DO YOU ever wonder how folklore factoids – like the giant alligators in New York’s sewers – are born, and end up as questions on New ĐÓ°ÉÔ´´â€™s Last Word page?
Firetech, a British fire safety company, has been sending the press “invaluable advice” with the explicit warning that a “cause of fires in the home is the TV remote control – this slides down the sofa and a button gets pressed and this can catch fire”. As we spend half our life hunting for lost remote controls, we asked whether the wayward remote turns on the TV, which then bursts into flames, or whether the remote itself ignites? A spokeswoman helpfully explained: “When it falls down the side of the sofa or armchair, one of the buttons gets pressed and stays pressed, and this causes the remote to catch fire.”
Worried and intrigued, we asked if there was any documented evidence of a fire starting this way. Says Firetech’s Trevor Dean, a former fire officer: “I cannot give you any examples at this point.” But he was able to refer us to a 1996 report from the British government (). Unfortunately, this report says nothing about flaming remotes. It just reassures that if there was once a risk of TV sets self-combusting while standing by for remote control commands, this was no longer a problem with new sets, even in 1996.
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Says Dean: “It depends on how you read it.”
THE bleat of a cellphone broke into the plenary lecture at the Radio and Wireless Conference, organised by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in Boston this month. Nothing surprising in that, and the topic under discussion was, appropriately, the technology used in cellphones. What surprised the audience, all of whom had politely switched their phones off or to silent mode, was the reaction of the speaker, to whom the offending device belonged. He stopped speaking, pulled the phone out of his pocket, looked at it as if trying to make up his mind whether to answer it, pressed a button, looked at it again, pressed another button, and finally returned the phone to his pocket, resuming his talk without a word of explanation.
Always inclined to give the benefit of the doubt, Feedback assumes he was considering an impromptu demonstration of the technology under discussion.
INVENTOR Don Sothman has his own solution for the world’s environmental problems: the Popcorn Fork. He argues that the world eats half a billion kilograms of popcorn a year, a lot of butter gets wiped off fingers onto paper napkins, napkins are made of paper, paper comes from trees and trees produce the oxygen we breathe. So, he claims, by using his Popcorn Forks instead of fingers you can help save the forests.
Whether the Popcorn Fork will also solve the health problems created by over-indulgence in the buttery stuff is another question. But Sothman sees no problem in that department. “Popcorn, it’s wholesome, it’s non-political, nobody can say anything bad about it,” he says. “It’s a health food as long as you don’t goop it all up.”
MAN does not seem to be dog’s best friend when it comes to hay fever. A group of medical researchers in Chicago have managed to sensitise beagles to ragweed pollen, the most common cause of springtime running noses and teary eyes in Americans. The dogs have been sneezing since the experiment began in 1992, and now the first results are being published in the Journal of Applied Physiology in an article entitled “Canine model of nasal congestion and allergic rhinitis”.
But the scientists are delighted with the dogs, which are apparently treated very well apart from their involuntary allergies. They are proud to have this new animal model for rhinitis because, as they delicately put it, previous studies were “based on nonsurvival techniques performed in small animals”. Feedback thinks this is fairly self-explanatory, but just to make itself perfectly clear, the journal has issued a press release stating that the earlier studies “were based on euthanising the animals following the techniques tested, an action unsuitable for application to humans”.
THE City of Edinburgh Council has a comprehensive list of unacceptable clothing on its “School Dress Code”. This includes “items potentially causing health and safety problems for the wearer (for example, clothes that are flammable, certain types of earrings and chains)”. This seems sensible until you realise that in a stroke it excludes all the normal clothing fabrics – cotton, nylon and so on. What, reader Shane Voss asks, should his son wear now?
FINALLY, while reader Ian Harper was browsing for new ski gear in the Snow+Rock catalogue, he came across this description for clothing made by Descent Ski Gear: “This highly respected intelligent gear… [uses] futuristic material with revolutionary properties that utilises advanced photonics in heat-retention technology by having its own solar system…” It should be warm enough, then.
The label on reader Michael Kellock’s Vicks nasal inhaler says that it is for external use only. He is still thinking about that…