(Image: Paul McDevitt)
Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
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Positively fruitloopy
VETERAN TV presenter Noel Edmonds is sleeping soundly at night after spending £2000 on a computerised yoga mat that recalibrates his electromagnetic fields. Edmonds shared the good news on Celebrity Radio, where he explained that phones and Wi-Fi are covering us all in the wrong sorts of electromagnetism, assuring host Alex Belfield .
That miracle mat is the , which promises a suite of “profound” such as better sleep, reduced stress, and, alarmingly, a 500 per cent increase in cellular energy.
To achieve this, the manufacturers claim that the EMPpad “produces an electromagnetic pulse at an intensity and frequency which mimics the Earth’s magnetic field”. Handy for astronauts, we presume, but rather redundant for Earth-bound folk.
Duncan Gaskin is told by The Mirror that eating spicy food makes him ““. “Pass me a Korma,” he says, “I might live forever!”
A tall order
READERS may recall that Noel Edmonds previously baffled audiences with talk of “cosmic ordering”, a type of wishful thinking in which the cosmos will fulfill your desires, if you only ask.
This was accompanied by Positively Happy, a book in which the multi-millionaire “embarks on a journey to discover a scientific explanation for his enhanced state of well-being”. Edmonds concluded that the answer lies in a positivity formula of “scientifically proven elements” in the form of abstruse questions such as “Do you trust your tap water?” and “How well do you treat your villi?”.
You can even file your astronomical demands online at the Cosmic Ordering Site (). Much as Feedback is tempted to ask the heavens for an end to this sort of fruitloopery, we can’t in good faith rid the world of something that brings so much genuine happiness to Noel Edmonds, and, in a roundabout way, to many of us as well.
Sex by numbers
FOR some weeks, correspondents to the Letters page have wondered how the average lifetime number of sexual partners could be 12 for men and 8 for women, as reported in New Scientist (27 June, p 34).
The Letters editor has put to bed these discussions, but Feedback is sure the assembled minds here can offer some ingenious hypotheses.
David Parlett suggests that the figures make perfect sense if the number of sexually active men and women is mismatched. “If there were a community of 12 women and 8 men, and each possible heterosexual pairing occurred at one time or another,” he writes, “then the women will each have had an average of eight partners and the men an average of twelve. Problem solved.”
Damn lies
MEANWHILE Anne Miller suggests: “Those who say that it’s impossible for men to have more lifetime partners than women neglect the implications of population growth.” Given that men seem to prefer younger women, and a growing population has more young than old, Anne reasons “it is mathematically straightforward for them to have significantly more lifetime partners than women do”.
Finally, Rory Allen writes to identify two explanations for the discrepancy. The first being that men are more willing to take part in same-sex encounters compared with women, while the second is that men are simply more willing to exaggerate. In truth, says Rory, “these numbers tell us more about the inaccuracy of self-reported statistics than they do about sexual activity”.
Card games
CHECKING our inbox, we find yet more ideas for renaming contactless cards. S. J. Courtney astutely points out that it would make more sense to name these cards for what they do, rather than what they don’t. “Since the user simply waves them over the reader, I suggest they be called wave-overs, possibly spelled wavovers.”
Avoiding the dreaded combination of Greek and Latin, Mike Frederick writes with a suggestion that is “entirely Latin and appearing to non-classical scholars to fit the current vogue for portmanteau words”. We rather like his solution: “nontact”.
That’s rich!
THE use of pseudoscientific equations as an advertising gimmick continues to evolve. Feedback previously mulled the unexplained letters scattered like runes in M&C Saatchi’s “holy grail” of marketing (25 July).
Now Anchor Cheddar advances the field again with a “formula for richness” that seeks to quantify the value in our lives through the mysterious interaction of letters coding for attitudes toward success, family and perfection, .
Happily enough, the equation finds that those with the richest lives aren’t wealthy financiers but married couples on middle incomes and other groups that fall into Anchor Cheddar’s target market. Fancy that.
Even-handed policing
POLICE in Leicestershire, UK, have been investigating burglaries only at even-numbered homes, reveals the . The scheme is said to have reduced workload with no effect on convictions or public satisfaction (though Feedback wonders if only even-numbered homes were sampled in surveys on police satisfaction).
Five more counties are eyeing a similar cost-saving measure. This presents an interesting dilemma for would-be burglars: if you suspect the local force has such a policy in effect, is it better to stick to odd or even-numbered homes, or spread your risk by alternating between the two?