Do Penguins Have Knees? (16 page)
Read Do Penguins Have Knees? Online
Authors: David Feldman
Unfortunately for all of us, not least the citizens of the towns in which the pulp mill is located, you don’t need to be a dog to sniff out the scent of sulfur compounds. Doug Matyka, a public relations manager at Georgia-Pacific’s Tissue, Pulp and Bleached Board division, told
Imponderables
these chemicals are “readily noticeable even at levels far below one part per million.”
But if a paper company decides to locate a plant in your town, don’t despair before you ferret out a few facts. Not all paper plants make their own pulp; many buy their pulp from a pulpmaking facility or from a free-standing mill that makes only pulp.
Also, many papermaking methods don’t require these sulfur compounds. The olfactory culprit is the kraft-pulping process (“kraft” derives from the German term meaning “strong”). Kraft paper is best known for making supermarket shopping bags and corrugated cardboard boxes. If the other pulping processes were capable of producing the strength performance of kraft paper at a decent price, don’t you think that companies would employ them? After all, even executives of paper companies have to smell the stuff, too.
Lest we seem to be picking on the pulp industry, a few fun facts from our paper sources will help you understand their dilemma:
1. You can’t make paper without pulp. According to Kenny, 80 percent of a sheet of paper is made out of pulp.
2. High-tech scrubbers have diminished the odor problem considerably. And more than many other industries, pulp mills conform to EPA air and water pollution standards. The smell of sulfur compounds is more offensive than dangerous.
3. Many other things besides pulp mills produce the smell. Doug Matyka notes that exhaust from vehicles with catalytic converters sometimes smells like mini-pulp mills. And the same smell occurs during natural organic decay. After all, Doug reminds us, the original descriptive phrase “you smell like a rotten egg” comes not from pulp mills but rotten eggs.
Yeah, sure, but it’s more fun to pick on heavy industry than a chicken.
Submitted by Barry Long of Alexandria, Virginia
.
How
Are Lane Reflectors Fastened onto the Road So That They Aren’t Moved or Crushed?
Most of us, on occasion, have accidentally run over a lane reflector. The little bump is always upsetting. Have we moved the reflector? Have we hurt the reflector? Have we hurt our tires?
Don’t worry too much about the reflectors, for you are unlikely to dislodge them. A two-part epoxy cement is used to fasten them to the road surface.
But the nasty little secret of the reflectors’ durability is that they are recessed into the road surface to prevent movement and designed in the shape of a two-sided ramp to avoid getting crushed. George E. Jones, highway engineer at the National Highway Institute, told
Imponderables
that
if you will look closely you will notice a groove about a foot long cut at a downward sloping angle in the pavement. The reflector is then cemented flush with the pavement surface.
Well, not quite flush, and for a good reason. Amy Steiner of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials explains:
…they do protrude slightly so that they can catch the light emitted from the headlights. Because of this protrusion, they do sustain damage from vehicles driving over them (particularly from snowplow blades). Reflectors require a fair amount of maintenance.
As for your tires, our authorities agree they are safe even if you hit twenty reflectors on the center line of the road. Just make sure you stay in your lane, or more than your tires are in jeopardy.
Submitted by Eric Hartman of Spring Grove, Pennsylvania
.
Why
Does Nabisco Put the Tiny Picture of Niagara Falls on Its Shredded Wheat Box?
At the beginning of the twentieth century, shredded wheat biscuits were produced at the Palace of Light, a ten-acre site bordering Niagara Falls, New York. According to Michael Falkowitz, director of industry and trade relations for Nabisco Brands, The Palace of Light itself became a tourist mecca and served as the marketing image for the Shredded Wheat Company:
The plant was decked out in marble tile and glass, and was air conditioned. It was visited by more than one hundred thousand wide-eyed tourists every year. The great falls gave meaning to what was billed as “the cleanliest” product—Shredded Wheat (and Triscuit)—produced in the cleanliest food factory.
When the Nabisco Biscuit Company acquired the Shredded Wheat Company in 1928, it didn’t mess with packaging that was working just fine. It did mess with The Palace of Light, though. No longer state-of-the-art, the Niagara Falls plant was abandoned by Nabisco before World War II.
Submitted by Sister Anne Joan of Boston, Massachusetts
.
Why
Do Automobile Batteries Have to Be So Heavy? Why Can’t They Be Miniaturized?
Of course, most consumers would prefer car batteries to be AA-size. If a car stalled, a driver could just reach into the glove compartment and pull out a little battery that had been recharged at home.
