Are Lobsters Ambidextrous? (27 page)

One reason why so little is known about the dress of judges in early America is that few laws or regulations govern what judges wear. Only Michigan prescribes a dress code (“When acting in his or her official capacity in the courtroom, a judge shall wear a black robe”), and nothing can stop judges from wearing a chartreuse robe if they desire, or none at all.

Still, the vast majority of judges do wear black robes today.
The only reason they aren’t wearing more colorful attire is because Queen Mary II died three hundred years ago.

 

Submitted by Susie T. Kowalski of Middlefield, Ohio. Thanks also to Karen Riddick of Dresden, Tennessee
.

 

Why
does the whitewall of a new tire usually have a bluish or greenish tinge?

Isn’t there any truth in advertising anymore? Our correspondent wonders why manufacturers don’t call them “bluewalls” or “greenwalls.”

Ironically, the blue-green stuff on new tires is paint. And it is put there to make sure the whitewall stays white.

Huh? We never said tackling Imponderables was going to be easy, did we? Actually, all will become clear in due time. We heard from General Tire and Goodyear about this subject, but the most complete explanation came from a retired Firestone executive, K. L. Campbell, who wrote a veritable treatise on the subject:

 

If black rubber is allowed to be in contact with white sidewall rubber for a few days, the white rubber begins to absorb some of the oils and antioxidant chemicals from the black rubber compound and the result is a permanent brown stain. The longer the black rubber is in contact, the darker the stain. The white rubber compound must be made without any of these oils or antioxidants in order to stay white. Furthermore, it must be protected by barriers so that when it is assembled into a tire, the ordinary black rubber compounds in the rest of the tire, the ordinary black rubber compounds in the rest of the tire are not in contact with it.

 

Before World War II, manufacturers separated the two by wrapping the white sidewalls with paper at the factory. During the war, whitewalls were not allowed to be manufactured. Once the restriction was lifted, whitewalls became a fad, and tire man
ufacturers looked for a way to eliminate the expensive paper and concomitant labor expense of unwrapping it.

The answer? The blue or green coating you see on tires now. This paint protects the white rubber from contact with the chemicals in the black rubber. According to Campbell, this paint was always intended to be completely washed off
before
the purchaser took possession of the tires. Bright colors were probably chosen to make it obvious that the paint should be removed to expose the white-as-the-driven-snow rubber underneath.

How do tire dealers (or you) remove the protective paint? Jean Bailey, of General Tire, recommends a good dose of soap and water. Campbell says that even a scrubbing with a stiff brush will usually do the trick. But the way that dealerships solve the problem is by utilizing a steam jet, the type you see at the beginning of most car washes.

 

Submitted by Lori Videla of Berkeley, Illinois
.

 

Why
does inflating tires to the proper pressure help gasoline mileage?

Do you remember, as a child, how hard it was to ride a bicycle with a flat or seriously soft tire? It was harder than trying to pedal a Stairmaster for an hour now, wasn’t it?

When you drive an automobile, the same principle applies. The mission of tires is to soften the bumps and bruises you would otherwise experience while negotiating roadways, but a tire that bends too much, whether from underinflation or overloading, is going to take a lot of extra energy to push. Tire pressure can actually affect your gasoline mileage. K. L. Campbell explains:

 

About 80% of the energy in the gasoline you buy is used up within your car engine. Of the 20% that is available to move the
car, a small percentage goes into friction losses in the various rotating and moving parts outside the engine. Most of the available energy goes into overcoming wind resistance and in rotating the tires, or in climbing grades.

In order for tires to perform their function of softening the ride of the vehicle, they must deflect under the load of the vehicle and the irregularities encountered on the road. When they deflect, there is internal movement throughout the tire that absorbs energy. The greater the deflection, the more energy the tire consumes as it is rolling.

Tire deflection is increased either by putting more load on the tires (filling up your trunk for a vacation trip or piling a few passengers in the rear seat) or by reducing the pressure in the tires.

 

When you inflate the tires to the proper pressure, you reduce the rolling resistance. In other words, as Jean Bailey puts it, “It requires much more force or energy to rotate a tire that is underinflated than it does to rotate a tire that is inflated to the proper pressure.”

Campbell estimates that by decreasing a typical radial tire pressure of 32 psi (pounds per square inch) to 24 psi, a car traveling at 55 miles per hour would increase fuel consumption by about 2 percent. Perhaps 2 percent does not sound earth-shattering, but to put the matter in perspective, the Department of Energy estimates that if all Americans kept all of their vehicle tires inflated to the manufacturers’ recommended pressures, four million gallons of gasoline could be saved
every day
.

One of the reasons why modern radial tires perform much better than their bias-ply predecessors is that radials distribute the deflection around most of the tire, whereas bias plies concentrated the deflection near the road surface. Unfortunately, the byproduct of this technological improvement is that it is difficult to see with the naked eye when a radial is underinflated. A pressure gauge is a necessity.

Don’t think that you can get even better mileage if you over
inflate your tires. Once you get above 35 psi, a diminishing effect occurs. Not only do you not increase fuel efficiency, but you will be rewarded with a harsh and potentially wild ride.

