Only .000000000000001% of the stars in the known universe are visible from Earth.
PINETOP SMITH (1904–29)
Clarence “Pinetop” Smith began his career as a blues pianist-for-hire at age 15. At first he made his living playing at house parties, bars, and brothels in Pittsburgh. From there, he joined the black vaudeville circuit, performing occasionally as a comedian, sometimes as a solo pianist, and finally as an accompanist for major blues singers like Mamie Smith and Ma Rainey. Smith still played the occasional house party, and at one of them in St. Louis in 1928, he invented a new style of music: 12-bar piano blues with an improvised melody (right hand) over a steady rhythmic bass figure (left hand). He called it “boogie-woogie.” A blues label called Vocalion signed Smith to make some recordings, the first of which was in the style he’d just invented, called “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie.” Over the music, he spoke instructions on how to do a boogie-woogie dance, which he’d also just come up with. Altogether, Smith recorded eight songs at Vocalion’s Chicago studios in three sessions—one in December 1928 and two in January 1929. Two months later, while still in Chicago, Smith was at a local dancehall for a gig. A fight broke out, guns were drawn, and Smith got caught in the crossfire. He was 24 years old. No photos of Pinetop Smith are known to exist, but his influence is still being felt. The style of music he invented gave way to hot jazz, rhythm and blues, and in the eyes of many music historians, rock ’n’ roll.
JOHN KEATS (1795–1821)
Regarded as one of the most important poets of all time, Keats was part of the second generation of English Romantic poets, which included Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Keats won his first literary prize at age 14, but as he came from a poor family, he continued with school, eventually attending medical school and becoming a surgeon. In 1817, at the age of 21, he’d had enough and quit his job to focus on poetry full time. In the winter of 1818–19, Keats wrote the majority of his most famous poems, including “Ode to Psyche,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on”). The following year he contracted tuberculosis and went to Rome to convalesce. His doctor treated him with a starvation diet (one piece of bread and one anchovy per day) and repeated bloodletting. After living in agony for a year, Keats finally died in February 1821 at age 25. While it’s difficult to say how much more he would have written, he was quite prolific in his time, writing more than 120 poems. Although Keats was considered unexceptional by literary critics of his day, by the end of the 1800s his works had become among the most studied in English literature.
So long, sucker: When tourists leave Fiji, they’re required to pay a departure tax of $30.
IT’S A WEIRD, WEIRD WORLD
• In 2007 a dead body was discovered in a wooded area in Allen Park, Michigan...with a six-foot-tall guillotine next to it. A police investigation revealed that the dead man had built the guillotine in his home nearby, and then used it to behead himself. Allen Park Police Chief Dale Covert said, “I can’t even tell you how long it must have taken him to construct. This man obviously was determined to end his life.” No suicide note was found.
• Responding to a call of an alligator threatening kids in an Independence, Missouri, neighborhood in June 2011, officers located the creature in a yard belonging to Rick Sheridan. With orders to shoot the animal on sight, an officer fired two rounds into it. That’s when Sheridan came running outside, yelling, “What are you doing? It’s made of concrete!” When asked why he had a concrete alligator in his yard, Sheridan explained that it works better than a “No Trespassing” sign.
First steamship to cross the Atlantic: The SS Savannah (1819).
HOW TO EAVESDROP
ON THE ASTRONAUTS
The International Space Station is one of the wonders of our age, as large as a football field and the third-brightest object in the sky after the sun and the moon. Few of us will ever get to visit it, but you can listen in when it’s passing overhead. It’s easier than you think.
HELLO DOWN THERE
On November 28, 1983, the space shuttle Columbia lifted off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center for a 10-day mission. It was the ninth shuttle mission, and not a particularly memorable one...unless you’re a fan of amateur “ham” radio: It was the first time that an astronaut, mission specialist Owen Garriott, brought a ham radio into space.
Whenever Garriott had some free time he’d point the radio’s antenna toward Earth and try to contact fellow ham operators on the ground. The radio was only a walkie-talkie tuned to ham radio frequencies, and it had just five watts of transmitting power—five percent of the power of a 100-watt bulb. Even so, Garriott was able to talk to more than 250 people, including some more than 1,000 miles away. An astronaut using a walkie-talkie to talk to people on the ground may not sound like a big deal, but it was the first time in history that ordinary citizens could talk to a person in space. Anyone with a ham radio license was welcome to try.
NOW HEAR THIS
Today it’s easier than ever to talk to astronauts in space. The International Space Station has its own ham radio station, five times more powerful than Garriott’s walkie-talkie. All you need to talk to the ISS is a ham radio license, and all that takes is a passing score of 26 on the 35-question multiple-choice license exam.
But what if you don’t want to get a ham radio license? Listening to the astronauts is even easier than talking to them. No license is required: All you need is a radio or a police scanner that can tune to the 2-meter amateur radio band (144.00 MHz to 148.00 MHz).
