NEVER let it be said that the US intelligence agencies are asleep at the wheel. According to US News and World Report, one day in April, the government’s daily “threat matrix” identified a new hazard, one Don Emilio Fulci, a supposedly evil and reclusive millionaire. A tip-off had warned them that Fulci was planning to mount chemical attacks in London and Washington, so the FBI was duly briefed, and word went to the White House.
Then an intrigued White House aide went Googling – and identified Fulci as the head of a crime syndicate in the video game Headhunter. Fortunately the all-clear came before attack orders went out. It all makes Feedback wonder on which day in April it all happened.
THE London listings magazine Time Out joins a long list of newspapers and periodicals that are impressed by a device called Aqua Detox, which claims to give “bio-energetic stimulation for self detoxification”.
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The Aqua Detox unit is a bowl filled with water with an electrode attached. When you immerse your feet in it “something special happens”, a leaflet promoting the device tells us. “The unit creates an electrolytic flow (a flow of electrons) which imparts to the water a bio-energetic field which corresponds to that of the person using the apparatus. This allows a gentle bio-energetic resonance to travel through the body. The body now starts to rebalance.”
This already sounds pretty amazing. But Time Out has identified further virtues. “The electrode creates electromagnetic waves that encourage the body to excrete toxins,” the magazine’s correspondent reported on 31 March after trying the device. And indeed, after a while “the water started to turn a dull rust colour… I hadn’t realised my toxins were so orange”.
Time Out is not alone in its enthusiasm. The Wellsprings Holistic Clinic offers treatment with this gadget, and the clinic’s website shows “before” and “after” pictures. You can see for yourself at that in the latter the water appears impressively brown. The website doesn’t explain what gives rise to this coloration, but it does point out elsewhere that “each foot has over 2000 pores through which toxins are excreted”.
And all this for only £995 for the “compact” Aqua Detox model, or £1095 for the “split-level model”.
But Feedback is puzzled. Some sceptical chemists have suggested to us that you can get water to change colour pretty much like this using standard school-physics electrolysis, given the right electrodes and a handful of AA batteries. And that’s with or without feet in the water – although salt from sweaty feet should help speed up the reaction.
Feedback is shocked that anyone could be so cynical, but still wonders why the water turns that murky colour. Is it because of toxins that have been excreted from the feet, as Time Out believes? Perhaps readers can supply an explanation. Or perhaps the makers of Aqua Detox themselves can tell us.
But be warned, dear readers, whatever you do, don’t try anything yourselves involving water, electricity and your body without expert supervision.
YET another game to play with Google. Martin Tweddle tells us that when he recently mistyped the word “result” in a manuscript, he got “result”. Thinking that this was rather a nice word, he typed it into Google to see what would happen – and was surprised to get a large number of hits, such as “Boom in day care industry the reslut of many social changes” and “Final reslut of men’s singles”.
Intrigued, Feedback then tried typing in a spelling error we often make, “unviersity” – and, yes, it turns out there are no fewer than 29,800 unviersities out there, including Columbia Unviersity, the Unviersity of Auckland and the Unviersity of Denver.
Feedback has at times poked fun at the vagaries of spellcheckers. But perhaps people who post pages on the web should be reminded that spellcheckers do in fact have their uses.
WAS this conscious or unconscious? James Reinhardt tells us of the excitement of the manager of a South African manufacturing company that has launched a new design of plough that apparently improves the fertilisation process of plants in the soil it turns over. According to the Cape Argus newspaper, he announced: “We are proud to be part of a ground-breaking initiative.”
FINALLY, they didn’t just provide a website, they were responsible for the whole thing. As Allyn Sayers was impressed to discover, in a note at the bottom of the San Francisco Exploratorium’s home page of : “Transit of Venus is made possible through the generosity of the Jim Clark Endowment for Internet Education and the McBean Family Foundation.”
The informative label on the pair of Odeon shoes that Joan Fox bought told her they were made of: “Upper: other materials. Lining & sock: other materials. Sole: other materials”
