by Lewis, Dan
BONUS FACT
The first person to receive Social Security benefits was a lady named Ida May Fuller, who retired in 1939 at the age of sixty-five and received her first check—for $22.54—on January 31, 1940. Fuller had worked for three years under the Social Security system, so she had made some contributions to the overall fund, but only $24.75 worth. She came out ahead by the time she cashed her second benefits check—the second of very, very many. Fuller lived to be 100, passing away on January 31, 1975, thirty-five years to the day she received that $22.54. Her total lifetime Social Security benefits? $22,888.92.
THE BIRTHDAY PROBLEM
HOW TO USE BIRTHDAYS TO WIN BAR BETS
Let’s make a couple of assumptions. First, let’s assume that birthdays are randomly distributed—given enough people, you’ll have roughly the same number born on, say, December 13 as you will on November 22 or April 14. (As it turns out, this isn’t quite true.) Second, let’s assume that February 29—Leap Day—doesn’t exist. (Also untrue.) Finally, let’s assume that everyone uses the 365-day Gregorian calendar. (Mostly true.) Got it? Nothing too controversial.
Say you walk into an empty auditorium. A minute or so later, someone else walks in. Given the previous assumptions, there’s a 1 in 365 chance (0.27 percent) that this person shares your birthday. A second person walks in a minute or two later. The odds of you sharing a birthday with either jump to about 0.55 percent. A third and a fourth and—you get the idea. Only when the 253rd person walks in do you have a 50 percent chance of having the same birthday as someone else in the room. It isn’t person 182 or 183, because some of the first 200-something people may share birthdays with each other. So a birthday shared with person 254 (including you) should make intuitive sense—or, at least, not be terribly shocking.
But let’s look at it a different way. Again, you start off in an empty auditorium and again, every few minutes, someone new comes into the room. Instead of wondering if you share a birthday with anyone else in the room, let’s make this about everyone in the room. Let’s ask: “Do any two people in the room share a birthday?” The math starts off the same—with two people, there’s still a 1-in-365 chance. The third person? The odds aren’t 0.55 percent anymore—now, there’s a 0.82 percent chance that anyone in the group matches someone else. Yes, you could share a birthday with either of the other two people—that’s the 0.55 percent—but they could share a birthday with each other, too. That’s where the extra percentage boost comes from.
How many people before we hit a 50 percent chance that any two share a birthday? Twenty-three. Not 230. Twenty-three. Here’s a graph:
Probability of Two or More Sharing a Birthday
The odds go up very quickly because each new person can match every other person in the room, and as the number of people in the room grows, the gains are huge. At fifty-seven people, there is just over a 99 percent chance of any two people in the room sharing a birthday. And, in case you are wondering, at 124 people, there is less than a 0.0000000001 percent chance of there not being a match. That’s one in one hundred trillion.
BONUS FACT
Of course, birthdays aren’t random. Some months have more births than others, for reasons one can imagine (and you’d almost certainly be correct). The days of the week should be random—but, at least in the United States, they aren’t. Why not? As BabyCenter explains, Tuesdays and then Mondays have the highest number of births, because hospitals try not to schedule C-sections or induce labor on the weekends.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY®
WHY RESTAURANTS HAVE SILLY BIRTHDAY SONGS
The song is iconic: “Happy birthday to you,” twice. “Happy birthday” (again) followed by the birthday boy or girl’s name. And again, to close, “Happy birthday to you.” The Guinness Book of World Records (as of 1998) says that “Happy Birthday” is the most recognizable English-language song in existence, followed by “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and then “Auld Lang Syne.” But unlike the second and third most recognizable English songs, “Happy Birthday” has another distinction: It is under copyright.
In 1893, two sisters from Kentucky, Mildred and Patty Hill, composed a song called “Good Morning to All.” The lyrics—“Good morning to you / good morning to you / good morning dear children / good morning to all”—are foreign to modern ears. However, the melody the sisters used for the song was that used in “Happy Birthday.”
