COMING soon to a department store near you: a fitting room that warns you 鈥測our bum looks big in that鈥� before you humiliate yourself in public.
British company Qinetiq has devised a system using 3D cameras that not only snap the potential customer as he or she cavorts in front of the mirror, but also record precise measurements from multiple points on his or her body. That information is then fed into a computer that will tell you if you look absolutely fabulous or give you a thumbs-down in the style of UK fashion police Trinny and Susannah.
The inventors are already in talks with leading clothes retailers, which can only be good news for those of us born without fashion sense. But we can鈥檛 help feeling a little uneasy that the idea sprang from a project undertaken by Qinetiq, formerly the UK鈥檚 Defence Evaluation Research Agency, to develop weapon range finders.
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READER Caroline Edmunson happens not to be tall. With the British summer coming to an end, she decided to buy herself a pair of thick black tights for the winter. She went into three different supermarkets, two pharmacies and a women鈥檚 clothes shop, and in each found that all the short tights were on the top shelf, which she couldn鈥檛 reach.
When she found the same problem in the seventh shop, she was sufficiently annoyed to ask the customer services manager why they put all the short tights on the top shelf. The reply was: 鈥淏ecause they don鈥檛 sell very well.鈥�
Edmunson suggested that this was probably because the people who want to buy them can鈥檛 reach them.
鈥淥h yes,鈥� said the manager. 鈥淚 never thought of that.鈥�
THE latest miracle of agricultural technology is a carbonated milk drink for teenagers. Developed by researchers at Cornell University鈥檚 food science laboratories in New York and produced by Mac Farms, 鈥淩efreshing Power Milk鈥� will not only be fizzy but will come in flavours such as vanilla cappuccino, Brazilian chocolate and chocolate raspberry.
File under 鈥淭hings I would prefer not to find in my grocery basket鈥�.
MANY travellers who have crossed the state of Kansas have remarked that the landscape there is as flat as a pancake. However, a team of researchers has established that Kansas is in fact flatter even than that.
An article by Mark Fonstad, William Pugatch and Brandon Vogt in a recent issue of the Annals of Improbable Research compares a 2-centimetre-wide sample of well-cooked pancake with an east-west profile across Kansas taken from merged 1:250,000 digital elevation model data from the United States Geological Survey. The results clearly show that while the pancake is 鈥減retty flat鈥�, Kansas is 鈥渄amn flat鈥�.
For those wanting a more rigorous measure of flatness, we should add that 鈥減retty flat鈥� is the researchers鈥� colloquial rendering of f = 0.957, while 鈥渄amn flat鈥� means f = 0.9997, where f = 1 represents perfect flatness.
鈥淪ome readers may find the comparing of a pancake and Kansas to be analogous to the comparing of apples and oranges,鈥� the authors say. 鈥淲e refer those readers to a 1995 publication by NASA鈥檚 Scott Sandford, who used spectrographic techniques to do a comparison of apples and oranges.鈥�
AFTER months of waiting, reader Penny Gledhill was thrilled when the replacement glass jug for her coffee maker finally turned up. However, delight soon turned to despair when she read the stern words on the box: 鈥淲arning: this part should only be fitted by a suitably qualified person.鈥�
Any suitably qualified glass jug fitters out there?
ARE some British wagtails setting themselves up for a bit of niche speciation? Reader David Hanlon reports pulling into a motorway service station near Reading in Berkshire. He noticed there were a number of pied wagtails waiting around the petrol station forecourt.
As soon as a car pulled up, the enterprising wagtails dashed up to the bumpers and bonnet and quickly picked off any 鈥渞oad kill鈥� insects from the front of the cars. They would then go back to their stations to await the next customer.
We wonder if other readers have noticed wagtails exploiting this niche? If so, we could be witnessing wagtail evolution in the making.
FINALLY, the August issue of a magazine put out by Safeway supermarket in the UK had this to say in a fact file about teeth: 鈥淭ooth enamel is made of calcium, phosphorous and water; your teeth contain 99 per cent of the body鈥檚 calcium.鈥�
Reader David Watson, who spotted this, wants to know if this means that people with false teeth have more difficulty standing upright than the rest of us.
For impatient executives who want everything done yesterday, the GenBank BLAST search engine promises: 鈥淭he results are estimated to be ready in 0 seconds but may be done sooner鈥