Well, at least he's not telling people they shouldn't vaccinate their kids. Still crazy, but not scary crazy.
AIDS? Ebola? Nah – ELECTRO SMOG is our 'biggest problem', says Noel Edmonds
Once omnipresent telly host Noel Edmonds has claimed that "the biggest problem we have is not Ebola, it's not AIDS, it's electro smog." Electro smog, according to Edmonds, is a product of "the Wi-Fi and all of the systems that we are introducing into our lives" which "are destroying our own natural electro-magnetic fields." …
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Thursday 6th August 2015 06:21 GMT Mark 85
Indeed, he does sound like he's a few sandwiches short of a picnic. OTOH, I don't know how "popular" he is over there, but this might be an opportunity to go long on shares of the company that makes the device. Then sell for a profit before some guardian agency degrees them as being worthless and a scam.
Crap.. I'm sounding like a greedy capitalist... Oh wait.. I am a greedy capitalist looking to pad by retirement account.
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Thursday 6th August 2015 12:07 GMT Jim 59
Edmonds is nowhere near as far, far, far out as Icke. And if one reads the story with a bit of thought, most of what he says here is just a broad statement of physics, apart from the EMPpad bit. For example, the bit Team Register have emboldened is just a statement of the law of conservation of energy.
Yes, physicists don't use the term "electr smog", but we certainly are living in a bunch of radio noise. You could call it a sea, or a field, or a smog...
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Thursday 6th August 2015 12:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
Bollocks
Most of what he says here is not "a broad statement of physics", it is a load of new age nonsense that appropriates the language of physics. In other words, the same pseudo-scientific claptrap that Deepak Chopra peddles.
When a physicist says "conservation of energy" they mean something very specific and measurable. When Edmonds says "energy" he means something completely vague to do with your "life force" (whatever that means) leaving your body and joining some universal consciousness. Unless you have some concrete definition of what "life energy" is, how you measure, and how it gets transmitted out of the body into wherever-it-is that it goes, it's just rubbish.
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Thursday 6th August 2015 14:04 GMT DropBear
Re: Bollocks
I'm kinda wondering what would he do if someone were to tell him there's an awful lot of MUCH higher frequency "electo-magnetic smog" sloshing around, also known as "thermal radiation" (and even worse - "light"!) which he could completely escape only by leaving the solar system entirely (not a bad idea, actually)...
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Friday 7th August 2015 08:09 GMT Anonymous Coward
moRe: Bollocks
What part of science isn't believing some story your mind tells you is actually real?
This leaving the body stuff is so backwards, our mind just stops trying to convince you that your body is the whole of you. So no "joining some universal consciousness" required, you just intentially forgot who you really are. Sometimes we remember and then convince ourselves to forget again and pretend that things are real.
The only knowable fact is that our mind presents us with a very believable reality.
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Friday 7th August 2015 09:15 GMT Jim 59
Re: Bollocks
Most of what he says here is not "a broad statement of physics", it is a load of new age nonsense that appropriates the language of physics.
I disagree. He doesn't mention "new age" or "life force", these are terms introduced by you. Yes, there is some made-up daftness (empPAD, "wrong sorts of electro-magnetism", Ebola). However, much of his statement regarding energy would find qualitative agreement among physics teachers.
We shouldn't get too snooty about people without physics O/A levels. They can understand some things without necessarily using the correct academic language. To people like Stephen Hawking, we probably all sound like Edmunds.
Swap Shop fans back me up here!
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Thursday 6th August 2015 09:53 GMT AbelSoul
Re: Is this a preview of a new series of Brass Eye?
Ah, the "Cake" episode. An absolute classic.
Mr Edmonds made a royal fool of himself.
"The most dangerous thing about Cake is that it's a made up drug."
And not to forget the other episode in that series where assorted celebrity pals were literally talking Nonce Sense.
