THE popular image may be that most Americans鈥� favourite possession is a handgun, but a survey commissioned by Magnavox, the electronics company, puts that in doubt. What they most like to have is the remote control for their television w 鈥� when they can find it.
The company has just come out with a line of TVs that include what it calls a Remote Locator, which makes the remote control beep for 30 seconds whenever you turn on the set. And in case you think that just sounds like more noise pollution, Magnavox鈥檚 survey found that remotes are a serious matter in the US.
Of the more than a thousand people questioned, 55 per cent lost their remotes up to five times a week and 63 per cent of the losers reported spending at least five minutes a day looking for them. They were willing to give up this much time because clutching a remote appears to be vital to their lives.
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鈥淥ne out of three Americans say watching television wouldn鈥檛 be as pleasurable without the remote control,鈥� the survey tells us. And speaking of pleasure, 鈥淓ighteen per cent of the women, compared to 9 per cent of the men, said that if they had to choose they would rather give up sex than their remote control for one week.鈥�
So Magnavox will sell you a remote that beeps when you can鈥檛 find it, thus spreading pleasure all around. Sadly, it may not be much help to the 6 per cent of Americans who habitually lose their remote in the fridge.
KEEP anything long enough and it will eventually become valuable. Over 700 wildlife photographers from round the world got a fresh reminder of this when they gathered in Bristol last month for the annual Wildscreen conference.
Wildlife photographers all have the same ambition: to shoot fresh and exciting pictures of live animals in their natural habitat. They are always looking for new ways of selling their pictures to the public, too.
The latest medium is a CD-ROM computer disc, with photographs, film sequences and text blended together. The disc gives a user the chance to walk down a path through the desert or jungle and spot animals as they appear.
It comes from New York鈥檚 TV station WNET 13, which like many others is branching out into CD-ROMs. But the station had problems when it tried to put together the disc from library footage, and had to send its own crew out to Kenya to shoot some of its own. 鈥淲e didn鈥檛 shoot a single animal,鈥� the station鈥檚 science editor, Neil Sims, told delegates. 鈥淲e just pointed the camera at landscapes as we drove backwards and forwards down tracks and roads. We can buy all the live action footage we need from your wildlife libraries. What we can鈥檛 buy is the background footage in which absolutely nothing happens and there is not an animal in sight.鈥�
As one old hand ruefully observed afterwards, this is just the kind of material most wildlife photographers have spent their working lives throwing away.
ALWAYS ready to keep up with the state of the art, press officers now send press releases via electronic mail and fax as well as through the post. The big advantage of electronic transmission, Feedback always heard, was speed. Why wait for the post to haul pieces of paper from one continent to another when electrons can do the job in milliseconds?
However, the latest press release from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore has given Feedback a crisis of electronic faith. The paper press release arrived before the fax and e-mail versions, and included a pretty photo of star clusters that was missing from the others.
IF YOU want to curry favour with John Gadogan, the director-general of Britain鈥檚 research councils, send him a solid glass tetrahedron. 鈥淚鈥檝e never been able to get one anywhere,鈥� he says.
Why should Cadogan, a chemist, want a tetrahedron? 鈥淐arbon, you see 鈥� the tetrahedral arrangement of the bonds.鈥�
If someone does oblige, the tetrahedron will take its place on Cadogan鈥檚 table at the Office of Science and Technology, beside a squat clay hippo. Visitors to his office be warned. The orientation of the hippo, moulded and fired by a family friend, reflects the kind of day Cadogan is having. 鈥淚f things are going well, it faces me, but if not, I turn it round,鈥� he says.
The tetrahedron would also sit alongside a solid glass sphere which looks very like a crystal ball. Cadogan denies that this plays any part in the Technology Foresight Programme, which aims to predict the most important areas of science and technology over the next decades.
NOW here is an important issue: how do you find out what makes people laugh and why? The Dutch journal Humor, which takes a learned interest in the subject, reports on an attempt to resolve the issue in the Netherlands. An in-depth study by Williband Ruch on what made 109 Dutch undergraduates giggle subjected them to the following tests: the Coping Humour Scale, Situational Humour Response Questionnaire, the Sense of Humour Questionnaire (1st version), the Sense of Humour Questionnaire (2nd version), the Metamessage Sensitivity Scale, the Humour Appreciation Scale, the Personal Liking of Humour Scale, and the Humour Creativity Scale.
The conclusion is that extroverts laugh more than introverts because they have less sense of the serious. But before you snigger, Ruch says he has identified a gap in the humour questionnaire market. There is, he claims, a desperate need for a new scale to test 鈥渟elf perception of sense of humour鈥�. Feedback agrees that this is indeed no laughing matter.
AND a reminder that this is your last chance to enter the Feedback Christmas Competition. You are invited to suggest the title and (optional) a maximum of 45 words of blurb for the book about science or technology that you would most like to read.
You may submit as many entries as you wish. Thanks to the generosity of the manufacturers, the 10 winners will each receive a bottle of Singleton, the splendid 10-year-old Speyside malt whisky. In addition, the 10 runners-up will each receive a bottle of J&B premium blend whisky.
The competition closes on Friday 2 December, so you have only a week to get your entries to us. (You can fax if you want to 0171-261 6464.) The results will be announced in the Christmas issue. The editor鈥檚 decision is final.