Sometime over the next few decades, that tune was wed to the lyrics we all know. Nobody knows exactly who wrote the stanza we all sing regularly—depending on whom you ask, “Happy Birthday” may be by the same two sisters or it may not have been written for twenty years thereafter. What we do know: the lyrics appeared in a 1924 book, as a second stanza following the original one of “Good Morning to All.” The song appeared in a series of other contexts soon after. In 1935, the company that originally published “Good Morning to All”—working with the Hills’ sister Jessica—copyrighted “Happy Birthday.”
Today, the rights are owned by Warner Music Group. Warner continues to enforce the copyright insofar as public and/or for-profit performances are concerned. (Don’t worry about singing it at a private family gathering.) Enforcement of the copyright netted the company $2 million in royalties in 2008 alone, and apparently, the Walt Disney Company paid $5,000 to use the song in a ride at Epcot Center a few decades ago.
Some take steps to avoid the fees. For example, some filmmakers substitute “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” when “Happy Birthday” would otherwise be more appropriate. Perhaps absurdly, in an effort to skirt paying royalties to Warner Music some chain restaurants instruct servers to sing atypical birthday songs when guests celebrate at their establishments.
“Happy Birthday” was originally scheduled to enter the public domain in 1991, but a pair of copyright extension laws in the United States (not specific to this song) extended its copyright another four decades. Absent other extensions, the song will enter public domain in the United States in 2030 and in the European Union at the close of 2016.
BONUS FACT
In 1963, an artist named Harvey Ball created the iconic yellow smiley face. He did it as a freelancer on behalf of the company now known as Hanover Insurance—but neither he nor the company ever registered the artwork with the copyright or trademark offices. Ball made a total of $45 from his creation—the fee Hanover paid him for the work.
A FANTASTIC COPY
WHY HOLLYWOOD MADE A MOVIE THEY NEVER WANTED YOU TO WATCH
The Fantastic Four—Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, the Human Torch, and the Thing—originally appeared in an eponymous 1961 comic book released by Marvel Comics. They were popular for decades and, in 2005, 20th Century Fox released a movie about the heroic quartet, which earned over $330 million at the box office with a $100 million budget. A sequel, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, hit theaters two years later, earning $290 million at the box office with a budget of $130 million. Despite the apparently massive amounts of money these movies made, studio execs were disappointed and put the franchise on hold for nearly a decade. (A rebooted series was planned for 2015 release.)
There’s another Fantastic Four movie—but you’ve probably never seen it. Technically speaking, it came out in 1994, but it never hit theaters nor had a home video release. To make matters even stranger, the film’s producers didn’t care at all. In fact, they were probably happy.
In the 1980s, Marvel Comics wasn’t yet set up to produce movies. The company ended up licensing some of their characters to various movie studios—that’s why Spider-Man movies are produced by Sony and the X-Men films are distributed by 20th Century Fox. (Marvel has retained some rights—most notably to Iron Man, Captain America, the Incredible Hulk, and the rest of the Avengers—and will regain the rights to their licensed characters at some point, but probably not too soon.) The Fantastic Four were one of the franchises licensed out during that boom period. In 1983, a production company named Neue Constantin purchased the option to create a F
antastic Four movie for what is rumored to be about $250,000.
That option was set to expire on December 31, 1992, and as that date approached, Neue Constantin was nowhere close to having a summer blockbuster ready—a week before that date, they hadn’t even started production. Neue Constantin approached Marvel for an extension, but was rebuffed. So they came up with another idea: Make a really terrible movie on the cheap.
The agreement between Marvel and Neue Constantin allowed the latter to retain the rights to the characters so long as they produced a movie before the date in question. The theory behind this ancillary right makes sense—if the production company makes a smash hit, they should be able to produce a sequel. Neue Constantin, many would later argue, used this as a loophole. In September 1992, they brought on a low-budget producer who could quickly churn out a Fantastic Four movie with a budget of only $1 million, chump change by industry standards. Production began on December 28, 1992, a few days before the deadline, and wrapped a month later. The film was slated to come out in late 1993 or 1994 but was scrapped before it hit theaters.
