Do Elephants Jump?

by David Feldman

  For the curious, here’s the Uniform Code:

  886.Art.86. Absence Without Leave

  Any member of the armed forces, without authority

  (1) fails to go to his appointed place of duty at the time prescribed;

  (2) goes from that place; or

  (3) absents himself or remains absent from his unit, organization, or place of duty at which he is required at the time prescribed; shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.

  Great catch, Patrick!

  You know who could use better public relations? Public relations people! We received an e-mail from Craig Cherry of Eugene, Oregon, who was riled up about a number we quoted (in What Are Hyenas Laughing At, Anyway?) from a representative of a dryer company, estimating how many trees are saved by the use of an automatic dryer in restrooms. Cherry was so distraught, we allowed him a horrendous “wooden” pun:

  You quoted some statistics stating than an electric dryer in a public restroom would save the use of 125,000 paper towels a year, which weigh 906 pounds, or the equivalent of 7.7 trees.

  I don’t know where this marketing director is from, but in Oregon, we don’t cut our trees when they are 118-pound babies. (I’m assuming that paper is primarily wood fiber, and that wood can be made into paper efficiently).

  I think that paper towels are made of soft pulp wood, such as cottonwood or poplar (among the pulp mill crowd, these are very poplar). According to Bruce Hoadley’s excellent book, Understanding Wood, the specific gravity of cottonwood is about 0.35, or about 22 pounds per cubic foot; 906 pounds would be about 41 cubic feet of cottonwood, or 71,000 cubic inches. A ten-inch-diameter tree of this volume would be 904 inches tall, or 75 feet — a reasonable size for a tree. Spreading this volume among 7.7 trees of 10 inches in diameter means they would each be less than ten feet tall. The other trees would call them stumpy.”

  In How Do Astronauts Scratch an Itch? we indicated that there were technical reasons why some cable companies rearrange the location of the VHF channels on their systems. But David Hanauer of Ann Arbor, Michigan, points out that the 1992 Federal Cable Act stipulated that those broadcast channels, especially noncommercial ones that meet the act’s requirements, must be carried by local cable systems:

  Those broadcast stations that request carriage and meet the Cable Act’s qualifications must be carried on the cable system. The stations are required to be carried regardless of popularity. The stations have also been given the right, by law, to select their channel position on the cable system.

  But you had other TV numbers in mind. In Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses? we mentioned that at one time there was a channel one. Dave Beauvais, an amateur radio enthusiast from Amherst, Massachusetts, heard us tackle this question on WBUR, Boston’s NPR station, and wrote:

  There was in fact a real-live TV Channel 1, which began broadcasting in Chicago in 1939. However, it was soon discovered that this frequency range (roughly 38 to 40 MHz) was so close to the international shortwave broadcast bands that it was exhibiting shortwave propagation characteristics, rather than the predicted “line-of-sight” characteristics.

  The manifest result was that Chicago’s Channel 1 virtually blanketed the entire country from coast to coast. While it must have been thrilling for the few early experimental set owners in New York and Los Angeles to receive live television from Chicago, long before cable or microwave TV networks had been invented, this was clearly not what the FCC had in mind when it made the original channel assignments. The frequencies were meant to be “recyclable” in cities spaced roughly 150 miles apart. There was never any intention of giving Chicago a “nationwide” TV channel, which is precisely what happened!

  When the allocation plan was revised after World War II, Channel 1 was in fact deleted and its frequencies given to police and fire utilities, which in 1938 had occupied the much lower frequency allocation between 1600 and 1800 KHz, just above our standard AM radio broadcast band. If you look at certain old household radios from the 1930s, you will indeed see that they extend to 1800 instead of 1600, and that the top end of the dial is labeled POLICE.

  Speaking of police and numbers — get sent to the slammer and you’ll be stamping out license plate numbers in prison. In What Are Hyenas Laughing At, Anyway? we discussed how convicts got into the license plate business, and how states have been taking longer and longer to produce new plates. Instead, DMVs are issuing drivers renewal stickers, which are cheaper to produce. Reader Darrell B. Thompson of Los Osos, California, wrote:

  On page 139, you mentioned that “as yet, prisoners have not gotten into the renewal sticker business.” Please note that the California Men’s Colony (a state of California penal institution), located in San Luis Obispo, does in fact manufacture renewal stickers for the entire state of California. This operation, of necessity, is accomplished in a very secure environment in the prison and it is off limits to visitors and most of the prison staff.

  We don’t want to whine, but when readers get upset about letters of other readers, we get the mail. And in this case, they’re up in arms about a number that doesn’t exist — the 717 that hasn’t graced a Boeing jet. Or has it? John Stancil, of Midwest City, Oklahoma, writes:

  While reading Do Penguins Have Knees? I was surprised to find a letter [from a Boeing employee] explaining why there was no Boeing 717. I must point out there is more to the story.

  I spent seventeen of my twenty-year Air Force career as a pilot of the KC-135, a Boeing-manufactured military air refueling and cargo jet aircraft. Every airplane I flew had a metal placard in the crew entry chute that bore its model designation as a Boeing 717.