Automobile manufacturers also want to downsize batteries. Any heavy material, whether it is the steel in the body of a car or the engine and cylinders, interferes with achieving better gasoline mileage.
Battery manufacturers have responded. In some cases batteries are half the size they were twenty years ago. But alas, don’t look forward to AA-sized car batteries in the foreseeable future. As Stephen Bomer of the Automotive Battery Charger Manufacturers wrote to
Imponderables
, high-density lead plates are a major component of a battery: “No substitute for lead has been found that can do the job or generate the voltage required.”
H. Dale Millay, a staff research engineer for Shell Oil, told
Imponderables
that the greater the surface area of lead in the battery, the easier it is to generate power. Millay claims that we have already paid the price for downsizing batteries: Although modern batteries are good at cold starts, they have low reserve capacities. Translation: They don’t last as long as they might under strain.
We received our most emphatic endorsement of the heavy battery from John J. Surrette, vice-president of Rolls Battery Engineering:
The thinner you make the plates in a battery, the lesser the material inside…. The heavier the material, the more rugged the batteries are and the longer they will last. When you use thinner plates…this lessens the amount of ampere hour capacity. When heavier material is used, like we do in marine and industrial applications, it results in considerably longer life and less exposure [to the elements], which reduces the chance of plates buckling in hard service or the active material shedding from the positive grids.
…Miniaturized batteries would probably be preferable but would stand little or no abuse or neglect.
Rolls’s marketing strategy is to emphasize the
heaviness
of its battery. It boasts a marine battery with 1/8″-thick positive plates (in contrast, some car batteries have plates as thin as .055 inches, which Surrette believes is too fragile to withstand abuse or neglect).
So, Becky, the car battery is one case where you
don’t
want to get the lead out.
Submitted by Becky Brown of Iowa City, Iowa
.
Why
Do Automatic Icemakers in Home Freezers Make Crescent-Shaped Pieces Rather Than Cubes?
We cannot be dispassionate about this subject. We hate crescent-shaped cubes. They are so long they get stuck in iced-tea glasses, making it impossible to load enough ice to cool the drink sufficiently. Even in wider glasses, they are too ungainly to stack. And they are too big to pop into one’s mouth comfortably.
We contacted the company that pioneered the automatic icemaker for home freezers, the Whirlpool Corporation, and prepared for a battle. What excuse would it trot out to justify banishing the ice cube to oblivion?
Much to our surprise, the manager of Whirlpool’s appliance information service, Carolyn Verweyst, disarmed us with her compassion and empathy. She, too, dislikes the crescent-shaped cubes, if only because they make her job harder: She says that Whirlpool gets more complaints about the shape of the ice than anything else about their refrigerator-freezers.
Verweyst and our other appliance sources confirm that there is only one reason why these cubes are crescent-shaped: Any other shape tends to stick to the mold instead of releasing to the ice bin. When first developing the automatic icemaker, Whirlpool experimented with many different shapes but found that any ice with straight edges simply would not release properly.
In fact, Verweyst says that Whirlpool gave an outside think tank a project to come up with a perfect shape for ice molded by an automatic icemaker. Its conclusion: The best shape was a crescent.
Submitted by Emily Sanders and Elizabeth Gaines of Montgomery, Alabama
.
You’d better get used to those scrawls. If the United States Postal Service reaches its goal, every single letter and package sent through them will have bar codes by the year 1995.
The series of vertical lines on the lower-right portion of first-class envelopes is meant for the “eyes” of OCRs, high-speed optical character readers. The Postal Service calls this specific bar code configuration POSTNET, short for Postal Numeric Encoding Technique.
OCRs are now capable of “reading” typewritten or hand-printed addresses and spraying bar codes on an envelope. The bar code readers are considerably less sophisticated and less expensive machines than OCRs (or for that matter, much less expensive than hiring humans over the long haul). By automating the sorting process, the postal service speeds mail delivery and saves more than a buck or two at the same time.
Can a human being interpret the code sprayed by the OCRs? Absolutely, although it’s a little tricky. If you look carefully, you will see that all the bars are two heights—either full bars or half-sized. The tall bars represent (binary) ones; the short bars represent (binary) zeros. The bars on the far left and far right, always full bars, are not part of the code, and are there merely to frame the other numbers.
All the rest of the bars and half-bars are arranged in groups of five. Each group of five bars represents one of the ZIP code digits, and all numbers are always expressed by two full bars and three half-bars. You can figure out which number the bars represent by noting which of the five positions contain full bars. Here is the code (remember, one equals a full bar; zero equals a half bar):