QUACKS selling “curative” water tend to claim it has any or all of three amazing qualities – and the alkaline water that Mark Dodds and Eddy van Zimmer found promoted by Life Ionizers at advances all three (30 July) in spoonfuls.
The first is that it can apparently “neutralize the acidity of the body caused by stress, modern diet, air pollution, and many bottled waters”. Secondly, because it is “negatively charged” it “improves body function by cleaning your cells from the inside out”. And lastly its “ionization”, we are told, “breaks clusters of water molecules into smaller micro-clusters… Smaller clusters pass through cell walls more easily and hydrate the cells more quickly.”
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Handily, Life Ionizers sell water ionisers and water filters – a mere £649 for the least expensive counter-top model. Or you could turn on the tap.
It’s time to add “pH balance”, “neutralising acidity”, “negative ions” and the like, along with “microclusters” and “cellular hydration”, to our lexicon of fruitloopery indicators. Like “quantum”, “far infrared” and “vibrational”, these may have meaning in science but are content-free in product pitches.
“Packets for Weetabix Mini breakfast cereal sold in joined-up Europe claim to contain “at least 100% recycled fibres”. John Rogers is as impressed by this as the “New recipe – Original” formulation”
A new dimension in theme-park horror
A BILLBOARD beside London Bridge railway station advertising the latest attraction in the London Dungeon, a spooky theme park in the arches beneath, reads: “The Ride of Your Afterlife: UK’s First 5D Laser Ride.”
Malcolm Bacchus wonders whether the proprietors “have managed to uncurl one of the hidden dimensions required by M-Brane theory”. Or, slightly more simply, the fifth dimension posited in 1921 by Theodor Kaluza (Instant Expert: The theory of everything, 4 June). Either way, “the ride might be quite thrilling, but a rather terminal introduction to one’s afterlife,” Malcolm suggests.
It’s not the humidity, it’s the heat
TEMPERATURES in the north-eastern US were high recently – but surely not as high as reported in the 22 July that Olivier Dessibourg sent us. “The extreme heat,” it reports, “is only expected to get worse, and residents are bracing themselves for temperatures near and above boiling point… Boston’s 99 degrees on Friday could feel like 105 degrees; Philadelphia’s 102 degrees like 114.”
Is the NASA engineer who mixed up imperial and metric units embarking on a new career in journalism? Fellow reader Kevin Ives asks: “What boils at 100 °F?” A quick search gives us (37 °C, say most). “And why,” he adds, “would that be relevant information in a weather bulletin?” Pass.
HAVING spent 15 years working as a futures broker, Brendan Hillary is in a reasonable position to comment on the “candlestick patterns”, used by colleagues to predict price movements, which so puzzled us (14 May) – even after we had the explanation that they plot the high and low prices of a stock or currency, overlaid by a rectangle depicting the opening and closing prices (23 July).
The patterns are attributed, Hillary reports, to a wealthy 18th-century Japanese rice trader called Munehisa Homma, also known as Sokyu Honma. “While his success in trading is perhaps a function of these charts,” Hillary observes drily, “it probably had more to do with the fact he paid for a chain of men to stand on rooftops and use flag signals to send information in code about growing conditions, weather, local prices and other inside information real-time from the growing fields many hundreds of miles away.” Outsider trading, as it were.
An American trader, Steve Nison, popularised the candlestick trading method in the 1990s. “Need I say more?” asks Hillary. We pondered that, and discovered Nison selling a “MegaPackage” of 15 or more DVDs at , reduced from $3865 to $1490, with testimonials in the excitable typography of which Feedback has become a reluctant connoisseur. Unfortunately no semaphore flags are included, that we can see.
MEANWHILE Simon Raggett has another bibliographic plea, following that which elucidated chimps’ trading performance (25 June). He fondly recalls the days before traders stared at charts in darkened rooms: “Serious investors perused accounts and economic trends, and lunched with company officials.”
The “chartists” were “invariably derided by most professional investors,” he says, “being compared to astrology”.
He adds that “a study of investment performance showed that investment recommendations by astrologers outperformed those of the serious and seriously remunerated investors.”
Feedback has made a fairly serious attempt to track down this study, and failed. Can readers help? Finding it may not, however, assist with the current interesting state of the markets, especially if, as Raggett recalls, chimpanzees, real or simulated, “still outperformed the astrologers”.
FINALLY, Jupiter is an impressive planet, but is it as unusual as ? When covering the Juno mission to the gas giant, on 28 July, it wrote: “With its fiery red eye and a mass greater than all the objects in the universe combined…”