The reasons why are unclear. Stan Lee, the legend behind Marvel, claims that Neue Constantin never intended to release the film—by simply creating the movie, the production company was able to maintain its hold on the Fantastic Four franchise for years to come. Neue Constantin’s executives tell another story, asserting that Marvel executive Avi Arad caught wind of the low-budget flick and, wanting to protect the Fantastic Four brand, bought all the rights and ordered all copies—including the film negatives—destroyed. (If true, he failed; two decades later, you can find a bootlegged copy on YouTube.)
Either way, Neue Constantin came out ahead. The company retained the rights to the Final Four franchise. If you look at the credits for both the 2005 and 2007 Fantastic Four films, you’ll see the name “Constantin Film”—Neue Constantin’s new name—as one of the studios involved in the productions.
BONUS FACT
On November 17, 1978, on the heels of the box office success of Star Wars, CBS aired the first official Star Wars spinoff, called “The Star Wars Holiday Special.” The ninety-seven-minute show was a weird variety show–style disaster, which was nearly universally panned. In response to the negative reviews, the powers that be decided to never re-air it or release it on home video. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, though, you can find a copy online pretty easily. (But, as someone who has seen it, take my word for it: Don’t bother.)
THE KEEPER OF THE HOLOCRON
THE GUY WHO WATCHES STAR WARS FOR A LIVING
When the first Star Wars movie, A New Hope, debuted in 1977, it introduced a complex universe of planets, species, religions, and ethos, which quickly expanded well beyond the 121-minute-long story of Luke Skywalker’s triumph over the Death Star. The original trilogy was later unfortunately expanded by a series of three “prequels.” And there were the cartoons. And toys. And books. And video games. And everything else.
With all of that content come a lot of details—different parts of the back stories of dozens of different species and hundreds of different characters, for example. When things get too complicated, many other brands “reboot” their universes, discarding most of the details and retaining just the broad strokes. But those at LucasFilm in control of Star Wars chose a different tactic. They hired Leland Chen.
He’s the Keeper of the Holocron.
Really. It says that right on his LinkedIn profile.
Holocrons are, appropriately, fictional devices from the Star Wars universe itself. Wookieepedia—that’s not a typo, but the name of an unofficial Wikipedia-like encyclopedia of Star Wars information—defines a Holocron as an “organic crystal-lattice device which stored phenomenal quantities of data guarded by the device’s gatekeeper.” In other words, it’s a high-tech library from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. The real-life equivalent of the Holocron is the database of Star Wars info that Chen administers—he’d be considered the gatekeeper, if you wanted to mirror the lexicon.
Chen was hired by LucasFilm in January 2000 to create this database. (His official title is “Continuity Database Administrator,” according to a Wired profile.) As he explained on the official Star Wars blog before he joined the company, LucasFilm had binders full of information about the universe, but it was quickly getting unwieldy and therefore difficult for licensees and partners to operate without creating continuity errors. Over the past decade, Chen digitized that information and then started watching movies, reading books, perusing video games, and the rest, all to make the database—the Holocron—as complete as possible. As of 2012, the Holocron contained “over 55,000 entries including over 19,000 characters, 2,900 species, 5,300 worlds, and 2,100 different types of vehicles,” according to a blog post by Chen. He also created a team charged with making sure what was canonical remained consistent. This requires extraordinary attention to detail, as Wired pointed out:
Chen spends three-quarters of his typical workday consulting or updating the Holocron. He also approves packaging designs, scans novels for errors, and creates Talmudic charts and documents addressing such issues as which Jedi were still alive during the Clone Wars and how long it takes a spaceship to get from Dagobah, where Yoda trained Luke Skywalker, to Luke’s homeworld of Tatooine. The Keeper of the Holocron takes this very seriously: “Someone has to be able to say, ‘Luke Skywalker would not have that color of lightsaber.’”
