Psychics succumb to the unforeseen
PANTAGES Playhouse in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, had an interesting sign outside on 7 September: “Psychic fair cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances”. Wilna Dehls sent a picture, thinking it belongs in Feedback. You’re right, Wilna.
In these disquieting times we felt the need to check. We’ve looked at all the pixels for evidence of Photoshopping and conclude that if anything has been faked, it was reality. The fact that the telephone number on the sign was out of service by 21 September suggests either this, or that the circumstances were more exceptional than we first thought.
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One of the main courses on offer at a restaurant Jenny Narraway visited in Bilbao, Spain, was “Assorted mixed of Iberians”. Jenny, being a vegetarian, chose something else
Hazy outlook for cloud computing
FEEDBACK has to wonder whether some sort of reality-Photoshopping was involved in the widely reported .
Apparently, 220 admitted to pretending to know what it is. And 170 said they’d bluffed about it on a first date. Yeah, right. Feedback is widely registered online as a 101-year-old widow from, let’s say, Albania, and as such does not believe everything people say in response to survey questions.
SEVERAL readers forwarded an email from computer retailer Micro Direct, promoting the “RadBlock Electronic Device Radiation Blocker”. It appears to be a gold-coloured stick-on thing, described as “smooth in texture and made with composition of materials which give a pleasant and shiny appearance”, which is nice, but possibly not nice enough to cost £23.94.
Susan Parker notes wearily that it’s “another product to protect us from ‘The Rays'”. Feedback was planning humbly to suggest to Micro Direct that its customers may value plausible physics in its sales pitches, but to the company’s credit it has removed all trace of the blocker from its website.
Frank Cross, meanwhile, points us to the wide range of . Feedback is particularly fascinated by the advertised by the Wenzhou Boshida Craft Company of Zhejiang City, China. This particular ad is disappointingly free of quantum guff: it doesn’t offer any clues to what the stickers are supposed to do, or how. Its selling proposition is “an unique price between 0.001-0.01 us$” each, with a minimum order of 10,000. Yes, they cost from one-tenth of a cent each.
Now we need your help to discover where they’re resold with the highest markup…
INSTRUCTIONS on the packaging of some medicinal potassium citrate – “For Extemporaneous Use Only” – puzzled Fiona Wain, and us at Feedback (8 September). The curse of the spellchucker seemed to be going into reverse, leading us to assume that the label’s author mistyped “external” and accepted a mis-correction.
Sheila Handley corrects us, harking back to the days “when extemporaneous preparation took up a large part of any pharmacy syllabus”. She refers us to the Handbook of Extemporaneous Preparation: a guide to pharmaceutical compounding by Mark Jackson and Andrew Lowey, which gives more detail than we need for present purposes on preparing one-off medicines that are not available as a licensed preparation.
So what Sunray Health Products seem to be saying is that they’re just selling a chemical, not a licensed medical preparation. Fair enough.
Free will available in Skipton
TWO readers from the north of England, Mike Mellor and Dave Manford, write independently to tell us about a poster appearing in the windows of branches of the Skipton Building Society. It makes the surprising claim: “Free Will for every Skipton customer, worth up to £180”.
“I don’t know how they are able to endow their customers with Free Will,” says Mike, “or how they can put a value on it. To find that out, the posters instruct me to enquire in the branch, but I’m predestined not to do that.”
FINALLY, an Ig Nobel prize that we didn’t have space for last week (29 September). The Ig Nobels are supposed to make us laugh, then think: but the medicine prize makes us wince. It honours the efforts of French physician Emmanuel Ben-Soussan, with colleagues Spiros Ladas and George Karamanolis, to prevent explosions of gas in the colon during a colonoscopy.
Hydrogen and methane from gut bacteria reach potentially explosive concentrations in some 40 per cent of patients who have not thoroughly flushed out their colons, they write in the World Journal of Gastroenterology (). The good news is that the gases won’t explode unless the colon also contains about 5 per cent oxygen; and normal oxygen concentrations are only 0.1 to 2.3 per cent. The researchers found only 20 explosions reported in the medical literature.