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Emperor’s virtual clothes

Spurred on by events such as last year’s sale of a dress that only for $9500, luxury fashion designer Gucci has announced it is moving into virtual clothing for those who want to look

We do, we do. But we urge caution to anyone tempted to clothe themselves only in photons, lest the blurring of our virtual and physical worlds accelerated by lockdown lead to unfortunate incidents when putting the cat out or wandering down to the local shops. We speak from experience. Back in the noughties, tired of the fame and the constant pestering on the street, Feedback was an early adopter of metamaterial invisibility cloaks – until it turned out they only worked when viewed at microwave frequencies. That explanation didn’t go down too well at the station.

Still, Feedback is enthused by the possibilities of virtual clothing, such as acting as a digital advertising hoarding on family Zoom chats, or changing colour, chameleon-like, with the tides of conflicting emotions that accompany work calls.

Gucci isn’t really our bag. Yet, in common with half of the world, we have rarely seen anyone from the waist down since March, so it should at least be possible to halve the cost of a virtual wardrobe.

Classical fruitloops

Meanwhile, in the world of fruitloopery, quantum physics is so last season. Galen Ives writes in with news of PolarAid, a “revolutionary, easy to use, portable, hand-held body tool that can be used anywhere, at any time”.

Feedback thinks there is generally a time and a place for that sort of thing. Yet besides its use to “enhance and encourage male and female sexual health”, PolarAid promises benefits in a whole host of other areas, from digestive and bowel health to mental calm (not that those things are entirely unconnected in our experience).

Best of all, for those uncomfortable with the turn physics has taken in the past century or so, is that the device – essentially a plastic disc embossed with copper-alloy rings – eschews standard quantum woo entirely. Instead, it operates on classical “scalar wave” principles championed by none other than Nikola Tesla, presumably during the visionary inventor’s more-than-a-little-odd period in which he also envisaged beaming death rays across the Atlantic Ocean.

Feedback has previous with scalar waves. One of the best bits of physics that most people miss out, these are essentially electromagnetic waves stripped of direction and left only with magnitude. Lest they feel too naked and point-like, they propagate instead through a mysterious fourth dimension known as time, faster than the speed of light, natch.

But far be it from Feedback to carp. We are too enthralled by our reverie about what would happen if virtual clothing and scalar wave technologies were to merge. Fast fashion forward into the singularity.

A question of degrees

Reviewing the weekly cache of fruitloopery causes Feedback to muse on a near-universally observed law: that the frequency with which anyone mentions their academic qualifications in a given context is generally in inverse proportion to their actual expertise on the subject.

On cue, our inbox bings with the latest missive from the reliably diverting Dr Benny Peiser at the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), an organisation that exists to convince the world we best not tackle climate change, for fear, Feedback presumes, that we might make a better world by accident. Dr Peiser, whose PhD in cultural studies hangs like an aura around all his communications, is keen to advise us that “Official US Climate Data Reveals No Cause For Alarm”.

The basis for the all-clear, it turns out, is a GWPF paper saying there is no cause for alarm. Emphasising that point, “it’s hard to find anything in the records of recent weather in the US that should give anyone any cause for alarm”, the report’s author is quoted as saying.

Feedback sighs. Climate denialism isn’t what it used to be. Still, delivered as large chunks of California celebrates black being the new whatever-colour-it-was-before, the line has that ineffable quality of good timing that is central to all good oddball comedy. Climate attribution is, admittedly, a complex and imperfect science. Feedback possesses no relevant qualification in it, which makes it time to fire up the stationery cupboard’s photocopier and write our own paper on it. It will also have graphs.

Signs of the times (I)

Smartphone users in California complain of cameras refusing to accept the orange hue of the sky during the recent wildfires, correcting it to blue. As succinctly put it, “what the hell is the point of living in an ecological disaster if I can’t take a picture of it?!?!?”.

Signs of the times (II)

London free sheet The Evening Standard reports “London virus deaths fall to lowest total on record”. Our brief frisson of joy at a potential pandemic turning point is rapidly overtaken by a new fear of the zombie apocalypse. Although, come to think of it, the undead roaming the streets may be a more effective way to enforce lockdowns than many of the methods trialled so far.

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