Ask Clay: The moon won't help you weigh less (or drive right)

Clay Thompson
The Republic |

Clay Thompson is off today. Here’s a classic column from Jan. 3, 2005:

I thought maybe we should do a few easy ones today.

If a person weighed himself with the full moon overhead, would he weigh less because of the gravity? After all, it does move the water in the ocean.

Huh? Don't be silly. First of all, the amount of water in your body is too small to be affected by the gravitational pull of the moon.

Even if it were, it's not like the moon is going to suck the water out of you so you would weigh less. Duh.

Why do the British drive on the left side of the road and we drive on the right?

The best answer I could find was that in the old days, when your chances of getting stopped by highwaymen were pretty good, you stayed to the left so your right hand could bring a sword or pistol to bear on someone approaching you. And after the Revolutionary War we switched to the right just to be non-British.

Neither of those sounds very convincing to me, especially the switching just to be non-British thing, but there you have it.

What causes hot flashes in women "of a certain age"? Since I'm at that age, I'm getting them regularly and wonder why.

They aren't quite sure why, but for some reason the drop in estrogen that comes with menopause affects your hypothalamus, which is the part of your brain that controls, among other things, your body temperature.

The lower estrogen levels make the hypothalamus turn up the heat, but as I said, the reasons for this are a bit hazy.