Liquid asset
HERE’S a tipple that will moisten your mouth and your eyes at the same time. Michael Zehse spies a company selling water from icebergs calved from .
Svaldbardi describes its product, priced at £80 a bottle, as exceptionally pure water that was last in liquid form up to 4000 years ago. Given the remarkable capacity of bacteria to survive millennia frozen in ice, Feedback is tempted to add “untreated” to that description.
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The makers of Svalbardi pride themselves on a product that is especially tasteless, a boast that Feedback won’t contest. For every bottle sold, though, a donation is made to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, meaning customers can quaff in the knowledge that they are contributing to the cost of running the vault’s generators, which will be especially needed once all the ice is gone. Those who can’t afford iceberg water can perhaps wait for the crack progressing through Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf to complete its journey, dispatching an iceberg the size of Trinidad into the Atlantic. Delivery times may vary – just remember to bring your ice pick.
“”Marmalade is the preserve of the elderly,” writes The Daily Telegraph. “I prefer it to be made from oranges,” muses Crispin Piney”
Objection!
A COURTROOM conundrum: David Head notices a report in The Times of a court case in which the judge “described the defendant… as a ‘self-confessed liar’.”
David wonders whether this means the defendant was lying when he confessed to being a liar, and so was not a liar, and so was telling the truth when he said he was a liar, and so…
Dial N for Never
FINDING himself similarly confounded is Dick Duane, who complains that he added his phone number to the UK’s national “do not call” list for warding off marketing agents as soon as it was installed. Therefore he was surprised to receive a recorded sales call.
At the end, the recording told him that if he wished to be removed from the do not call list, he should press 8. “How thoughtful of them!” says Dick.
In a flap
WE FIND ourselves concerned about the optimum number of corners on oatcakes, following a report of a schoolboy injured by flying flapjack (25 February).
“Square flapjacks have more corners so might be more dangerous,” writes Brian Horton, “and on that basis round flapjacks have an infinite number of corners, so would be infinitely more dangerous. Except that the danger must relate to the sharpness of the corner, so maybe circles are infinitely safer than triangles.”
We feel assaulted by Brian’s use of the infinite in relative measures, but he does propose a solution: “Since Feedback also wants a tessellated baking tray, it is clear that flapjacks must be hexagonal, giving less acute corners that will not cause serious injury when users are hit in the face by one.”
Feedback prefers the following solution: cut flapjacks into circles before serving to children, and send us the leftovers.
Mind your Ts and Qs
ON THE question of what words, printable or otherwise, can be spelled out using chemical symbols (18 February), Keith Perring notes that “of the four new elements ratified by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry last November, Tennessine (Ts) seems to help – but only for forming the plurals of certain slang terms”.
Imperial march
PREVIOUSLY Rex Waygood sought enlightenment about his light bulbs, whose output was measured in very obtuse terms of “10 kWh/1000h” (21 January). “Could they have used a more obtuse power rating?” he cries. “Surely it would have been much simpler to have used good old British imperial units,” replies Barry Cash, “and defined the power rating as 13 and 2/5th horsepower per 1000 hours?”
But as the UK marches Brexitward, some are keen to reinstate old-fashioned imperial units. Feedback notes that as things stand in the metric system, 1 cubic centimetre of water contains 1 millilitre, weighs 1 gram and takes 1 calorie to warm by 1 degree Celsius. A cubic inch of water, meanwhile, contains 0.58 fluid ounces, weighs 0.58 ounces and takes 0.0036 British Thermal Units of energy to warm by 1 degree Fahrenheit. Best dust off those slide rules.
Chill room
A FROSTY reception awaited Adrian Simper in his hotel room: the air-conditioning dial ran from a chilly +3 K to an impossibly cold -3 K. “I asked for an extra blanket,” says Adrian. Maybe those concerned about dwindling ice at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault could open an auxiliary store here?
Marine cuisine
FINALLY, a company with a keen interest in maintaining the terroir of its ingredients (or should that be meroir?). London’s ‘Over that all its pizzas are made with “pure” seawater. Whether it meets the Vienna mean standard (12 March 2016) we’re not sure, although the restaurant says the ingredient brings “less sodium and more minerals” to make a lighter, more digestible dish.
After all our wrangling over the correct labelling of Himalayan “sea salt” (5 November 2016), we never for one moment considered calling it dehydrated seawater.