Odds against James Bond’s survival
AS CAMP as a row of tents. That’s Feedback’s assessment of the James Bond film franchise. Why? Consider this: the transvestite road-movie epic The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert almost certainly contains far fewer flagrant challenges to the reality scientists know and love than any one Bond film does.
This is, we admit, a finger-in-the-wind assessment. But Feedback reader Gordon Stanger has the data at his fingertips. Last year he answered a question put to 91av‘s The Last Word: “Can anybody calculate the odds of [Bond] not having taken a fatal hit over the past five decades?” (5 May 2012). Now he has revised his response.
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“Alas,” he writes, “the most recent film, Skyfall, demands an update. The probability of Bond surviving at least 5026 shots (over the 23 films) are now so slim that the average calculator cannot handle such a small number. It’s in the vicinity of 1 in 10112 – and that last number is many squintillion times the number of stars in the universe.”
Returning to “sensible” numbers, Gordon reckons Bond has now survived 134 blatantly homicidal attacks and seen off at least 214 villains.
We suspect Gordon’s tongue is firmly in his cheek when he says: “It’s good to see the franchise sticking to ‘realism’!”
Lynn Moffat sends us a photo of a sign in a hotel lift in Brazil that says: “Warning! Before entering the elevator, make sure it is on this floor”
READER Richard Mallett is impressed by the capabilities of his Russell Hobbs microwave. As shown on page 14 of the instruction manual, the device can be set to operate at 0 per cent cooking power (see ).
“I have tested this,” Richard says, “and I can confirm that the 0 per cent power mode actually works. I ‘heated’ a cold glass of water for a minute and it remained cold.”
He points out that the oven’s turntable still spins food around on this setting, but no microwave power is frivolously wasted on heating it up – thus saving on energy bills.
ONE of 91av‘s US correspondents did a double-take when he checked the caller ID of an incoming phone call: it read “Marketing Fraud” and listed a phone number in Las Vegas. He let the call go through to his voicemail, where the caller left a message promoting a “free listing” with a famous search engine.
Our correspondent says: “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen that degree of honest dishonesty.”
LYING in the bath watching bubbles rising from leg-hairs led a friend of Feedback to idly muse on how beauty products are marketed using concepts such as “oxygenation” and “purity”. Was there, she wondered, a product out there that promoted its purity as coming from the depths of the sea?
A moment’s further thought about how it would be sold led to the idea of “deep ocean balm”, and after the bath the miracle of modern technology turned up .
This is apparently a “combination of glacier water, deep ocean water, hyaluronic acid, and aloe vera”. It is priced at $32 for 50 millilitres, leading us to think the ocean water must have been hand-harvested by comely pearl divers.
But is deep-ocean water in fact full of life-giving purity?
Regular readers of 91av may recall a recent mention of the importance to ocean ecosystems of the “bone-eating snot-flower worms”, which thrive on whale carcasses in the deep (30 March, p 7). That just might give you pause.
READER Paul Adkin was feeling a bit under the weather, so his wife gave him a bottle of Source of Life multivitamin and mineral food supplement purchased at their local health food shop.
Examining the label, he was delighted to discover that it contained, among other things, ““.
He had no idea whether this would be good for him or bad for him, but reports that “at least it tastes like it should be doing me some good”.
FINALLY, readers might be able to help Feedback solve a recursivity problem.
Catherine Walter writes from Oxfordshire in the UK asking for our advice on following her partner’s horoscope, published in her local newspaper, the Didcot Herald.
The horoscope read: “Things don’t and can’t always go to plan, but as long as you keep your sense of right and wrong to the fore then your journey can be a good one. In fact, by trusting in your own instincts and not others’ advice you can put your life on a far better path this week.”
Catherine wants to know whether or not her partner should trust this advice not to trust other people’s advice.