When mistakes come up, Chen tries to resolve them or, when need be, make retroactive changes to maintain continuity. (There’s even a term for this—“retcon.”) However, that’s not always possible. Some of the early works are too complicated to fix retroactively—take the widely maligned Star Wars Holiday Special from 1978 or the first Star Wars novel, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye (where Luke and Leia—siblings who don’t know it yet—get a little frisky). Those are treated as outliers.
But the big category of outliers is flagged GWL. This is the stuff that drives hardcore Star Wars fans mad. For example, R2-D2 could fly in the prequels, but he forgot about that ability in the original trilogy. Both R2 and C3P0 served Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Anakin Skywalker stories, but in A New Hope, Obi-Wan had no knowledge of either of the droids, or vice versa. That stuff is all GWL. GWL is the only force more powerful than the Holocron.
GWL stands for George Walton Lucas.
BONUS FACT
You won’t find the name of Yoda’s species or its home planet in the Holocron. The former has never been named and the latter has never been identified.
DOUBLE BONUS!
In the summer of 2013, Star Wars debuted once more, and again in groundbreaking fashion. On July 3rd, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope became the first major motion picture to be translated and dubbed into Navajo, as part of an effort to keep the dying Native American language alive for another generation. As NPR reported, the Navajo version was screened at the Navajo Nation Fair in Window Rock, Arizona, and is now available on DVD.
TOY RESTORE-Y
WHEN BUZZ LIGHTYEAR ALMOST WENT BEYOND INFINITY AND RIGHT TO ZERO
In 1995, Pixar released the movie Toy Story, the tale of a room full of toys who—when real people aren’t looking—turn out to be alive. Two of the toys—Woody, a cowboy, and Buzz Lightyear, an astronaut—lead the gang, both vying to be the favorite of a boy named Andy. They’re joined by toy soldiers, a Slinky dog, and of course, Mr. Potato Head. The movie was a box-office smash, earning more than $360 million and warranting a sequel four years later. It too was a major success, earning another $485 million at the box office, leading to a third movie in the series. But the second film in the series almost never hit theaters, because Pixar almost accidentally deleted it.
You’ve probably been in the situation where something goes wrong with whatever technology you’re using, and poof! your data is gone. Maybe you accidentally deleted a video off your phone. Perhaps you were writing a college paper and your computer crashed—without a backup. Maybe you were downloading a file and your connec
tion timed out. Or maybe you dropped your device and it smashed, taking your photos with it. It’s not hard to see how digital data can disappear despite our best efforts.
In most cases, though, major media companies don’t have that problem. First of all, it’s really hard to drop a huge set of servers into a toilet or onto the concrete, and second, things like massive crashes don’t typically result in data deletion. But sometimes things go wrong, and in this case—for reasons unclear—a system administrator decided to run a special command (rm *, if you understand Unix commands) on one of Pixar’s servers. That command quickly and thoroughly erased the drive.
Unfortunately, the drive contained a bunch of really important data for the movie—“databases containing the master copies of characters, sets, animation, etc.,” according to a computer graphics developer who was working on the project. Galyn Susman, the movie’s supervising technical director, claimed that the deleted work would have required “twenty or thirty people working for a solid year” to recreate what was lost. While this might be an exaggeration, the data loss was a big deal.
But, you say, they had their backup drives. After all, this was Pixar, a major media company. They have all sorts of redundant backup systems, right? Right! So, no problem.
Except that the backups had been failing for the last month, and no one knew. It turned out that the backups were spitting out error messages, but for some reason, the error messages were being repressed (likely due to a full disk) and therefore, no one was informed that something was wrong. The last two months of work on Toy Story 2 was gone forever.