PERHAPS President Clinton did not lie about his liaison with Monica Lewinski.
Perhaps he just forgot about it.
According to two doctors at Johns Hopkins University, 鈥渂earing down鈥� the way
you may do when you move your bowels, have a baby or indulge in sexual
intercourse, can sometimes cause 6 to 12 hours of transient global
amnesia鈥攖he inability to form new memories.
In the correspondence section of The Lancet (vol 352, p 1557), Chi
Dang and Lawrence Gardner describe two separate cases of men whose wives took
them to hospital an hour or so after sex because the men had become seriously
confused, although fully conscious. In one case, the patient thought he鈥檇 had a
stroke.
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Instead, according to Dang and Gardner, the 鈥渂earing down鈥濃�攌nown in
medicine as a Valsalva manoeuvre鈥攃ombined with the activation of the
sympathetic nervous system during sex, created intense pressure in the brain鈥檚
blood vessels, impeding the flow of blood to the central part of the brain.
This, in turn, resulted in amnesia.
The result is a complete inability to recall what happened before and during
the period of confusion, Dang says. 鈥淎s with our patients who did not recall the
name of the current US President, a presidential Valsalva manoeuvre during each
of his recent escapades may have legally allowed him not to recall specific
events and may thereby help maintain international stability during the current
transient global economic fluctuation.鈥�
WHERE do the people at The Economist鈥檚 advertising agency get their
brains from?
The latest advert for that worthy magazine tells us: 鈥淏lue eyes from mother.
Dark hair from father. Brains from newsagent.鈥�
Sorry, but no. The blue-eyed gene is recessive and has to be inherited from
both parents.
奥贬础罢鈥橲 in a name? Not a lot if theUS government鈥檚 Advisory Committee for
Energy-Related Epidemiologic Research is anything to go by. Puzzled by its role
and its remit, Feedback looked closer, only to find that its job is to look at
the effects of radioactive fallout from atomic bomb tests鈥攓uite a stretch
of the term 鈥渆nergy鈥�.
WHEN the New 杏吧原创 news desk was researching the story about
e-mail scams (This Week, 31 October, p 7 and Letters, this issue, p 62),
CompuServe would not talk about its security procedures and said only that it
鈥渢ries to avoid providing addresses that are easily identified鈥�. So Feedback set
up a new account with CompuServe to see what would happen.
Within hours there was a dodgy e-mail from someone called 鈥淩ussiansexy鈥�.
Then, a week later, not one but two 鈥淯rgent鈥� messages arrived from different
sources, each signed 鈥淐ompuServe Account Manager John Debri鈥� and titled 鈥淧roblem
with Your Account鈥�.
Sure enough, both messages asked for our password, address and credit card
details. We shudder to think what would happen to anyone鈥檚 bank balance if they
revealed these details. But a new user might well be fooled by the message which
CompuServe鈥檚 system delivered.
For many years, Feedback has had a personal account with Compuserve, and no
such message has been sent to this long-established address. The scam
e-mails were addressed to the new account by number not name. So the hackers are
clearly targeting new address numbers.
We called CompuServe and innocently asked who John Debri was. 鈥淲e already
know about him. Delete the message and don鈥檛 reply,鈥� said CompuServe鈥檚 help
line. 鈥淭here are a lot of hackers out there trying to get members鈥� details.鈥�
Perhaps CompuServe would now like to talk to us about security.
HARD to know whether a Virginian farmer that reader Peter Martin bumped into
was being serious or sarcastic. Martin tells us that he was doing a dawn-to-dusk
spring bird count for a local Audubon Society with another bird-watcher. At one
point, they came across a farmer in a field and stopped to chat with him.
While they were passing the time of day with him, Martin鈥檚 friend looked up
in the sky at a circling hawk, nudged Martin and asked: 鈥淲hat is that up
迟丑别谤别?鈥�
As they both trained their binoculars on the specimen, the local farmer
drawled: 鈥淎round these parts, we call that a bird.鈥�
WHEN travelling back to London from Taiwan on a KLM flight, Tony Lang was
puzzled by the 鈥渂est before鈥� date on his packet of Edam cheese: 鈥淛an 99 AD.鈥�
Was such clarification really necessary? Or is the market still flooded with
cheese from 99 BC?
FINALLY, don鈥檛 forget鈥攏ow鈥檚 your chance to beat the winter blues by
entering the Feedback Christmas Competition.
Last year, Channel 4 television asked a group of scientists what they thought
were the seven wonders of the modern world. For our competition, we are asking a
somewhat different question: what are the seven blunders of the modern
world?
Give us your answers, please, by letter, fax or e-mail.
Thanks to the generosity of Olympus Cameras, the 20 readers who come up with
the best blunders will each receive the latest Advanced Photo System compact
camera from Olympus, the OLYMPUS AF 200 (recommended retail price
拢69.99).
All entries must reach us by Monday 7 December. The winners will be announced
in the 19 December issue. The Editor鈥檚 decision is final.