Has your death affected your life?
HAS your death affected your life in any way? This odd question is asked on the medical site . Diana and Emily Lutz came across it when they were trying to find out whether bitter almonds really do contain cyanide. They went on to ask the site what you should do if you eat bitter almonds, which not entirely illogically brought them to the subject of death.
They were directed to a page entitled “Patient Profile Survey for Death” at . This explains that it is “a general survey about you, your success in finding relief from Death and what effect Death has had on your life”.
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After asking questions about age, gender, occupation and so on, the survey asks: “About your Death… Do you have a family history of Death?” with tick boxes for Yes, No and Don’t Know.
Then it asks: “At what age did you first show symptoms of Death?” This is followed by “How long after you noticed symptoms of Death were you officially diagnosed?” and then “How long after you were diagnosed with Death did you have an effective treatment or cure?”
There are many more questions in a similar vein, including one asking how much “medical care and relief from Death” has left you out of pocket.
What could lie behind this bizarre investigation? We don’t know for sure, but are confident that Diana and Emily are on the right lines when they note that the site “seems to be largely computer generated”.
PROBABLY the ultimate example of the use of “up to” as a get-out clause in adverts (14 August) arrives from Alan Olson. He refers us to emails making claims such as “You can receive up to $240 or more every day”.
A quick search for confirmation throws up asking “Do you want to save up to 75 per cent or more on airline tickets?”. Meanwhile, quite coincidentally, an email arrives from Howard Smith alerting us to the site at , where currency trader Forex exhorts: “Open an account today and receive up to $250 or more”.
Alan says such statements are “basically meaning-free”. We agree. As Howard points out, they could cover absolutely any number at all, from a tiny fraction or less, to a billion billion or more – so they don’t tell us anything. Does this make you trust the good sense of companies that make such claims?
Breakthrough in paradoxical labelling
THE fluid-filled rubber ball Chris Goddard bought for his youngest at the Science Museum in London carried a label saying: “Warning! Not suitable for children under 3 years. Choking Hazard.”
“The ball,” Chris says, “is slightly larger than a standard tennis ball. Preliminary testing suggested that the human adult male is incapable of opening his jaws wide enough to admit a ball of this diameter into the mouth, far less into the windpipe. The ball itself could therefore never conceivably form a choking hazard to an infant.”
But there’s more. “The warning itself,” Chris continues, “is printed on a small piece of robust polymer film that could quite easily be removed and choked upon by a small child.” So it seems the museum’s marketing folk have produced a breakthrough in paradoxical labelling. “The warning label is needed, but rendered necessary only by its own existence,” Chris says.
A WARNING about “suspicious emails” was circulated recently round US Department of Energy laboratories, Jim Kornell tells us. The warning, itself an email, reported that the labs had been targeted by a series of emails with the subject line “Settings for your mailbox are changed”.
These emails, from “an unknown sender”, should be deleted, the warning says. “Do not open or forward them. Simply delete them!”
Then, after repeating the message that “all customers are reminded to not open e-mails from unknown senders/sources” it concludes: “**PLEASE PRINT AND POST THIS MESSAGE FOR YOUR CO-WORKERS WHO DO NOT HAVE ACCESS TO E-MAIL**”
Just what that is supposed to achieve, the message does not attempt to explain.
Relief for fire extinguisher disease
FINALLY, we reported two weeks ago on the gobbledegook churned out by an online translation system (16 October). Colin and Penny Gray send us a photo of another translation puzzle they saw on the wall in a Japanese hotel in Takayama.
It is a list of the benefits of the hotel’s hot springs. Among these, we are told, a dip in the water is good for “piles”, “arteriosclerosis”, “gimlet wound”, “convalescence convalescence” and “chronic woman disease”. It is also apparently just the thing for “chronic fire extinguisher disease”.
It’s this last one that has us really puzzled.
“Angela Kutchen sends us a scan of a pack of Johnson’s antiseptic powder warning that “Contact with the eyes, brain, meninges and middle ear should be avoided”
