Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald, Sep. 26, 2002

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MagWatch: Dishing up Brain Food For Part-Time Boffins
By David Dale

Without wishing to imply that the publications normally discussed by this column are for stupid people, we decided to devote our analysis this time to a different and possibly smaller target market, which we will have to describe as "people who are vaguely intelligent and mildly curious" (the VIMC niche).

America's mental floss (with its subtitle "feel smart again" going straight to the VIMC heartland) costs $11.95, but provides twice the stimulation of Australasian Science, with three times the laughs. The editor's letter begins "There are two constants in editors' letters: 1. Nobody has ever read one in its entirety 2. It serves no purpose to the magazine." This editor's letter is designed to be cut out and used as a bookmark.

After that, mental floss reveals: your nose produces nearly one cup of snot a day; 40 per cent of the world's newspapers are printed on paper from Canadian forests; genetically engineered bacteria can now clean up oil spills and pollutants; Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the most recognisable album cover of all time, while Sticky Fingers is the best cover of the '70s (it's not all science); to avoid being damaged by alcohol in Japan, "act much more drunk that you are - by using loud language, singing and wild gestures, your hosts will typically ease the pressure of drinking".

Most importantly, mental floss offers simple explanations for Big Picture items, in the form of "three impossible theories brought to you in plain English". After reading the article, this column kind of gets chaos theory and special relativity, but remains stumped by"the golden spiral", which has something to do with the perfect rectangle being in the proportions 1 to 1.618.

Obviously we don't belong in the VIMC niche. Better get back to Woman's Day.

Copyright © 2002 Sydney Morning Herald.