Crackpot product with a very long name
COULD this be the longest name ever for a crackpot product? Ian Fletcher draws our attention to the Orgone Protector Tachyon Pyramid Quartz Tesla Coil Orme, on sale on eBay for £14.99 at . Has the Guinness Book of Records been informed?
You would expect a device with a name like that to do lots of stuff, and according to the inventor, called Suli, you wouldn’t be disappointed. The OPTPQTCO is just one of Suli’s inventions that can be used to “enhance meditation, manifestation, food/water charging, eliminate toxins from food, eliminate chemtrails, align chakras, protection from radiation, achieve zen-like meditation, psychic enhancement, psychic attack protection, alien abduction protection, alien implant neutralizer, increase life force energy and many other things”.
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It all sounds very impressive, especially the “alien implant neutralizer” bit. We have to admit, though, to a twinge of disappointment that even more fruitloop words – such as “quantum” and “microclusters” and “negative ions” – haven’t been included in the device’s name. Sooner or later, no doubt, they will.
THE gesture of laying a finger on one side of the nose is intended to convey possession of inside knowledge and used to be quite common, reader Bob Millar noted (27 August). But why? We asked readers to supply an explanation.
The idea that charmed us most, even if it stretched our credulity, came from John Mulholland. In the game of charades, he claimed, there is a gesture intended to indicate that you have worked out the answer. Pointing at an eye and then at the nose gives you “eye-nose”, which in turn suggests the words “I know”. Bob Millar’s nose-tapping gesture, says John, is just a “minor development” of this bit of charades’ sign language.
In addition to its charm, this explanation has the further advantage that readers who know a lot more about charades than we do will be able to confirm or deny John’s hypothesis. We expect to hear from them soon.
Road signs aiming to reduce noise in Victoria, Australia, read “Avoid using engine brakes when safe”. So truck drivers can only use their engine brakes when it’s dangerous, Robert Crigan fears
Beer so acid it goes right through you
YOUR “inner biological terrain” is at risk, according to – which asks us to “identify various foods’ pH-level”. Why would we want to do that? Presumably, so that we can combat the risk by buying the website’s “Alkaline recipes” book for $4.95, or their dispenser of “alkaline water – ionized, energized, healthy!” – for $299. At least the latter is a lot cheaper than the one going for £649 that we mentioned in our last report on alkaline water (20 August).
Perhaps, however, we should first join reader Will Kemp in observing a moment’s startled silence at the news on the site that healthy alfalfa grass has a pH of +29.3 and beer an astonishingly bad -28.6? As Will observes: “Blimey, no wonder it goes straight through you!”
Feedback asked around the New Scientist office to see whether we could work out where these numbers came from. The pH scale runs from an extreme of acidity at a value close to zero via neutral at pH 7 to extreme alkalinity at 14. Have they resurrected some obscure previous incarnation of pH to rival the modern scale? Not that we can discover, though we did en route stumble on the amusing beer-related Wikipedia factoid that the term “pH” was “first introduced by Danish chemist Søren Peder Lauritz Sørensen at the Carlsberg Laboratory in 1909”. Lager has a lot to answer for.
Or is making up the whole thing? “New chemicals have,” the site assures us, “put even greater stresses on our system’s ability to control the chemistry of our bodily fluids.” Could those be the “precious bodily fluids” so fiercely preserved against Communist contamination by General Ripper in the film Dr Strangelove?
THE headline John Murrell read on the Universe Today web page at was pretty disturbing. “Comet Elenin Could Be Disintegrating,” it said. John read on, taking in the distressing news that the comet has decreased in brightness since it was struck by a massive solar flare and it may not survive perihelion, its closest approach to the sun.
Then John perked up. Prominent among the content-related advertisements accompanying the article was “Comet Repair Services”, offering fixed price repairs for only £125. Surely such a cost would be within the means of the world’s space agencies, even when they are cash-strapped as so many are now. The only problem would be getting the repair people out to the comet.
AN ADVERTISEMENT for The Coin Depot in Coin World magazine offers sets of US coins in lots of 10. “Each group,” the ad announces proudly, “contains at least 10 different dates.”
Scott Bryan wonders what the words “at least” are doing there.