JOHN GRAY â he of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus fame â is branching out into the slimming business. Last week found him in a hired room at Londonâs Natural History Museum launching his Mars and Venus Supershakes, which he claims are gender-specific slimming drinks. Fat men who want to get slimmer should take the Mars Supershake, while fat women should go for the Venus Supershake.
The drinks, Grayâs press release tells us, are âfor optimising brain chemistry to help men and women to control their appetites and encourage weight loss. Dr Gray has researched the balance between food, brain activity and physical activity, and found that males and females need different triggers to balance their brain chemistries if they are to control their appetites and lose weightâ.
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So what happens if the drinks get muddled up and a boy takes a girl shake or a girl takes a boy shake? We do not know and would rather not imagine. But all this reminds us irresistibly of a sobering catchphrase we have seen on T-shirts: âMen are from Earth. Women are from Earth. Deal with it.â
PETER MOSS tells us of a website he has found that fortuitously combines two themes that have cropped up a lot in this column in recent months â non-sciency names and unusual units.
The site is , and the delight of it is that it allows you to convert from sciency units to non-sciency ones. So if you are interested in measuring acceleration, the site will help you convert from metres per second to celos, galileos or leos. If it is an area youâre interested in, you can convert from hectares to centiares, roods or townships. Force gives you newtons, dynes, crinals and slugs, while length comes in metres, bolts, calibers, chains, digits, nails, palms, perches, poles, spats, stigmas and â again â townships.
We could go on, but weâll leave some finding out for you to do. Meanwhile, you might be interested to know that according to the site, 40 winks equals 13.3333333 nanoseconds.
MOST people believe that jet lag affects travellers crossing time zones by going west-east or east-west. But the winter edition of Amsterdam Schiphol airportâs newsletter thinks different. Travellers, it suggests, can âexperience jet-lag-like symptoms after long flights having a minimal time change like the Amsterdam to Johannesburg flight. This is because fluids, like crystals, align with the closest, strongest points of magnetic attraction, the North and South Poles. And because the body is largely made up of fluids, this effect kicks in when we cross the equatorâ.
Amazing what that there magnetic attraction gets up to.
THE UKâs Royal Society for the Protection of Birds produces a âpeanut cake with insectsâ. It carries a label stating: âWarning. This product contains nuts.â
Although she does not have a nut allergy, Christine Carrington tells us she was not at all tempted to taste the cake when she bought it. She just hopes the warning wonât put off the birds in her garden.
NIGEL Howe is very pleased with his Freeserve/Wanadoo spam filtering software. He directs all mail tagged as spam to the junk mailbox online and downloads the remaining emails to his PC. Occasionally he checks the junk mailbox to see if any legitimate email has been wrongly tagged. And what did he find among the 158 spams junked while he was on holiday? A message from Freeserve/Wanadoo telling him all about its great new spam filtering system. Now thatâs a serious spam filter.
âIn Guy Robinsonâs inbox, the recent email from New ĐÓ°ÉÔ´´ entitled âThe first ever scientific movie of an earthquake in actionâ was shortened to the rather less exciting âThe first ever scientific movie of an earââ
OLAF Lipinski ran a search on the UK Open University website trying to find a tutorial for the course he is doing. Typing a bit too fast, he missed out a letter so that his query read âfind tutorial social sienceâ.
The helpful reply was: âDid you mean: find tutorial social silence?â He wonders if this is a technical term for the study of people living alone in big cities.
ASTRONOMERS casting around for a name for asteroid 2001 DA 42 suddenly realised it was obvious. Given that its number happens to be the âanswer to life, the universe and everythingâ, they named it after Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhikerâs Guide to the Galaxy.
IF you are thinking of indulging in some amateur cosmetic surgery, best not to use L6301 silicone sealant from Sony Chemicals. Mark Ribbands assures us that this mastic-gun tube of buildersâ silicone, used for grouting round baths, showers and window frames, advises: âNever use this product for implantation or injection into human bodies.â
FINALLY, Geoff Milner has been waiting for nominative determinism to raise its head again so that he could tell us that the noise and vibrations engineer for the Queensland Electricity Commission in Australia used to be Ron Rumble.