Radios with digital tuners work best, as they allow you to tune precisely to the ISS’s downlink frequency, 145.800 MHz. A radio that can scan frequencies from 142.300 MHz to 149.300 MHz is particularly desirable—it will enable you to pick up the ISS’s signal earlier and hold onto it longer because of a phenomenon known as the Doppler effect: When the ISS is approaching your location, the Doppler effect causes the signal you receive to be slightly higher in frequency than 145.800 MHz. And when the ISS is moving away from your location, the received frequency will be slightly lower than 145.800 MHz.
Scary fact: A king cobra can rear up to “stand” 6 feet tall.
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION
The trickiest part to listening to the ISS is figuring out when it is passing through your part of the sky, because that’s the only time its transmissions can be heard at your location. The ISS orbits Earth every 91 minutes, and depending on where you live, it should pass overhead at least a few times a day.
Before the Internet, finding this information would have been difficult; today all you have to do is Google your way to any one of a number of satellite tracking websites, then enter your zip code to get a schedule of upcoming passes for your area. (NASA’s website lists only the passes when the ISS is likely to be visible in the sky.) It’s also possible to download satellite tracking software onto your computer and track the space station yourself. A schedule of ISS passes will contain the date, time, and length in minutes of each upcoming pass, plus its maximum elevation, or its highest point in the sky during the pass. If the ISS barely peeks over the horizon before dipping below it again, it will have a maximum elevation close to 0°. If it passes directly over your location, it will have a maximum elevation of 90°.
HIGH AND MIGHTY
The higher the ISS’s maximum elevation during a particular pass, the more likely it is that you’ll be able to receive any transmissions that are being made. That’s because the ISS is physically nearest to you when it is passing directly over your head. It orbits at an altitude of anywhere from 173 miles to 286 miles above Earth, so when it’s directly overhead, this is how far away it is from you. When it’s on the horizon, it can be as far as 1,500 miles away, and at that distance the radio transmissions are weaker and more difficult to receive. High-altitude passes also last longer than low altitude passes, sometimes 10 minutes or more compared to 2 minutes or less for
low altitude passes. This gives you more time to listen for transmissions. Passes with a maximum elevation of 40° or greater offer the best chance of picking up a signal.
Solar winds travel through space at about 1,200 times the speed of sound.
TIMING IS EVERYTHING
The astronauts on the International Space Station use the radio to talk to schoolkids and other civic groups through a program called Amateur Radio on the Space Station (ARISS) (for more on this, see page 338). The NASA website posts the dates of scheduled ARISS contacts; if there are any scheduled for your area, that’s a great time to listen in. It’s not uncommon for the astronauts to talk to individual hams before and after scheduled events, so tune in early and keep listening after the scheduled contact has ended.
The astronauts can also use the radio in their spare time, so it helps to try and figure out when that spare time is likely to occur. The ISS is usually on Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which puts them eight hours ahead of the West Coast and five hours ahead of the East Coast. A typical ISS workday begins at 06:00 UTC, when the astronauts awaken from their night’s sleep. They start work at about 08:00, break for an hour lunch at 13:00 UTC, then continue working until about 19:30 UTC. They have two hours off until bedtime at 21:30. The astronauts are most likely to use the radio during their work breaks, before and after meals, and in the two hours before bedtime, so if after calculating the time difference between your location and UTC, you find a high-altitude pass of the ISS over your area at a time when the astronauts are likely to have some downtime, that is an excellent opportunity to listen for transmissions.
Weekends are also a good time to listen. The astronauts work only five hours on Saturdays, and their Sundays are unscheduled except for catching up on unfinished work, so they may have time to talk on the radio then as well.
RUSSIAN HAM
Before the ISS, the Soviet Union had its own space station called Mir, which was operational from 1986 until 2001, and it too had a ham radio on board. In the years leading up to the construction of the ISS, American astronauts made extended visits to Mir. The visits between the onetime cold-war foes didn’t always go as smoothly as hoped, which led to at least one instance when the Mir’s ham radio got a lot more use than it otherwise might have:
Only U.S. city “named after the full name of a president”: George, Washington.
• In 1995 Norm Thagard became the first NASA astronaut to visit Mir. He was supposed to receive two radio “com passes” with NASA officials each day, but the Soviets reneged on the deal. Thagard went days on end without being allowed to talk to NASA...at least not through official channels. He finally started using Mir’s ham radio to talk to David Larsen, a ham radio buff in northern California, who became a back-channel conduit for exchanging messages with NASA.
• Thagard was supposed to conduct scientific experiments during his Mir mission, but they ended in failure when the freezer containing his samples died a few weeks into the four-month mission. The Russians wouldn’t let him touch any of their equipment, so with nothing left to do and months in which to do it, Thagard spent his remaining time aboard Mir staring out the windows, doing crossword puzzles, watching movies, and talking on the ham radio.
