.