 

Submitted by Linda Seefeldt of Clark, South Dakota
.

 

What
do coffee companies do with the caffeine left over from making decaffeinated coffee?

You wouldn’t want them to throw away the caffeine, do you? If they flushed caffeine down the drain, it could end up in the ocean, and we wouldn’t want to see the effect of a caffeine jolt upon killer sharks. It might be enough to turn a blowfish into a slayfish. If they discarded caffeine in the trash, could the caffeine wake up organic garbage in landfills?

We’ll never have to worry about these contingencies, for the decaffeination process used in coffee yields pure caffeine, a marketable commodity. Coffee companies sell caffeine to soft drink companies (who need a little less now that many of them are selling caffeine-free sodas) and pharmaceutical companies.

When coffee companies justify the higher cost of decaf by citing processing costs, they rarely add the information that
they
get reimbursed on the back end for the caffeine they “eliminate.”

 

Submitted by Glenn Eisenstein of New York, New York
.

 

How
do they get rid of the remains of dead elephants in zoos?

When an elephant in a zoo dies, a necropsy must be performed. In most cases, the necropsy is conducted by a licensed veterinarian or veterinary pathologist from tissue and blood samples extracted from the carcass.

Most zoos we contacted remove selected organs from the dead elephant, pack them in ice or Formalin, and ship them to various research institutions for reproductive or physiological studies. Typical is the response of San Francisco Zoo’s Diane Demee-Benoit. She reports that her zoo has a binder full of requests from universities, zoos, and museums for various animal parts. Forensic labs might need DNA to help identify other creatures. A natural history museum might want skulls or a particular set of bones to perform comparative studies. Zoos make sure that all animal parts are used for research and educational purposes only and are not permitted to sell or donate parts to private individuals.

After organs and other body parts are removed, the least pleasant task is performed—cutting the elephants into smaller pieces, for even elephant
parts
are heavy. The parts are carried by forklifts and cranes and placed on flatbed trailers, dump trucks, or whatever vehicles are available.

Where do the trucks take the remains? That depends upon the zoo. The preference is always for burying animals on the premises. Alan Rooscroft, manager of animals at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, said that out of respect for the animals, their elephants are buried on the grounds of the zoo. But not all zoos have room enough for this “luxury.”

Many zoos, such as the San Francisco Zoo, incinerate or cremate elephants. Ed Hansen, president of the American Association of Zoo Keepers, indicated that in areas where such disposal is legal, some elephants are buried in licensed landfills.

Some elephants, particularly those from circuses, meet a more ignoble fate—they are sent to rendering plants. Mark
Grunwald, of the Philadelphia Zoo, told
Imponderables
that such boiled elephants end up as an ingredient in soap.

 

Submitted by Claudia Short of Bowling Green, Ohio. Thanks also to Richard Sassaman of Bar Harbor, Maine; and David Koelle of North Branford, Connecticut
.

 

Why
do modern gas pump nozzles have rubber sleeves around them? And what are those red, blue, and green things near the nozzle?

Newfangled gas pumps sport nozzles considerably “pumped up” compared to the puny nozzles of yore. Why is it that as soon as most gas stations became self-service, the pumps became five times as bulky?

The rubber bellows are not there for show. The new nozzles, known as Stage II nozzles, help protect us from harmful fumes emitted by the gas going into our automobiles’ tanks. J. Donald Turk, of Mobil Oil’s public affairs department, explains:

 

These nozzles are part of the vapor recovery system at the service station. The rubber sleeves create a seal between the delivery hose and the car’s gas tank so that gasoline vapors are returned to the underground storage tank. From there, the vapors are returned to a gasoline terminal so that no [polluting hydrocarbon] vapors are released to the atmosphere.

 

And what about those colored doohickeys around the nozzle? According to Mobil Oil’s Jim Amanna, those are scuff guards used to protect the car from being scratched by the nozzle.

 

Submitted by David Kroffe of Los Alamitos, California
.

 

Why
do “sea” gulls congregate in parking lots of shopping centers where there is little food or water?

The reason why “sea” is in quotation marks above is that there are many different species of gull, and quite a few of them spend little time near the sea. Several species live inland and survive quite easily.

Nancy Martin, naturalist at the Vermont Institute of Natural Science, told
Imponderables
that ring-billed gulls, the most common inland species, display great affection for fast-food restaurant dumpsters as a feeding site. Ring-billed gulls are happy to leave wide-open landfills to the more aggressive herring and great black-backed gulls.

But even gulls who normally feed at the shore might have reason to visit the local mall parking lot. Little-used areas of parking lots are safe and warm. And don’t assume there is nothing to eat or drink there. Humans, whether the intentional bread crumb tossers or the unintentional litterers, leave a veritable smorgasbord for the birds, and gulls can take advantage of pud
dles on the surface of the pavement to take a drink or a quick bath. Martin adds that near the ocean, “hard pavement is good for dropping clams or mussels onto to break them open, although gulls will usually choose an area away from other gulls to carry on this activity.”