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Thursday 6th August 2015 12:22 GMT ravenviz
Re: Is this a preview of a new series of Brass Eye?
Er, I think it was the Brass Eye production team that made a fool of him, he was acting in all good faith putting his popularity where his mouth is and backing a (what he thought was a) worthy cause.
Chris Morris' talent though is without question.
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Thursday 6th August 2015 06:47 GMT Charles Manning
He's possibly right about Ebola
Ebola has been massively over-hyped.
Sure, it has killed some people but really nothing compared to other health risks. If anything, all the hoo-ha about Ebola has muddied the water when it come other diseases.
During the last 18 months in the three W. African countries of Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia there have been 11000-odd deaths from Ebola out of a population for 22million or so. About 1 per 2000 people.
During that same time in those three countries:
* Flu killed about 50,000-60,000
* Malaria killed about 30,000.
* Tuberculosis killed about 50,000
* AIDS 20,000.
* Motor vehicle accidents: 6,000 or so.
So all the media hype about Ebola causing massive problems due to economic disruption due to people dying was just nonsense.
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Thursday 6th August 2015 08:10 GMT Rich 11
Re: He's possibly right about Ebola
So all the media hype about Ebola causing massive problems due to economic disruption due to people dying was just nonsense.
The economic disruption wasn't caused by people dying, it was caused by people being afraid to go out and carry on with business as usual for fear of getting infected.
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Thursday 6th August 2015 08:14 GMT MathsFail
Re: He's possibly right about Ebola: No
Charles, what your Noel's analysis fails to consider is how Ebola differs from those other causes of death:
* the Ebola deaths occurred over a month, the others you quote over 18 months. I leave the linear growth calculations as an exercise (even though disease transmission/death is often exponential);
* the nature of Ebola means that people must avoid contact with others to avoid infection. This isn't the case with the other things you mention and effectively shuts down all activity in affected areas. Think about that happening in a city, eg business district;
* Ebola's infectiousness means that the risk of it spreading outside those countries, eg via human travel on planes or boats, is huge. Imagine what that does to importing/exporting or business travel between neighboring countries. Look at our own response in airport/port controls;
* disease containment and body disposal require new techniques, equipment and facilities. All this costs time and money meaning the response is slow, meaning the disease spreads faster, exacerbating all the above points;
* finally, can you honestly tell me that your personal response (and fear of) Ebola is the same as for flu or a car accident?
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Thursday 6th August 2015 09:19 GMT Richard Taylor 2
Re: He's possibly right about Ebola
Yeah, but nobody ever made a scary film about Flu, Malaria, TB or Motor Vehicle Accidents...
Well I raise you, in order
* Flu Bird Horror
* Martha and Mary (a Richard Curtis film - so that get's the horror angle)
* A New York Winter's Tale (it really is bad)
* Crash
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Thursday 6th August 2015 11:28 GMT GitMeMyShootinIrons
Re: He's possibly right about Ebola
"Yeah, but nobody ever made a scary film about Flu, Malaria, TB or Motor Vehicle Accidents..."
I remember a scary film about motor vehicle accidents. In fact several:
- Keanu had pretty scary acting in Speed.
- Those Fast and Furious films had scary accidents.
- But check out this for full horror... https://youtu.be/qrY7pr2V82o
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Thursday 6th August 2015 13:57 GMT Fibbles
Re: He's possibly right about Ebola
Those numbers are completely disingenuous. Considerably more effort was expended to contain the Ebola outbreak than to contain any outbreaks of Flu for example. Were Ebola left to run unchecked the numbers would be very different.
Ebola has a mortality rate of 50-70%. Flu has a mortality rate of 0.1%.
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Thursday 6th August 2015 07:24 GMT Law
Reported by Digital Spy?!?!
