Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
Cornucopia of cures?
IMMEDIATELY after our appeal for information on the health effects of newspaper health advice (19 April), we found a resource that will be invaluable for any such study: .
The site chronicles front pages of the Daily Express – a publication that is registered as a newspaper at the Post Office – that bear “miracle cure” headlines. We looked at the headline for 25 April – “Coffee helps beat diabetes” – and in the previous fortnight also found “Major cancer breakthrough” (17 April); “Proof statins beat dementia” (14 April); “Arthritis: new way to ease pain” (7 April); and “Diet that adds years to life” (1 April). That last was the same news that prompted Roy Stillman to contemplate “spending much of the rest of eternity on the loo, [given] the effect that fruit has on me” (19 April).
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The Creekside Grill in Ann Arbor, Michigan, enticingly that it boasts “a TV-maligned bar”. If that’s where patrons malign the television, isn’t it a normal bar?
A productivity boom for what?
WE count the Daily Express headlining 84 breakthroughs in the past 12 months, on the above-mentioned website. Others might wonder whether it is press-releasing rather than medical science that is experiencing such a productivity boom, but we couldn’t possibly comment.
Indirect inspiration
AGITATED delight at the above mention of coffee as a wonder cure is tempered by the realisation that caffeine may not be the font of creativity. We had noticed that ideas tend to pop up after we get out of our chair, and had attributed this to the caffeine in our tea.
But experiments at Stanford University have shown that people are more creative when walking than when sitting (). So it appears the effect is less direct; as a diuretic, caffeine stimulates us to walk to the loo, and the walking stimulates the ideas.
What should this headline be?
INDEED, while Feedback was out taking the air just now we had a most excellent idea, which… er…
Mapping mystery
IT IS a few years, Martin Horwood writes, “since I took a few minutes off from my parliamentary duties to report the historical and future time limits of Outlook’s calendar” (4 August 2007). Now the MP for Cheltenham writes about an odd feature of the mapping service offered by a famous web search engine (FWSE).
Locate London. Zoom out to show it in the context of England. now shown is Leigh-on-Sea in Essex. Not Cambridge, Cheltenham or Oxford.
Don’t get us wrong, Leigh-on-Sea has its charms: Feedback recalls a happy afternoon eating fish and chips in a quayside pub there. But why should it be any more map-worthy than other places?
Martin naturally suspects that politics is involved. We hunted in vain for connections between Leigh and Steve Hilton, former strategy guru to the UK prime minister and married to the FWSE’s senior vice-president of communications and public policy for information technology, Rachel Whetstone. But we did find out that Hilton , which was shown on the FWSE’s map when we looked.
Then we glanced across the sea… Brussels was missing! Not surprising, given the FWSE’s many run-ins with the European Commission there.
The parts of a naming
FWSE? Why? Recently arrived colleagues, and reader Andrew Ward, want to know. In 2006 żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ received a letter from trademark lawyers – as did other publications. It comes to such lawyers as naturally as breathing to object to the use of lower case verbs like “to google”, lest it convert their trademark into a “generic” word.
We heard spluttering from a neighbouring desk at this restriction on journalism’s vocabulary. We decided that henceforth we would be referring to a Famous Web Search Engine (2 September 2006).
This usage is now recognised at . It also saves giving free advertising, to which our bank manager objects.
Just right
THANKS to Tony Harker for the first response to our call for more examples of technology that is “just right” in terms of its antiquity – or, as we prefer to say, adheres to the Goldilocks Meso-Tech Principle (19 April). He sagely observes that the principle applies to electric kettles: “If they have transparent water level gauges, they leak; if they have press-button lids, the linkages break.” He has “reverted to one with a solid metal body and a lid that lifts off”; any older, though, and a kettle’s frayed, cloth-wrapped lead would disqualify it.
A wheely good analogy
FINALLY, talking – as one does – of kettles, we thank Martin Harris for directing us to the website of the Falkirk Wheel, an ingenious engineering solution to moving canal boats from one level to another. So ingenious is it that “just 1.5 kilowatt-hours (5.4 megajoules) of energy in 4 minutes, roughly the same as boiling eight kettles of water”.
Oddly enough, it may have been this column that helped inspire use of the kettle measure – for the power consumption of China’s Tianhe-2 computer cluster (6 July 2013). To avoid unfortunate unit-confusion consequences, we should stress again that we were referring to a European kettle drawing on a 230-volt supply.