How Does Aspirin Find a Headache? (35 page)
Read How Does Aspirin Find a Headache? Online
Authors: David Feldman
Reader George E. Jackson, Jr., of Mantua, Ohio, notes that the federal government supplies many institutions with surplus food and that they are
extremely picky about their suppliers meeting stringent specifications…. As an example of what I mean: the military recipe for fruitcake is eight pages in length. Perhaps if you contacted the Government Printing Office, you might be able to get their recipes for meat loaf and fruitcake.
Sorry. We’d rather write the IRS, asking them to please audit us.
Of course, the government has its civilian culinary counterparts in the large institutional catering companies, such as Marriott and ARA. As Mike Tricarico, Jr., of Dubuque, Iowa, puts it:
The meat loaf you had last month for lunch at a hospital in New York was very possibly made by the same company, following the same recipe, as the meat loaf that you ate yesterday at an IBM cafeteria in southern California. Marriott also serves food on airlines, so it is even possible that you had the very same meat loaf on board flight 123 from New York to southern California. Hopefully, this entree was not followed by fruitcake!
Is it our fate for fruitcake to follow us everywhere? We’re talking meat loaf, now.
Only one reader was willing to plumb the ineffable essence of meat loaf. And that savior is Wayland Kwock of Aiea, Hawaii:
It boggles the mind that nobody would be brave enough to expose the meat loaf conspiracy. Closer inspection would probably show that meat loaf is served on Friday, the end of the week. The day to get rid of all the “extra” food, the dregs, the leftovers. All of this goodness is unceremoniously included in the meatloaf.
So why does it taste the same? Mathematics, specifically probability, provides the answer. If an infinite number of monkeys…No, that’s not quite right. If an infinite number of institutions served an infinite variety of food, the amounts and types of leftovers would tend to form a Gaussian distribution. This means that there may be meat loafs out there that taste better (not better—different), but they are outside one, if not two, standard deviations. All other meat loafs contain an average amount of a generic sampling of foods and thus, on average, taste the same.
We don’t understand a word that Wayland says here, but we smell greatness. Or is that fruitcake we smell?
Imponderables
readers have continued to flood our post office box with thousands of letters in the past year. We appreciate all your new Imponderables and solutions to Frustables. And we wouldn’t be human if your words of praise didn’t put a spring in our step. But this section is reserved for those of you who have a bone to pick with us: Some of you want to add to what we’ve discussed; others want to disagree with what we thought were words of wisdom
.
Please remember we can publish only a fraction of the terrific letters we receive. Many of you have submitted corrections or suggestions that we will be researching; we will check out your concerns even if we don’t publish your letter. Because of the mechanics of publishing, it can sometimes take years to validate objections and change the text on subsequent printings, but we do so regularly. The letters contained here are chosen for their entertainment value and the merit of their argument. Let the bashing begin!
Is it Clintonomics? The coming millennium? We don’t know why, but Imponderables readers were particularly testy this year. Sometimes for good reason. Several readers, such as Jon A. Kapecki of Rochester, New York, took us to task for our discussion of peanut M&Ms
:
Nuts may indeed be “the source of one of the most common food allergies,” as you assert on page 56 of
Do Penguins Have Knees?
However, peanuts—the subject of discussion—are not nuts, but legumes, specifically members of the pea family.
This is no pedantic distinction. People who are allergic to nuts are usually not allergic to peanuts and vice versa, and a failure to observe such distinctions can have fatal consequences.
That said, I enjoyed the book.
Gee, Jon, that’s a little like saying other than being mass murderers, we have a pleasant personality. But you are right. Peanuts are not technically nuts, and we should have been more careful in our terminology. Violent allergic reactions both to peanuts and other nuts are common, but someone who reacts to pecans or walnuts may suffer no adverse effect from consuming peanuts
.
Speaking of getting sick, two more faithful readers and correspondents, Rabbi Joseph Braver of Baltimore, Maryland, and Fred Lanting of Union Grove, Alabama, wrote to complain that our discussion of the snake emblem found on ambulances in
When Did Wild Poodles Roam the Earth?
was woefully incomplete. For the associations of the snake and the pole have Jewish and Christian as well as Roman and Greek significance. In Numbers 21, the wandering Israelites were afflicted by snakes sent by God to punish them for speaking against Him. Moses interceded on behalf of his suffering followers
:
Then the Lord said to Moses, “Make a seraph figure and mount it on a standard. And if anyone who is bitten looks at it, he shall recover.” Moses made a copper serpent and mounted it on a standard; and when anyone was bitten by a serpent, he would look at the copper serpent and recover.