So it's come to this?? El Reg is re-reporting a Digital Spy article... which itself is based on some lazy re-reporting of a mirror interview... I assume you saved the extra Clarkson / Evans paragraphs for another couple of pieces? (yes, I lowered myself to googling "noel edmonds digital spy")
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Thursday 6th August 2015 07:37 GMT Phuq Witt
Orbs
According to the Daily Fail's rehashing of this story [Look. I was bored and there was nothing else to read!] Edmonds also claims that his dead parents sit permanently, in the form of 'golden orbs', one on each of his shoulders.
That would really cramp your style when it came to certain 'Gentlemen's Relaxation' exercises. So no wonder the fecker's had to resort to his EmPad. It's obviously the equivalent of a cold shower, for the digital age.
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Thursday 6th August 2015 08:24 GMT DJO
Wimp
I remember a very long time ago I was at a party where a young Noel Edmonds was being very self-important in the kitchen, until the police turned up (actually just to get the music turned down a bit).
Me Blobby was out into the garden and over the fence before you could say "Daily Mail Expose" - As were a lot of naughty persons in the front room who left their bits & bobs behind, so I helpfully tidied up and was stoned for a week.
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Thursday 6th August 2015 08:42 GMT MJI
At least he is happy
Not being a miserable sod, not scared of popping his clogs.
Might be a load of old bollocks but at least Mr Blobbys friend will be happy.
One final thing for Mr Blobby well done for knocking Take That off no. 1 with the Blobby song!
Almost as good as Bob the Builder denying some other boy band a no. 1
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Thursday 6th August 2015 09:07 GMT Allan George Dyer
Let's get this straight...
"part of a massive, incomprehensible universal web of energy" -
Yep, that's right. Biologists call it the Food Web. Next time you get bitten by a mosquito - celebrate, it's immortality on an instalment plan! Bird just shat on you? That might be Grandma trying to get back in contact, via the bird that ate the worm that... you get the idea.
Any sane person makes a distinction between energy and consciousness. Shesh!
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Thursday 6th August 2015 10:02 GMT Naughtyhorse
Re: energy and consciousness
I appreciate that I am on thin ice here.
And I have absolutely no wish to be associated in any way with the cockwomble(heheheheh) in question.
but on the question of consciousness and energy... i think there is a clear link.
What is 'me' is an unintended consequence of all that electrical activity going on behind my eyes.
electrical _energy_ that is. ergo I am energy, when the energy goes away... I stop.
</pedant>
that said, crystal vibrations is bollocks (apart from,,,, err real ones)
dowsing is just a twat in a field with a stick.
Prince Philip is most certainly _not_ a lizard.. I'm pretty sure anyway.
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Thursday 6th August 2015 10:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: energy and consciousness
Prince Philip is most certainly _not_ a lizard.. I'm pretty sure anyway
At last a voice of reason, least Phil say's what's on his mind, rather like my Aspergers suffering son (who by the way has never felt the need to hack and use it as an excuse to avoid prosecution)
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Thursday 6th August 2015 12:26 GMT David Nash
Re: energy and consciousness
But when these woo-merchants say "energy" they don't mean any normal, accepted definition of energy such as you might get from a scientist or even a physics teacher. they mean some vague undefinable "life force".
Consciousness is just the emergent behaviour of a few billion brain cells and the rest of your body working together, yes they need energy input from food, and they convert that to electrical energy to do work, but there's nothing mysterious about that.
Now explaining consciousness, yes, that is called "the hard problem" and is quite mysterious indeed. But one can't just posit some unexplainable web of "energy".
By the way reports I've heard indicated that self-proclaimed sufferers of sensitivity to EM radiation from wifi, etc, couldn't tell the difference from placebo, so it's all in the mind or simply an unrelated conjunction of assorted non-specific symptoms (headaches, tireness, nausea etc). Unfortunately I don't have an immediate source for that. It's just a normal reaction of some to newish technology. Same happened when the railways were invented, no doubt something similar happened with motor vehicles, and I've even heard that people claimed some kind of syndrome caused by ball-point pens!