A MIR TRIFLE
Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev was aboard Mir in August 1991 when Communist hardliners tried to overthrow Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. Krikalev learned of the failed coup attempt on Mir’s ham radio, which is also how he learned that the crumbling U.S.S.R. couldn’t afford to send up the rocket that was supposed to bring him back down. Result: Krikalev had to spend an extra six months aboard Mir (10 months in all), and he was still there when the U.S.S.R. passed into history on December 25, 1991. He finally returned home—to Russia—in March 1992. Thanks to his time stranded aboard Mir, the astronaut who went up a Soviet and came down a Russian still holds the record for the most time in space—more than 800 days in all.
“An autobiography without punctuation is a life sentence.”
Largest private home ever built in the US: the Biltmore Estate in N. Carolina (250 rooms).
A CACOPHONY
OF CACA
How variations of one ancient word plopped into so many languages.
THE DIRTY TRUTH
Many of today’s languages descended from a common root language they call “proto-Indo-European,” or PIE. Dating to the Copper Age, about 4,000 B.C., PIE led to ancient Greek, Farsi, Hindi, Latin, and, by extension, all the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian) and the Slavic and Germanic languages (Russian, Polish, German, English, Dutch). PIE probably originated at the Pontic-Caspian steppe, a vast area of 384,000 square miles encompassing eastern Europe and western Asia.
The area was populated by tribes of nomadic horsemen, and as they went off in separate directions to conquer various areas of Europe and Southern Asia, PIE spread with them and evolved into ancient Greek, Sanskrit, and Latin. With further expansion over the next few thousands of years, the ancestors of all modern languages based on PIE were born. No written samples of PIE exist—because written language hadn’t developed yet. Most of its words have disappeared, but at least one lives on in dozens of languages: kaka, or caca. Or poop.
MEDICAL TERMS
Medical terms are formed from words in ancient Greek, one of the few ways the language survives today. “Cac” is a medical prefix used to describe things that are wrong, off, or otherwise unsavory. In other words, poopy. They include:
• cacodermia: a general term to describe bad skin conditions
• cacomelia: deformed limbs
• cacidrosis: foul-smelling sweat
• cachexia: wasting away from disease
There are about 140 billion pennies in circulation—$1.4 billion worth.
SCIENTIFIC TERMS
Scientific names have the same Greek lineage. Some caca-based words:
• cacophony: harsh noise
• cacodemon: evil spirit
• cacosmia: the hallucination of a bad smell
• cacology: poor word choice
SLANG
Caca pops up in slang all over the world, too:
• In the Jewish dialect of Yiddish, an alter kocker is an insulting term for an old person. It literally translates to “old pooper.”
• Poppycock, the English slang word for nonsense comes from the Dutch word pappekak, which means “soft poop.”
• The Dutch expression bekakt means “to put on airs.” Literally, bekakt means “covered with excrement.”
• The Aztec word for the chocolate they drank was cacahuatl. But that sounded (and looked) like you-know-what to the Spaniards, so they called it chocolatl, which eventually became “chocolate.”
WE’RE NOT DUNG YET
Here are some more variations of “caca” from the world’s collective vocabulary:
• French: caca
• Lithuanian: kakoti
• Gaelic: cac
• Portuguese: cagar
• German: kacken
• Russian: kakat
• Greek: kakke
• Italian: cacca
• Bosnian: kakiti
• Ukrainian: kakaty
• Turkish: kaka yapmak
• Basque: kaka egin
BOOK SMART
By age 15, Harry Truman had read every book in the Independence, Missouri, library (but he never graduated from college).
Skeletal remains of people living 10,000 years ago in what is now Pakistan have no cavities.
THE ’UMBLE UMBRELLA
Just when we thought we’d done every origin under the sun...it starts to rain.
UNDER COVER
According to some scholars, the only early treatise on the history of the umbrella burned when Julius Caesar torched Egypt’s Library of Alexandria. But legend says that a Chinese woman invented the device 3,000 years ago. Its purpose: to provide relief from the sun for the elite. In fact, only Chinese men of royal blood and government officials could
be shaded by a san kai. The higher a man’s rank, the more umbrellas in his entourage, with as many as 24 being carried in the emperor’s procession. Since its invention, the umbrella has popped up all over the world, and for a long time, it was anything but humble.
THE UMBRELLAS MAKE THE KING
• A bas-relief sculpture dated between 668 and 626 B.C., located in the palace of Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria, shows the king riding his chariot back from war. He has just trounced his brother, the king of Babylon, and rides in triumph beneath an umbrella.
• In Egypt, the umbrella protected the exalted heads of the pharaohs from the harsh African sun. In Thent-Amen’s time, around 1120 B.C., the Egyptian courts held that if the shadow of the Pharaoh’s umbrella fell upon a man, he became a slave for the rest of his life.
• In ancient India, umbrellas were stacked, one atop another on a single pole, to show status. The king’s umbrellas were stacked 13 high. And in nearby Burma, the ruler held the title “King of the White Elephants and Lord of the Twenty-Four Umbrellas.”
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