Keep your distance
Feedback’s time has finally come. For years we have sat in a small, dark room, shunning contact with the outside world. An elaborate system of pulleys and pigeons brings us everything we need to survive and, most importantly, produce this column.
Now, we hear on the pulley-lines that this lifestyle is encouraged by governments and healthcare professionals to help slow the spread of covid-19. So for those of you unaccustomed to a life of self isolation here are a few tips:
No. 1 Learn to hula-hoop. This will help you maintain a distance of at least 1 metre from people at all times.
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No. 2 Exercise at home. A bit of exercise is crucial to a sound mind. Feedback has a highly collectable set of Mr Motivator workout tapes that we couldn’t live without. Other options are apparently available.
No. 3 Maintain regular work hours. We have always known this is crucial to a healthy work-life balance. As such, we use a version of the pomodoro technique that involves working for 25 minutes, taking a 5-minute break and then repeat. Feedback has followed this meticulously for years, and though it’s hard getting your daily sleep in just 5-minute windows, you do eventually get used to it.
School’s down, not out
With many schools and colleges running classes digitally because of the coronavirus pandemic, students are having to come up with new and ingenious ways to get out of doing their homework.
In China, some 50 million students have been taught lessons via an online tool called DingTalk. According to Technode, the students hatched a plan to get DingTalk removed from app stores by bombarding it with one star reviews.
Unfortunately, other users countered their efforts by posting a flurry of five star reviews, and the campaign didn’t succeed.
Happy bidet to you
Forget hand sanitiser and loo roll. The black market for bidets is about to go through the roof.
Bidets are those mysterious down under sinks that are easy to mistake for either a birdbath or a lidless toilet. Possibly – and we aren’t looking at anyone in particular – both. According to Crunchbase, one direct-to-consumer bidet start-up saw its revenue triple after toilet paper started disappearing from shop shelves.
It’s hardly surprising. Once you have overcome the fear of spraying dirty water everywhere, a bidet is simpler, more energy efficient, more hygienic and much much greener to use than scrolls of dead tree cross-section.
There are disadvantages, of course. Space, for one thing. Availability for another. Feedback rarely visits supermarkets, but we hear our local one doesn’t have a bidet aisle. Not that it has a toilet paper aisle either, apparently. Now it just has a lot of Angry Person aisles and not much of anything else.
Your songs
You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you. And if it isn’t, then you will probably stop listening. That, at least, is the upshot of new research by Grant Packard and Jonah Berger published in Psychological Science. It turns out that listeners have a marked preference for songs that make use of the second person singular in the title, as though the performer was directly addressing their fans and endowing them with a shared perspective.
These results are hardly surprising. After all, don’t we all like to be noticed? To be seen? To be directly addressed? Lord knows, we get a little shiver of recognition down the spine every time a microphone malfunctions and blasts feedback out of a nearby speaker.
That is why The Beatles achieved such success with hits like I Want To Hold Your Hand, and bombed at the charts with dreck like They Want To Hold His Hand, He Wants To Hold Their Hand and the perennially ambiguous Whom Wants To Hold I’s Hand.
In case of emergency
These are difficult times for us all and humour and levity are in short supply. Thankfully, our kind readers continue to send us examples of nominative determinism, and we have built up a healthy stockpile, saved for just such an emergency.
Ian Darby sends us a cutting from the The Courier-Mail of Brisbane featuring a concerned parent who has bought a job lot of loo roll, nappies and Nurofen in preparation for covid-19 shortages. Her name is Laura Spender.
Also featuring in Australian media stories about the coronavirus is the New South Wales minister for health, Brad Hazzard. Thanks to Michael Butcher for that one.
Malachy Bromham passed on a forensic psychology study by Kenneth Dodge and Cynthia Frame. Natalia Vukolova sent in the CEO of the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia, Debra Graves. And Steve Swift wrote in to tell us of a new member of his local speedwatch – himself.
Lesley Negus wrote to us about The Porn Conversation, a non-profit that helps parents and carers talk to young people about pornography. Its founder is Erika Lust.
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Send it to ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ, 25 Bedford Street, London WC2E 9ES or you can email us at feedback@newscientist.com