  And a devoted and passionate reader, Ken Giesbers of Seattle, Washington, just happens to be an employee of Boeing. He took umbrage with a reader in What Are Hyenas Laughing At, Anyway? who claimed that the 707 number was assigned to Boeing by the FAA. We’re on Ken’s side, because he agrees with us!

  Your original answer was correct that Boeing chose the 707 designation. The registration number N70700 was requested, not forced upon Boeing. In fact, it was Carl Cleveland of Boeing Public Relations, the very department that your reader maligned, who convinced then-president Bill Allen to choose the number 707 instead of 700.

  Ken was kind enough to contact Boeing’s historical archivist, Tom Lubbesmeyer, who confirmed Ken’s tale but extended an olive branch to the subject of Giesbers’s wrath:

  Boeing public relations and sales people were planning to market the 707 under the name Jet Stratoliner. The selection of the number 707 (which was to be used primarily for internal record keeping) made obvious sense, because Boeing had historically made heavy use of the lucky number seven in its commercial model numbers since the Model 247 of 1934. And more specifically the name Jet Stratoliner harkened back to the original Stratoliner, the Model 307. Thus the 707 number quite nicely suggests the name Jet Stratoliner and vice versa. But once the 367-80 appeared, with the requested registration number N70700, it was the “seven-oh-seven” name that the public and press picked up on, and the Jet Stratoliner name was largely forgotten. So to a certain extent, the letter writer is correct in saying that the 707 was imposed on Boeing.

  Lubbesmeyer then included smoking-gun evidence: a copy of the internal Boeing model register that shows the 707 number in September 1951, well before there was any need for any governmental registration number.

  Speaking of registration, we heard from Doug Frazer of Cincinnati, who has “been known to drive eighteen-wheelers off and on since 1970.” He confirmed what we wrote in When Do Fish Sleep? that different states have all sorts of different regulations about where and whether state licenses must be displayed on the front and back of their trucks:

  Some large tractors do indeed have rear license plates and rear license lights because some states require it. I have seen brand-new tractors from the factory with a license bracket light on the rear frame.

  This rear plate is the same as the front plate, of course, and it’s called the base plate. S
ince most tractors are engaged in the commercial transport of freight, the annual cost of a base plate can be thousands of dollars [in licensing fees to states].

  In the case of a large corporation like Consolidated Freight-ways, the tractors may have a base plate from different states because the trucks “live” at different terminals nationwide. And most trucks have no rear plate — it gets so dirty under the trailer that such plates are solid mud anyway. In the case of a “shiny wheels” (owner operated), the base plate is usually from the state where the driver and truck reside.

  It used to be that a truck running nationwide needed a blizzard of different plates, decals, signs, abbreviations, etc. This will never go away completely, because every state has its grubby paws out for money any way it can get it, and trucks seem to be easy targets. But in the last few years the states have been discovering that trucks travel in more than just their one state and some of the exterior junk is no longer required, because one decal now covers many states.

  What most people don’t see is the pile of paperwork in a folder in the cab: permits for all the states the truck will travel in. Modern owner-operators often use a laptop computer to keep up with all the paperwork, and there are plenty of software programs devoted to this.

  And before we leave the subject of registration and transportation, we must certify one David Bennett, of Fredericton, New Brunswick, as being really real! The poor guy’s letter was published in How Do Astronauts Scratch an Itch? with one tiny little detail deleted:

  I noticed that you used my information regarding having to put snow into covered bridges. I’m glad you found it useful. However, I have one small request. You list me as “one enterprising reader from New Brunswick.” Of course, nobody believes me when I tell them it’s me! Is there any chance I could get my name mentioned when the book comes out in paperback? I’d get a whole bunch of free drinks from people who doubt my word!

  Isn’t it nice to know that your pals don’t believe that you are enterprising? Or think you lack expertise about covered bridges? Please use this acknowledgment to cadge some free drinks from your wretched so-called friends!

  Speaking of cadging, librarian Ethel C. Simpson of the Mullins Library at the University of Arkansas heard us on NPR talking about why pirates wear earrings. In How Do Astronauts Scratch an Itch? we postulated that pirates believed that piercing their ears improved their vision. Simpson is suspicious:

  I always heard that the earring was a way that a pirate could carry a little gold on his person — mad money or an emergency fund to tide him over if he got rolled or arrested.

  We’ve heard this theory often, too, but we suspect that if a pirate were attacked, any gold on his person would be the first thing the roller would try to take from the rollee. Another listener to Weekend Edition, Bruce Hope, e-mailed us with this theory that was advanced by a Navy tour guide on the USS Enterprise in San Diego:

  I have heard that the earring was part of a sailor’s uniform. If you have survived a shipwreck, then you have the right to wear a silver earring. If you have survived two shipwrecks, then you have the right to wear a gold earring. If you have survived three shipwrecks, then you are not allowed on another ship, as you are considered bad luck.

  Three strikes and you’re out, huh? We think that an enterprising sailor could foil this plan by the brilliant ploy of taking off the damn earring. Beats that problem of getting mugged for your jewelry, too.

