FEEDBACK is lost in admiration for the research department of the Tesco supermarket chain. Last month it was widely reported that the store鈥檚 psychologists had discovered that customers thought about the size of women鈥檚 breasts when they were buying melons and that, in accordance with current fashion trends, both men and women preferred smaller fruit. Tesco has modified its melon-buying policy as a result.
Hard on the heels of this work, the company has caused another stir by announcing that its researchers are investigating whether custard pies or lemon meringue pies are best for throwing at people鈥檚 faces. According to The Wall Street Journal, public interest in pie-throwing has surged since the attack by 鈥渆ntarteurs鈥� on Microsoft chairman Bill Gates last year. So in response to customer inquiries, Tesco took a group of employees to a school gymnasium near its headquarters in Hertfordshire and got them to throw pies at each other. Another group of employees recorded the results.
鈥淎ll our pies seem to fly extremely well,鈥� spokesperson Melodie Schuster reported after the experiment. 鈥淲hen you throw them and they land on someone, they make a nice, clean mess.鈥�
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What will Tesco鈥檚 boffins come up with next? We can鈥檛 wait.
INVENTIVE brains have not been idle in other commercial giants. Researchers at Proctor & Gamble recently filed a patent that enables you to check if there is any mess inside a baby鈥檚 nappy.
They propose in patent WO 99/23985-entitled 鈥淎bsorbent article with fibre-optic waste inspection system鈥�-a nappy with a fibre-optic cable running from the crotch end of the nappy to the top of the backsheet. Parents will be able to tell whether junior has wet his or her pants by peering down the cable.
This is obviously a useful invention, but speaking as a parent, Feedback is still puzzled. What is wrong with that other, unfailing indicator of the state of a baby鈥檚 nappy-the one detected by the nose?
TECHNOLOGIES for dealing with problems in the dark have also been put to good use by German inventors Gerrit Prop and Willi Specht. In order to guard against the ever-present danger of burying people alive, they have patented a coffin with built-in sensors. According to their system in patent WO 99/23988, if the person in the coffin wakes up and discovers they are still alive, the sensors send out a radio signal to a receiving device which e-mails or radios the local authorities with a message along the lines of 鈥淗elp, get me out of here鈥�.
Feedback is worried that lead-lined coffins would block such signals. We hope that Prop and Specht will get in contact with Proctor & Gamble. A modification of the fibre-optic nappy technology would be just the thing for ensuring efficient communication from the grave.
ARE YOU thinking of going online? If so, there are a lot of free Internet service providers you can sign up with nowadays. One is CurrantBun.com, which is 鈥渂rought to you by The Sun鈥�, Britain鈥檚 infamous tabloid. This one is well worth thinking about since, as its publicity tells us, among its other benefits it has 鈥渆xclusive access to you鈥檙e favourite newspaper鈥�.
How exciting. Not so sure about 鈥渋t鈥檚鈥� standard of English, though . . .
HAVE YOU ever wondered why Microsoft programs are so big, asks Simon Hogg of the University of Sheffield. Believe it or not, he tells us, there is a three-dimensional flight simulator buried in Excel 97, Microsoft鈥檚 spreadsheet software.
He must be kidding, we said. And when we fired up the copy of Excel that was conveniently loaded on the nearest PC, sure enough, there was no flight simulator.
But then we noticed that we were using Excel 7.0, not Excel 97. So we got hold of a copy of Office 97, Small Business Edition, which includes Excel 97. We tried to install it, got 鈥淓rror 825鈥� messages about 鈥渄amaged setup files for Outlook 97鈥�, roundly cursed Bill Gates and finally, by luck rather than skill or judgment, got Excel 97 up and running.
Sure enough, it does conceal a full-blooded flight simulator. Moving the mouse controls a flight over a surreal landscape past a 2001: A Space Odyssey-style monolith that displays the names of the programmers and some potted philosophy. We cannot quote it verbatim because we lost the monolith soon after flying past it, and by then we had rather lost interest in the whole silly business.
Who, we wondered, does Microsoft think has the time to unearth this kind of hidden nonsense?
But don鈥檛 let鈥檚 be too cynical. However daft this software-cluttering may be, it has forced manufacturers to produce hard disc drives with ever-increasing capacity-so that, for example, they can now be built into digital TV receivers as an alternative to videotape for recording TV programmes.
FINALLY, talking yet again of Bill Gates, British and Canadian readers will be shocked to learn that the great man has decided that the languages we speak are merely dialects. When Simon Painter was downloading Microsoft鈥檚 Internet Explorer 5, he was asked which version he wanted. The options given included: 鈥淓nglish鈥�, 鈥淓nglish (Canadian)鈥� and 鈥淓nglish (British)鈥�.
It鈥檚 the sort of thing that makes you want to throw a pie in somebody鈥檚 face.