Fred Lanting points out that the snake and staff symbolism continues in the New Testament and asserts that “the Greek myths were corruptions of the stories of Israel’s experiences with this Old Testament healing
.
While we’re on the subject of vehicles, readers are still trying to figure out where the old oil lurks in automobiles after oil changes. In
Do Penguins Have Knees?
we could account for much but not all of the disappearing oil. We heard from Dan Kiser of Elmira, New York, a student studying automotive technology. If you combine Dan’s account with our previous discussion, we think this Imponderable is finally nailed
:
Assuming that the engine is warm and that it does indeed have five quarts of oil, here is where the oil “lurks.” Most all engines are made out of cast iron and manufactured by a process where cast iron is poured into a sand mold. This process creates a rough texture on the surface of the engine block. Oil will cling to this surface because of the rough texture of the block. Oil will settle mainly in the lifter galley (located directly under the intake manifold). It will also accumulate on the top surfaces of the cylinder heads.
The crankshaft and connecting rods in your engine ride on a thin film of oil between two bearing halves. If oil was not present here all of the time, your engine would self-destruct due to lack of lubrication. There is about.003 clearance between these bearing halves and the crank or rods. This oil will not drain out during an oil change.
Oil will also stay inside the oil pump and oil pump pickup during an oil change. The lifters in an engine operate the pushrods, which in turn open the valves. These lifters (one for each valve, sixteen in a V-8 engine) are of the hydraulic type: They are filled with oil during their lifetime. This oil will not drain during an oil change, either.
If you were to drain the oil out of your engine and then put the drain plug back in, you would have to wait several weeks before any of the oil in the aforementioned spots drained into the pan….
I have had the opportunity to rebuild several engines. In each case, the oil was drained and the engine was allowed to sit for several weeks. By the time I started to disassemble the engine, residual oil had drained into the pan, resulting in about three-quarters of a quart of oil on my garage floor when I pulled the oil pan off.
Oil wasn’t the only liquid on your minds over the past year. Many of you are concerned about water, in particular, bodies of water
. In Do Penguins Do Knees?
we discussed the difficulties in differentiating a lake from a pond. Several readers insisted there was a distinction. Typical was this letter from Bill O’Donnell of Eminence, Missouri
:
As an ecosystem, a pond is defined as a body of water of such a depth that light can penetrate all the way to the bottom, allowing rooted submergent vegetation to grow across the entire bottom. Lakes are deeper, so that rooted plants cannot draw at the deepest parts. They also have differences in temperature, called thermoclines, which ponds usually lack. Of course, many true ponds are called lakes and vice versa, but as you said, people can get away with calling most things anything they want.
Exactly, Bill. We’re talking apples and oranges. We were discussing geographical definitions, and you are speaking of biological ones
.
More liquids? In
When Did Wild Poodles Roam the Earth?
we discussed what we are smelling when it “smells like rain.” Ron Smith of Winnipeg, Manitoba, wants to supplement our explanation:
Just before a storm, the barometric pressure decreases. Rising air reduces surface pressure and produces condensation, quite often resulting in cloud formation and frequently precipitation. The reduced surface pressure causes slight gas release from the soil resulting in a fresh or “earthy” smell.
A fellow Canadian, Gilles Fournier of Calgary, Alberta, wanted us to know that in local folklore, the “H” in the “C” of the Montreal Canadiens stands not for “hockey” but for “habitants”
:
In the English media, the Montreal Canadiens are often affectionately called “the Habs.” Most people believe that Habs is short for “habitants,” the French word often used to mean “farmer” in Quebec. What do farmers have to do with hockey? Many of the Canadiens wunderkinder came and still come from the rural areas of the Belle Province…so from Habitants, to Habs, to…the H in the C!
In
Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses?,
we discussed why there is no channel 1 on televisions. Gilles wanted to add
:
the FCC (and its Canadian counterpart, the CRTC) gave it back to radio buffs because channel 1 was a poor TV performer, riddled with ghost images. That frequency was just too prone to interference from other radio frequencies.