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Thursday 6th August 2015 09:17 GMT Doctor_Wibble
Dangers Of Electro-Smog
The presence of electro-smog means all those newfangled doodads without wires can work and you end up with people wandering about aimlessly, casually throwing themselves into the paths of herds of rampaging shopping trolleys with absolutely no thought for those of us trying to whizz past on our hipster scooter thingies and although they aren't going to try and eat us, Mr Romero's fine and much-emulated documentaries do spring to mind.
edit: or possibly The Fog but there's a book and a film with different stories and that just gets confusing especially the bit where we can't see the electro-smog but on the other hand it does have an insidious control over the minds of those within, who will either try and assimilate/eat or destroy you so maybe they aren't that different...
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Thursday 6th August 2015 09:52 GMT Anonymous Coward
It's life, Jim, but not as we know it..
.. and a new one is born every minute.
Edmonds says he remains healthy through a £2,000 device called an EMPpad, which purports to be based on NASA research.
It removes pain and reduces stress and people tell me I don't look 66.
"I use [my EMPpad] eight minutes a day – it has changed my life," offered Edmonds, who then explained how it is able to do so.
"It recalibrates all the blood cells and readjusts the electro-magnetism in your body. Think of a yoga mat, connected to a computer – it provides you with pulsed electro-magnetism."
Colour me suspicious after hearing such a barrel load of, well, claptrap, really, but I'd like to know how much of the company that makes it is owned by Mr Edmonds himself. The statement as above contains quite a lot of repulsive energy for people like me, you know.
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Thursday 6th August 2015 10:11 GMT RonWheeler
NE's phraseology is bad
but there is some, slightly vague, slightly theoretical work being done on non-native EMF showing it can have an effect on the human body. See books like 'The Body Electric'. Some of the quantum biology stuff is a bit 'out there'.... I used to be a EMF cynic until I hooked myself up to a regular multimeter and stood beside from the microwave oven.
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Thursday 6th August 2015 10:39 GMT Little Mouse
Hang on - he might have a point...
Fundamentally, we ARE all made of energy.
And I've seen enough superhero films to know that anyone who "recalibrates all the blood cells and readjusts the electro-magnetism in your body" will inevitably become some kind of supervillain.
In this case, a supervillain who wears his Mum's hair and his Hairdresser's shirts.
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Thursday 6th August 2015 12:19 GMT MrPloppy
Re: Hang on - he might have a point...
But the great one said it better than him.
Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration—that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves.- Bill Hicks.
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Thursday 6th August 2015 12:13 GMT David Pollard
EMP-pad a successor to EM-Drive?
The EM-drive was featured in the Torygraph a week ago. Maybe Mr Edmonds thinks he can get a bit of lift from the wash as it zooms on by into the stratosphere.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/space/11769030/Impossible-rocket-drive-works-and-could-get-to-Moon-in-four-hours.html
Mind you, the EM-drive was twice in receipt of DTI funding - £100,000 or so - just over a decade ago.
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2006-12-05d.103254.h
It's reassuring to know, as Margaret Hodge informed us, that, "Highly qualified technical experts and academics carried out an assessment on behalf of the Department [of Trade and Industry]."
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Thursday 6th August 2015 13:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
I've come to the conclusion
That "certainty is only for imbeciles and deities".
I don't class myself as either (despite what colleges say) so I dispair a little at the rush to call the guy names.
We quite possibly are surrounded by all the information required to transcend this reality and the only thing stopping us is our own certainty that it couldn't possibly be, because that would be mad!
Look at the flat earth stuff, oh how I laughed until I realised it could be used as an exercise in pulling apart my own beliefs, why do I think the earth is round? suppress laughter for a second and you can transport yourself back through childhood and see those key lessons being taught in a "because it is" mode, you may find the sparks of curiosity strangly bright even from this distance, it's a shame how much genuine interest we suppress to be normal, fit in, pay taxes and breed.
