Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
Dolls of destiny
BARBIE dolls: does playing with them discourage a future in research? Feedback suggested that it’s more a matter of how you play, given a report of doll mummification (5 April).
Support for this thesis is provided by a friend of Feedback reporting a film re-enactment involving a row of dolls buried neck-deep in sand. The scene was from Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, set in a prisoner-of-war camp. That friend is now researching the laws of war, particularly those governing occupation.
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Andrew Doble’s bank annoyingly limits his online transfers to £999,999,999,999,999.99 – some 56 times the . What does it know about inflation that we don’t?
Disclaimers as art
DISCLAIMERS on websites are developing into an art form. We liked the sober disavowal of responsibility concluding with a that “Should you decline to comply… a leather winged demon of the night will… search the very threads of time for the throbbing of your heartbeat” (16 December 2006). Now Brian Clegg stumbles across another whose actual legal content is equally bizarre, demanding that the reader agree: “I understand this website is only illustrative of what might be achievable from using this/these products, and that the story/comments depicted above is not to be taken literally and should not be treated as non-fiction.” The website is called and appears to consist entirely of plugs and puffs, from “How to conquer your debt in 2 minutes” to “5 betting tips to win money this World Cup”.
Database is not a researcher
WHAT drew Brian Clegg’s attention to , above, was an especially bizarre plug it featured on weight loss. The author of this item “We asked the National Centre for Biotechnology Information in America. They confirmed that raspberry ketones fight obesity and increase metabolism.” Feedback suspects the mention of the NCBI is at best a garbled reference to the of research paper abstracts that the Center provides.
Diet deal or no deal?
SO DO “raspberry ketones” have anything to do with weight loss? The PubMed database includes abstracts of two research papers that seem relevant. One, “Anti-obese action of raspberry ketone” () features two authors working for Kanebo Ltd in Japan, now a cosmetics company.
But our main concern is with wallet weight-loss. The website was plugged by , as we mention above. It offers a “trial bottle” for just £4.95 post and packing. Only inspection of the hardly prominent reveals that those who sign up agree to be billed £69.95 every 30 days.
The Observer newspaper that customers of a strikingly similar site found that they had unwittingly entered into a “continuous payment authority” to debit their credit card. Some banks told them – incorrectly – that these payments could be stopped only with the agreement of the company requesting the payments, who weren’t answering the phone.
Dopers’ hopers
WHEN new medicines become available, new technology is often close behind. Feedback has a press release plugging – apparently serving the medical marijuana industry.
The PotBot is software that uses “neural-net algorithms to recommend custom strains” of pot to customers, presumably depending on what ails them. BrainBot, meanwhile, uses “new-age EEG scans that aid in the medical analysis of patients seeking a proper medical marijuana diagnosis”. Finally, NanoPot “uses advanced DNA readers to scan seeds and generate a custom-made growth model to maximize growers’ yields”.
So how do they work? We poked around the website. We were left scratching our head and wondering quite how much of the merchandise they had sampled.
Definitely a good idea
FEEDBACK regrets that we were unable to let readers know about an intriguing US Secret Service request, published on 2 June, before its deadline on 9 June. The agency is looking to procure a social-media analytics tool with the “ability to detect sarcasm”, among other things. We are sure that a week will have been long enough to put together thorough treatments of this interesting problem in linguistics. Of course successful candidates will sail through a proper Turing test for artificial intelligence (14 June, p 3).
Danube detonation danger
FINALLY, our mention of the UK Independence Party’s use of the Blue Danube as its on-hold music (24 May) jogged a colleague’s memory. Rather than referencing the musical paean to the unification of the Germanic peoples, might the party be referring to the code-name of the UK’s first operational nuclear weapon?
That in turn jogged Feedback’s memory. Somewhere in , a publication of the UK government department , is a mention of one variant of the “Blue Danube” bomb being withdrawn because it was scarily unstable.
Digging turns up suggesting that this particular 1958 variant had a 1-megaton fission warhead – and the primary measure against unscheduled ignition was 6500 steel balls in a rubber bag, removed from the hollow uranium core before take-off. We now feel ill with retrospective worry.