Most of your complaints this year have been about our discussions of technology. We can always count on a few correspondents to offer constructive criticisms about our explanations of gadgets and widgets. One of our more irrepressible contributors is William Sommerwerck of Bellevue, Washington
:
When Did Wild Poodles Roam the Earth?
states that 9-volt “transistor” batteries are rectangular because they take the shape of six stacked cylindrical cells.
This is absolutely, utterly, completely, and
totally
wrong, wrong, Wrong,
Wrong
, WRONG!!!
The cells in a 9-volt battery are rectangular. They look like little sardine cans, but (as a friend said) without the key. If your so-called “expert” had ever bothered to open one, he or she would have seen this.
But how do you really feel about our discussion, Bill? You motivated us to call back several battery companies, and all we can tell you is that if the cells of 9-volt batteries are rectangular, the technical staffs at Eveready, Duracell, and Panasonic don’t know about it. Eveready’s 9-volt alkaline battery, for example, contains six quad-A cells, which are now being marketed separately as E-96 batteries and are used primarily in penlight flashlights and laser pointers. Perhaps, William, you are thinking about less popular carbon-zinc batteries, which often contain rectangular or “cake” cells stacked atop one another inside the case
.
Believe us, William Sommerwerck isn’t our only correspondent with a bee in his bonnet. By far the angriest and most vociferous mail we received this year came from the eight readers who violently objected to a letter we published in
Poodles
about why tape counters on audio and video tape players don’t seem to measure anything. We quoted an electronics engineer who claimed that tapes didn’t run at a constant speed. Thank you, Stan Sieger, Michael Javernick, Dallas Brozik, Nils J. Dahl, Jr., Charles Kluepfel, Jim Tanenbaum, and Bruce Hyman for setting us straight; but we’ll quote the letter from John B. Dinius, of West Hartford, Connecticut, because his explanation is simple enough for even us technoramuses
:
All audio tape recorders (with the possible exception of some really cheap models that would be considered toys) move the tape past the heads at a constant speed, by using a capstan and pinch roller. The function of the takeup reel is not to control the speed of the tape but merely to collect the tape after it passes the capstan/pinch roller device. This constant tape speed is evidenced by the fact that technical specifications for tape recorders always express the tape speed in terms of inches per second (e.g., cassette tapes play at 1-7/8 inches per second).
Your correspondent suggests that the tape passes the read/write heads of a VCR faster towards the end of a movie because the effective diameter of the takeup reel has been increased by the tape that has been collected. In fact, you can observe (by noting the number on the counter every fifteen minutes while the tape is running) that the tape counter runs more and more slowly as the movie progresses. This indicates that the takeup reel has to turn more and more slowly in order to collect the tape, which is moving past the heads at a constant speed.
As far as the original question is concerned, the reason [why tape counter numbers seem arbitrary] is that they measure revolutions of the takeup reel, which don’t bear a constant relationship to the things that people really care about (i.e., how many minutes into the tape they are, and how much time is left on the tape). Note that if the reel actually ran at a constant speed, as your correspondent suggested, then the number of revolutions would be proportional to the elapsed time of the tape, and people could use the counter numbers fairly well, by realizing that a certain number of revolutions represented one minute of tape.
As Dinius mentions later in his letter, fortunately for us, most VCRs now use time counters, which measure information much more important to the average consumer. Our next angriest group of correspondents challenged the comments of a source in
When Did Poodles Roam the Earth?
who discussed why trees on a slope don’t grow perpendicular to the ground. Our first correspondent is Stanley Sieger of Pasadena, California
:
Hardly one of his sentences is without error
or worse
. He attributes “motivation” to trees, claims that light provides trees with food (rather than just the energy to “digest” the food they absorb), claims that in a forest the source of light is “up,” etc.
But worse, oh so much worse, is his confusing geomagnetism with gravitation and claiming that there are places of “abnormal” gravity on this planet. Wrong!
The original reference was to the Oregon Vortex in Gold Mill, Oregon, where our source said that “it is reported” that trees grow in a contorted fashion because of abnormal gravitational forces. Scot Morris joins Sieger in (justifiably) abusing us for allowing these statements to go uncriticized. Morris, a regular contributor to
Games
magazine, personally conducted an investigation of the Oregon Vortex, published in the December 1987 edition of
Omni,
and proved that this place where balls that appeared to roll uphill was clearly an illusion
.