SHARING Feedback’s fascination with laundry balls – those variously shaped objects that are promoted with all sorts of sciency-sounding gibberish about how they will supersede detergent, but which may work despite their flaky reputation – Ruth Turner had a look around. What she discovered was a discussion on a blog called “bean-sprouts” in which the blogger observes that she has been told “that my beloved laundry balls might be a rip-off, no better than washing clothes in plain water” (see ).
Indeed, as Feedback has noted, “slapping your clothes against rocks in a cold stream works, apparently, if you have the persistence” (7 June). But we were most intrigued by her report of tests by in which a laundry ball “performed a little better than just plain water (which they put down to chance). But surprisingly the ball also performed about the same as using branded laundry detergent.” So detergent is little better than water alone?
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This experiment, we thought, demands replication. And thanks to the technological marvel that is remote working, Feedback was able, while working on this at home, to wander into the kitchen and put a load of white laundry in the machine, on a hot wash, with neither detergent nor ball – and to do this on company time. It came out nearly pristine – and smelling suspiciously of washing powder, either from a previous wash or from the inside of the machine. So we put in another load. Also pretty clean, although a chocolate-stained handkerchief (don’t ask) still bore traces of confectionery.
“From last month’s Dell Business: “Dell colour laser printers combine piece of mind with low costs per page.” Peter Russell wants to know whose mind Dell is cutting up and combining”
We shall be repeating this experiment, and shall take the proposition that plain water works to be falsified when colleagues start dropping hints when we visit the office, maybe by leaving sample-packs of detergent on our desk.
THE bank HSBC recently sent David Holdsworth new “General Terms and Conditions”, which among other things require him to take reasonable precautions to prevent fraudulent use of his security details. To his dismay, the lawyers specify: “These [precautions] include but are not limited to never writing down your security details and not choosing security details to make them more memorable to you.”
“In short,” Holdsworth summarises, “I must choose passwords that I find difficult to remember and not write them down.” He has a solution involving writing himself a computer program to keep his password safe – but what, he wonders, are Joe and Joanna Public supposed to do?
As a public service, Feedback offers a solution: choose two unrelated words and join them with a random punctuation mark. Looking out of the window, we come up with the transiently related and memorable “magpie/towerblock”. Why? Most password attacks are based in one way or another on throwing the dictionary at your login: this method means attackers have to deal with the square of the number of words in the dictionary. Put a symbol in the middle of a word, and they have to work far, far harder still.
If you are surrounded by co-workers, you can go further by learning a bit of a language none of them can pronounce or spell – use harakka/kerrostalo, perhaps, unless you’re among Finns. If you do this, it hardly matters even if you mutter your password aloud while you type.
The question remains: would this meet HSBC’s stated conditions? Apparently not, since the whole point is to make a password that’s “more memorable to you”, albeit very hard for anyone else to guess.
Bet you hadn’t thought of this reason…
WHY do gamblers gamble? A new insight into this question has just been published in the journal Psychology of Addictive Behaviors (vol 22, p 380). Martin Gardiner reports in that conducted by the University of Albany’s Addictive Behaviors Laboratory involved more than 400 experimental subjects in a series of experiments to pinpoint the possible driving forces behind the thrill of gambling. The lab’s findings “support the notion that the excitement of gambling is tied to the expectancy of winning money”.
Well now.
One-step instruction in three-and-a-half easy stages
THE packet of Betty Crocker’s One-Step Pancakes that Tim von Ahsen bought contained simple instructions on the back. These said: “Follow these basic steps… 1. Pre-heat frying pan… 2. Mix pancake mix and milk… 3. Cook 1 to 1 ½ minutes… then turn over and cook another 1 to 1 ½ minutes…” So where does the “one-step” concept come in, von Ahsen wonders?
FINALLY, the Gardener’s Corner rain gauge that John Perry bought is, according to the packet Perry sent us, “for measuring rainfall”. It is “calibrated in inches and millimetres for easy use” and, best of all, it is “for indoor and outdoor use”.
Wait a minute…