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Swish sip

OVER the years, the world’s overlooked geniuses have released endless new varieties of water on the world, chronicled tirelessly in these pages. There has been iceberg water, magnetic water, crystal-whirled water, buffered water, solar-powered healing water, alkaline water, water with added oxygen, restructured water, hexagonal water, radio-wave energised water, and the thrillingly thirst quenching vibrationally charged interactive water.

So it’s a wonder it took this long for someone to come up with sexy water, as spotted at the Perth Garden Festival by Anne Butcher.

Sexy Water is of course a brand name not a technical term; the accompanying website claims the scientific name for this liquid is “Hydrogen Rich, Micro Clustered, Electrolysed Reduced Water”.

The makers also tell us that chronic dehydration is one the three causes of 95 per cent of lifestyle diseases, and installing a Sexy Water unit to “alkalise” what comes out of your tap will improve your health, your looks and the shelf life of your food. Not listed but also possible: your taste in music will broaden, your relationship with your mother will deepen, small woodland creatures will befriend you.

For A$6545 you can purchase a top-flight model – the Kate Moss of sexy water machines if you will. Let’s hope it’s just fancy water that customers are flushing down the drain.

“Our item about the 6D Titanic experience reminds Hilary Johnson of an attraction in Cyprus, “a moored boat offering a 7D submarine simulation”. Do we hear 8?”

Power pill

SITTING down in a diner in New Jersey, Susan Haney spots an advert for a supplement by her table that promises a lot of bang for her buck. It reads: “Want more energy? One capsule of Microhydrin has more electrons than 10,000 glasses of organic orange juice.” Given that sort of concentration of energy, we’re not sure if Microhydrin is a dietary supplement, or some kind of rocket fuel.

Outer limit

TURNING people inside out? Jim Ryan responds to Ian Napier’s question as to whether internal medicine has a complementary branch known as external medicine (22 April). “In Japanese, internists are referred to as naika which means, literally, ‘internal specialist’, while its opposite gekai means ‘external specialist’ and refers to surgeons.”

Having dug into the history of this separation, Jim reports that when Western medicine was first introduced to Japan during the Edo period, practitioners of Chinese medicine thought that cutting the body was inconceivable. “They said it was so heinous that it was ‘outside the realm of medicine’. Thus began the usage of gekai to refer to surgeons, or ‘one whose practices are external to the realm of medicine’.” Yes, it seems no matter where they go, doctors everywhere refuse to let surgeons enter their club.

Choco-lots

MORE big mouthfuls: our colleague shares the exciting news that he may already have won “the biggest Cadbury chocolate hamper you can imagine” according to one of the marketing emails cluttering his inbox.

“That is a pretty big hamper,” he says. “Have they thought about Cantor’s hierarchy of infinities?”

It’s a set up

PREVIOUSLY Brian Smith asked for help discerning whether the word heterological – meaning something that does not describe itself – is itself heterological (22 April). “This is one of a whole family of similar paradoxes that have been extensively discussed by philosophers and logicians,” writes M. J. Whalley. “An excellent account is given in Truth, Probability and Paradox by J. L. Mackie, in which he remarks in his conclusion that ‘it is a fascinating feature of this group of puzzles that we seem to be able to take any proposed solution and build out of it a new paradox.’ Good luck!”

Gordian knots

MEANWHILE, Anthony Wilkins writes to say “This question is an instantiation of the Grelling–Nelson paradox, a semantic self-referential paradox formulated by Kurt Grelling and Leonard Nelson early in the twentieth century.” It is closely related to several other well-known paradoxes, says Anthony, in particular those arising out of set-theoretical work by Bertrand Russell. Anthony adds: “In fact, I have discovered a truly marvellous demonstration of one solution, that the margin of this e-mail is unfortunately too narrow to contain.”

Bed bug

IN THE UK, rubbish removal services are much like the weather, being unpredictable, highly variable from one place to another, and a talking point that many will find impossible to refuse.

Indeed, the recent local elections saw Sally Cogley, member of the one-woman Rubbish Party, elected to a seat on East Ayrshire council on a platform of action on fly-tipping, littering and dog fouling.

While Cogley cleans up politics, Keith Walters has found a way to get much more from his rubbish services. The large-item collection service in his area has a new online form, in which you can enter how many mattresses you intend to leave out using a pair of incremental arrows. “As you can manually type in almost any number, I thought I’d see how it reacted when I tried to order the removal of -999999999999999 mattresses.”

Unfortunately for Keith, the website took this request without blinking, “so I presume at some point in the near future a quadrillion used mattresses are due to be delivered to my front footpath”.