Basic science
YOU may have heard about the ongoing issue of ocean acidification (perhaps even from our erstwhile colleagues). But UKIP MEP Roger Helmer isn’t having any of this “ignorance”.
The politician set the world to rights on Twitter, declaring that the oceans “cannot be MORE acidic, “. As the East Midlands representative sees things, the oceans are in fact alkaline, and thus getting less alkaline rather than more acidic.
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Helmer stuck to his alternative view, despite gentle insistence from Bob Ward at the Grantham Institute on Climate Change that “the oceans really are getting more acidic”.
“Garry Sturley spies a sign at Macclesfield Cemetery: “Garden of Remembrance temporally closed for refurbishment.” But it remains open for spiritual matters, one presumes”
Neutral party
PERHAPS what is needed to save the world’s oceans is some alkaline water to buffer the change.
Step forward “blk. premium alkaline water”, a soot-coloured thirst quencher that promises trace fulvic minerals (that’s dirt to you and me) and the thrilling gamble of “pH 8.0+”. At £4.40 a litre though, it’s going to be quite a costly .
Clean sweep
ALSO finding herself in a pickle is Natasha Corrett, author of the bestselling Honestly Healthy cookbook that champions the benefits of an “alkaline diet”. This involves eating foods to calibrate the pH of your body, a goal that is both meaningless and impossible.
Corrett previously told the Daily Mail ; cancer creates disease in the body through acidity”, but backpedalled when the incredulous journalist asked if this meant her alkaline diet could prevent cancer (it can’t).
Unfortunately, reality has caught up with the pH practitioners. The inspiration behind this fad, Robert O. Young, currently faces jail time for practising medicine without a licence, after he tried to treat a young woman with breast cancer using intravenously injected solutions of sodium bicarbonate, or .
In a perfect world, that would be enough to spell the end of the alkaline food fruitloopery. Yet having witnessed the rise and fall of many esoteric and sometimes dangerous food fads, from coffee enemas to “vibrational ingredients”, Feedback knows it’s only a matter of time before the glossy food gurus find some new nonsense to serve up.
Known unknowns
THE post-truth era entrenched itself last week, as the White House press secretary Sean Spicer used his first briefing to excoriate the media for accurately reporting the middling crowd numbers at Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony, and issued a number of unverified claims that painted a much rosier picture of the event.
An aide later appeared on NBC News to explain that Spicer’s pronouncements were not falsehoods, but “alternative facts“.
Trump even requested the National Park Service to provide photographic evidence that his inauguration crowd was bigger than Obama’s, but this alternative fact proved difficult to, er, prove.
Department of metaphysics
READERS may recall that George W. Bush strategist Karl Rove also questioned the existence of facts, admonishing journalist Ron Suskind for being party to what he called the “reality-based community” who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality”.
Rove felt this was “not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”
The question remains whether we’ll be forced to live in President Trump’s reality, or he in ours.
Frisky business
FROM alternative facts to alternative measurements: writing on the website of conservative think tank The Heartland Institute, Isaac Orr announces that oil pipelines are “safer than safe sex”.
For those who don’t see the connection (other than the contents of both might be described as crude), Orr expands on his hypothesis. Despite the occasional oil spill, 99.999 per cent of piped oil reaches its destination, whereas the effectiveness of condoms is 98 per cent. Feedback thinks that in both cases though, it only takes a tiny leak to spell disaster.
Zeno’s breakfast
SHEILA BURCH discovers that Sainsbury’s organic instant porridge sachets advise customers that “of the ingredients that are organic, 99% are organic”.
Which would mean that 99 per cent of the remainder was organic. And 99 per cent of that… Feedback wonders if the instant porridge contains any organic content at all?
Cupboard critters
MORE missing socks (14 January). John Ripley says that the mystery of where they go was solved back in the 1980s, when he correlated his sock drawer with his wardrobe and noticed an inverse relationship. He concludes that “socks are the larval form of the coat hanger”.
A big shot
FINALLY, Chris Smith notes that Westminster Abbey has appointed the Reverend Anthony Ball in a new senior role, making him Canon Ball. “We just have to hope that he doesn’t get fired,” says .