Do Penguins Have Knees? (18 page)
Read Do Penguins Have Knees? Online
Authors: David Feldman
Alas, it does matter. Milk companies buy the paperboard for milk cartons unformed. Machines at the milk distributor form the paperboard into the familiar carton shape, seal the bottoms, fill the cartons with milk, and then seal the top. Bruce V. Snow, recently retired from the Dairylea Cooperative, explains:
The machine is adjusted so that only one side of the gable (the “open this side” end) is sealed; when you pull the gable sides, the spout is exposed and opens. If you pull back the gable sides on the other end of the top, then squeeze the sides, nothing happens. The gable on that side stays sealed.
Why does it stay sealed? The secret, according to Dellwood dairy’s Barbara Begany, is an ingredient called abhesive, “applied to the ‘pour spout,’ which makes it easier to open. Abhesive also prevents solid bonding of paper to paper as occurs on the ‘open other end’ side.”
Submitted by Grayce Sine of Chico, California. Thanks also to Alice Conway of Highwood, Illinois, and Jeffrey Chavez of Torrance, California
.
Why
Do We Feel Warm or Hot When We Blush?
We blush—usually due to an emotional response such as embarrassment (we, for example, often blush after reading a passage from our books)—because the blood vessels in the skin have dilated. More blood flows to the surface of the body, where the affected areas turn red.
We tend to associate blushing with the face, but blood is sent to the neck and upper torso as well. According to John Hertner, professor of biology at Nebraska’s Kearney State College,
This increased flow carries body core heat to the surface, where it is perceived by the nerve receptors. In reality, though, the warmth is perceived by the brain in response to the information supplied by the receptors located in the skin.
Because of the link between the receptors and the brain, we feel warmth precisely where our skin turns red.
Submitted by Steve Tilki of Derby, Connecticut
.
Although a doctor may ask you to cough when listening to your lungs, the dreaded “Turn your head and cough” is heard when the physician is checking for hernias, weaknesses or gaps in the structure of what should be a firm body wall.
According to Dr. Frank Davidoff, of the American College of Physicians, these gaps are most frequently found in the inguinal area in men, “the area where the tube (duct) that connects each testicle to the structures inside the body passes through the body wall.” Some men are born with fairly large gaps to begin with. The danger, Davidoff says, is that
Repeated increases in the pressure inside the abdomen, as from repeated and chronic coughing, lifting heavy weights, etc., can push abdominal contents into the gap, stretching a slightly enlarged opening into an even bigger one, and leading ultimately to a permanent bulge in contents out through the hernia opening.
Inguinal hernias are obvious and can be disfiguring when they are large and contain a sizable amount of abdominal contents, such as pads of fat or loops of intestine. However, hernias are actually more dangerous when they are small, because a loop of bowel is likely to get pinched, hence obstructed, if caught in a small hernia opening, while a large hernia opening tends to allow a loop of bowel to slide freely in and out of the hernia “sac” without getting caught or twisted.
Doctors are therefore particularly concerned about detecting inguinal hernias when they are small, exactly the situation in which they have not been obvious to the patient. A small inguinal hernia may not bulge at all when the pressure inside the abdomen is normal. Most small hernias would go undetected unless the patient increased the pressure inside the abdomen, thus causing the hernia sac to bulge outward, where it can be felt by the doctor’s examining finger pushed up into the scrotum.
And the fastest, simplest way for the patient to increase the intra-abdominal pressure is to cough, since coughing pushes up the diaphragm, squeezes the lungs, and forces air out past the vocal cords. By forcing all the abdominal muscles to contract together, coughing creates the necessary increase in pressure.
If the physician can’t feel a bulge beneath the examining finger during the cough, he or she assumes the patient is hernia-free.
And why do you have to turn your head when coughing? Dr. E. Wilson Griffin III, a family physician at the Jonesville Family Medical Center, in Jonesville, North Carolina, provided the most concise answer: “So that the patient doesn’t cough his yucky germs all over the doctor.”
Submitted by Jeffrey Chavez of Torrance, California. Thanks also to J. S. Hubar of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
.
We spoke to Chris Jones, Pepsi’s charming manager of public affairs, who is by now used to our less than earth-shatteringly important questions. She told us that, legally speaking, the company could have put the registered mark wherever it wanted to.