I'm not sure how much David Ike stuff I follow but he has been calling Edward Heath a child murderer for years, strange nobody has called him out on it in the courts.
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Thursday 6th August 2015 16:14 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I've come to the conclusion
"David Ike ... has been calling Edward Heath a child murderer for years, strange nobody has called him out on it in the courts."
And others.
Anyway, you watch your back.
Talk like that might get you a visit from Special Branch, who after providing round the clock protection services for the PM for more than two decades will have a pretty good idea whether he's got anything to hide, anything to fear, or not.
Or you might get a visit from someone who wants to vigorously suggest that you don't want to believe everything David Icke says.
Be careful out there.
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Thursday 6th August 2015 13:04 GMT Stevie
Bah!
Didn't Mr Edmunds get taken in by some idiot scheme about 40 years ago? Something to do with speedboats and unworkable "harmonically balanced" reciprocating engines?
I think I saw the cutaway model for that engine once. It was very impressive. I could never make the geared pseudo-crank work on paper though. I figured I was missing something. I was. I was missing the fact that it was a tricked-up model for pushing a scam.
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Thursday 6th August 2015 13:11 GMT Anonymous Coward
Young?
It's probably the wig / dyed hair (I don't really care which) that makes him look 'young', along with dressing well, a make-up dept to conceal the cracks, an enjoyable job, ample amounts of cash, and a young lady to mess about with, etc.
I assume he has considered how much 'electro-smog' is floating about in the studio, with all those wireless mics and cams?
I admit I still find him quite amiable on Deal or No Deal, so I'm not going to let a bit of hippy nonsense cloud my opinion of him too much! (although, if I thought about it too deeply, I could be quite disgusted how he lets contestants make expensive mistakes based upon numerical hunches that are total BS - it's RANDOM!)
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Thursday 6th August 2015 13:12 GMT John Savard
Only 2,693 pounds
Visited the web site of the people who make the EMPpad. A featured product was the Omnium1, a tablet with an extra-powerful battery, presumably to allow it to emit those electro-magnetic pulses that mimic the Earth's natural magnetic field. A steal at only £2,693.
So to enjoy its health benefits, I fear one truly has to have more money than sense... at both ends.
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Friday 7th August 2015 01:13 GMT Henry Wertz 1
There's a whole industry of these devices
There's a whole industry of various devices here in the US at least. I'm not sure how large an industry but at the prices they charge I'm sure it's very profitable.
Some devices will claim to do whatever and turn out to have nothing at all in there (they're either an empty box or have a few electronic bits but they aren't actually hooked up to the mains or inductively coupled to it or anything.)
A few technically do what they claim -- not the effects, those are pure "pseudo-science" (I hesitate to raise most descriptions to the level of pseudo-science so I put it in quotes.) But, for example, if it claims to make a magnetic field, it'll turn out to have a magnet or electromagnet in it (along with an LED or two that will light up when it's plugged in to "tell you it's working".) You could of course just buy a magnet for like 1% the cost.
Don't get me wrong, I assume they're effective for the people that buy them. Some studies have shown the vast majority of people sensitive to wifi, "cell phone radiation", and so on, it's pure placebo effect (being effected by something because you think it's effective.) If they've convinced themselves all these things are affecting them, then I suppose the placebo effect from some random device will counteract the first placebo effect pretty well.
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Friday 7th August 2015 19:40 GMT Anonymous Coward
Icke and Phil have doubles.
So our Noel says that people tell him that he doesn't look 66. Perhaps that's because they don't like to hurt his feelings by telling him that actually, in the flesh he looks 96 !
He'll be telling us next that Phil the Greek died at 80, and a body double who's had plastic surgery has taken his place. After all, Prince Phil is very sprightly and agile for a 94 year old isn't he ?
Does David Icke know he's got a challenger, or is Noel a body double for him as well ? Has anyone seen them both together on a live show ?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
