FEEDBACK

BATTY product description of the week was found by Bill Tango on the wall of a restaurant on the freeway between Sydney and Newcastle in New South Wales, Australia. It can also be seen on the website of the product’s retailers, Oliver’s Real Food.

Himalayan salt – “The King of Salts” – apparently contains “high inherent stored information from 250,000,000 years ago”, along with “84 of the nutritional elements you need”, including neptunium and plutonium.

“This special salt,” we are told, “is waiting for the moment to have its inherent, stored energy, its bio-photon content, set free, by adding water.”

This use of “bio-photon” in a product description is new to us. Since the phrase refers strictly to a biological phenomenon, it has no meaning here. We have therefore added it to our Dictionary of Fruitloopery Indicators, where it takes its place alongside the likes of “quantum” and “resonant frequencies”.

And there’s more. “From a scientific point of view,” the

Last month, Margaret Morgan tells us, the newsletter of the Australian Psychology Association advertised a workshop for health workers titled: “Compulsive Hoarding Training”

website assures us, “salt has a very unique property. In contrast to all other crystalline structures, the atomic structure of salt is not molecular, but electrical.”

Goodness, that is unusual. But wait, it’s not over yet: “When we submerge a crystal of salt into water, it dissolves, and the sole is created. Sole is neither water nor salt. It is a higher energetic dimension than either the water or the salt alone.”

And so on, and so on. At last, we get the peroration. “So the brine solution,” the website concludes, “is the fluid state of the sun or light energy.”

Do we laugh or do we cry?

A PRESS release from EPIC announcing the launch of a “European business roundtable” on sensors for defence and security had Feedback deeply puzzled. What was the Electronic Privacy Information Center doing promoting the development of new technology for spying on citizens?

We had just been reading about the group’s campaign against

full-body scanners at American airports. Had they done a U-turn and sold out – or were they being breathtakingly two-faced?

Fortunately, neither. A closer look revealed that this EPIC was the European Photonics Industry Consortium, an industry group promoting optical sensors. It was the acronym that was two-faced.

A WEB-BASED company that offers to save people money on insurance deals has been advertising widely in the UK. Tom Newth saw one of its televised ads claiming that the internet is “the greatest invention of the 21st century”. He was unimpressed with their grasp of time – something rather important to insurance.

Turning to the company’s website, we see its response to a user querying the assertion: “The internet was the most important invention of the 21st century, in terms of impact and not that it was invented in…”

Feedback reckons that, on that basis, language, fire and the wheel are still in competition. Oh, the company’s name? Confused.com.

BROWSING through a very weighty treatise, Advanced Engineering Electromagnetics by the highly respected Constantine Balanis, David Sharman came across some startling data. In a table of dielectric constants (and other data that Feedback wouldn’t dream of understanding) of various materials there appears an entry for “dehydrated water”. It is given, perhaps logically, exactly the same value as a vacuum.

A HELPFUL map and guide to the town of Bonifacio on the Mediterranean island of Corsica notes that the St Roch Chapel was “erected where the last victim of the 1528 fever epidemic died, reducing the local population by three-quarters”.

A quick calculation by our

colleague Stephen Battersby reveals that before that unfortunate’s death the town population must have been one and one-third – and afterwards only a third of a person remained to mourn.

READER Michael Mowlam’s bottle of Miracle-Gro Fruit & Vegetable Concentrated Plant Food has the declaration on the back that it contains nitrogen (N); phosphorus pentoxide (P2O5) and potassium oxide (K2O). On the front it declares that it is “100 per cent CHEMICAL FREE!”. That’s all right then.

A PHOTO of “yet another sign imploring the impossible” arrives from Gavan Schneider. It shows a notice on a hospital door in Lithgow, New South Wales, that says: “Staff only access when door is closed.”

Gavan notes that it is apparently just the staff that are obliged to do things the hard way. Patients, it would seem, can have an easier time of it by going through the door when it is open.

FINALLY, one from the “Lost in Punctuation” department: Ron Westmaas’s local pub advertises “Vegetarian meat and fish dishes”.

Ron asks: “Is this some extreme form of genetic modification that I should avoid consuming?”

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72 | NewScientist | 18 December 2010

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