But the company wanted to place the mark in the “Pepsi” rather than the “Cola.” It seems that Pepsi has a competitor in the cola wars—its name escapes us at the moment—so they wanted to draw attention to the “P-word” rather than the “C-word.”
Jones says that graphic designers felt that the mark after the second “p” looked better than placing it after the “i” in Pepsi: It made the design more symmetrical and didn’t butt up against the hyphen after Pepsi.
Submitted by Tom Cunnifer of Greeley, Colorado
.
We answered the question of why page numbers are missing from magazines in
Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses?
. Now, from our correspondent Karin Norris: “It has always annoyed me to have to hold my place and search for the remainder of the article, hoping the page numbers will be there.”
We hear you, Karin. In fact, one of the great pleasures of reading
The New Yorker
is the certainty that there will be no such jumps. We had always assumed that the purpose of jumps was to force you to go to the back of the book, thus making advertisements in nonprime areas of the paper or magazine more appealing to potential clients. Chats with publishers in both the newspaper and magazine field have convinced us that other factors are more important.
A newspaper’s front page is crucial to newsstand sales. Editors want readers to feel that if they scan the front page, they can get a sense of the truly important stories of the day. If there were no jumps in newspapers, articles would have to be radically shortened or else the number of stories on the front page would have to be drastically curtailed.
Less obviously, magazine editors want what Robert E. Kenyon, Jr., executive director of the American Society of Magazine Editors, calls “a well-defined central section.” Let’s face it. Most magazines and newspapers are filled with ads, but with the possible exception of fashion and hobbyist magazines, readers are usually far more interested in articles. Magazine editors want to concentrate their top editorial features in one section to give at least the impression that the magazine exists as a vehicle for information rather than advertising. J. J. Hanson, chairman and CEO of The Hanson Publishing Group, argues that sometimes jumps are necessary:
An article that the editor feels is too long to position entirely in a prime location will jump to the back of the book, thus permitting the editor to insert another important feature within the main feature or news “well.” Many publishers try very hard to avoid jumps.
The unhappiest version of a jump is one where an article jumps more than once so that instead of completing the article after the first jump, the reader reads on for a while and then has to jump again. That’s almost unforgivable.
Hanson adds that another common reason for jumps in magazines, as opposed to newspapers, is color imposition:
Most magazines do not run four-color or even two-color throughout the entire issue. Often the editor wants to position the major art treatment of his features or news items within that four-color section. In order to get as many articles as possible in that section, the editor sometimes chooses to jump the remaining portions of the story to a black and white signature.
Of course, advertising does play more than a little role in the creation of jumps. Most publications will sell clients just about any size ad they want. If an advertiser wants an odd-sized ad, one that can’t be combined with other ads to create a full page of ads, editorial content is needed. It is much easier to fill these holes with the back end of jumps than to create special features to fill space.
The New Yorker
plugs these gaps with illustrations and funny clippings sent in by readers, which, truth be told, may be read more assiduously than their five-part book-length treatments on the history of beets.
Submitted by Karin Norris of Salinas, California
.
What
Does the
EXEMPT
Sign Next to Some Railroad Crossing Signs Mean?
E
XEMPT
signs are not intended for drivers of private cars, but rather for drivers of passengers for hire, school buses carrying children, or vehicles carrying flammable or dangerous materials. Ordinarily, these vehicles must stop not more than fifty feet or less than fifteen feet from the tracks of a railroad crossing, and their drivers are supposed to listen for signs of an approaching train, look in each direction along the tracks, and then proceed only if it is apparent no train is near.
But an exception to this federal regulation is granted to
an industrial or spur line railroad grade crossing marked with a sign reading “
EXEMPT
.” Such
EXEMPT
signs shall be erected only by or with the consent of the appropriate state or local authority.
According to the signage bible, the
Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices
, an
EXEMPT
sign informs the relevant drivers that “a stop is not required at certain designated grade crossings, except when a train, locomotive, or other railroad equipment is approaching or occupying the crossing or the driver’s view of the sign is blocked.”
Robert L. Krick, of the Federal Railroad Administration, told
Imponderables
that some states do not permit the use of
EXEMPT
signs or may attach additional meanings to them. And Krick makes it clear that an
EXEMPT
sign does not relieve any driver from the responsibility of determining that no train is approaching before entering a crossing. Krick emphasizes the motto of the FRA’s Operation Lifesaver: “Trains Can’t Stop; You Can.”