  But random muggings weren’t the biggest threat to pirates — walking the plank wasn’t exactly a walk in the park! In Astronauts, we mused about why pirates forced prisoners to walk the plank instead of, say, just chucking them overboard. We mentioned several classic books about pirates in the nineteenth century that didn’t mention walking the plank, including Treasure Island. One reader, Christopher L. Prenger of Bartlett, Illinois, wrote:

  I am a recent discoverer of your fine books and have been poring over them voraciously and with much interest whenever I come across a new one. As always, I quickly read How Do Astronauts Scratch an Itch? and was again amused and informed. It so happens that at the same time I was in the midst of reading another classic of literature: Treasure Island.

  Your investigation into this matter, which I am sure was thorough as usual, I discovered was untrue on one small point. You state that popular pirate stories such as Treasure Island had no mention of walking the plank when, in fact, I found two references to it in the course of my reading. The passages are as follows:

  “1. His stories were what frightened people most of all. Dreadful stories they were; about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms of sea, and the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds and places on the Spanish Main [chapter 1].

  2. How many it had cost in the amassing, what blood and sorrow, what good ships scuttled on the deep, what brave men walking the plank blindfold, what shot of cannon, what shame and lies and cruelty, perhaps no man alive could tell [chapter 33].”

  Admittedly, the action of walking the plank never once occurs in the narrative but it is obvious that Robert Louis Stevenson was familiar with the concept, perhaps from the other classics of pirate literature you noted.

  And while experts debate whether walking the plank actually existed outside of pirate tales, one naval historian and publisher of Time Rover Press, Dale R. Ridder, sides with the believers. He sent us a scan of a photo from a 1929 book, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, that cites a shipping newspaper, the Niles Weekly Register, which documents a “walking the plank” incident in 1822, long past the height of piracy a century before.

  Let’s switch to something slightly less life threatening — food and drink. We usually like to accompany liquids with some grub. But Mission, Kansas’s Bob Potemski made us lose our appetite:

  I have a follow-up to the buffet plate question (“Why do many restaurants insist that you take a new plate every time you go through a buffet line?”) in Astronauts. Even in restaurants where you need to use a clean plate for a buffet, you can still refill your drinking glass at the soda dispenser. Now, even if you buy the “germs from mouth to fork to plate to serving utensil to next person” scenario, it seems much more likely that since you put your mouth directly onto a glass, you could easily put germs onto the little metal arm that you press to get the soda. In turn, when the next guy or girl puts his or her glass on the arm, you get the picture?”

  Unfortunately, yes.

  While we’re on the subject of gross dining practices, we might as well delve further into the subject of why pigs are roasted with apples in their mouths. In How Does Aspirin Find a Headache? we admitted we couldn’t track the origins of the practice. Jeannette Shelburne of West Hills, California, was researching Celtic mythology and found this passage in Barbara Walker’s The Women’s Dictionary of Myths and Symbols:

  Today’s Christmas pig with an apple in its mouth is the descendant of Norse Yule pig sacrifices, when the pig was offered to the gods at the turn of the year. Pigs were holy in Germanic and Irish mythology, both branches of the long-established Indo-Aryan worship of Vishnu as the boar god. The Celts associated pigs with the other world and believed them to be the most appropriate food for sacred feasts…. Magic apples of immortality or of death and rebirth are common to most Indo-European mythologies. The apples are usually dispensed by the goddess to a man, hero, ancestor, or god. The Norse goddess Idun kept all the gods alive with her magic apples.

  What goes well with apples, magic or mundane? Cheese, of course! In When Do Fish Sleep? we noted that the only reason why American cheddar cheese is often orange is that consumers preferred the bright color. But reader Dan Chambers of Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin, wrote:

  Years ago, when cows were pastured, they sometimes had buttercups available as part of their diet. This gave the cheese a yellowish or orange color, and yielded a better flavor. Consumers noticed this and came to prefer the naturally colored cheese. It was a simple step to artificially color the cheese.

  When we asked Dan for his source of informat
ion, he couldn’t find the newspaper article where he first read it, but found a Web site based in the Isle of Mull in Scotland where a farmer relates:

  One of our prime concerns…is to make in the winter and be able to sell in the summer. Winter, do not forget, lasts longer up here — from October through March — and the winter cheeses tend to be much paler in comparison to the buttercup yellow of the summer ones.

  In What Are Hyenas Laughing At, Anyway? we discussed why many guitar players keep long, dangling strings on their instruments. Patricia K. Larkins of Homewood, Illinois, seems to think we’re dumb, which isn’t exactly music to our ears:

  I am amazed that you could find eight reasons for the length of string on a guitar and still not come close to the right one. It’s very simple: new strings stretch, and can slip off the post if they are cut too short too soon. That’s all. Some musicians are particularly heavy-handed and are always breaking strings, so their strings never get old enough to cut off. I suppose that accounts for some copycats who think you should never cut the strings, but that’s silly.

  They should be cut as soon as they stop stretching because of the white noise they produce. Incidentally, a small piece of paper slipped under the strings just above the neck will reduce white noise and make your instrument sound much better.

  All logical. But none of this explains the expanse of “extra” string on so many guitars, more than will ever be necessary.

  Michele Myhaver’s son plays the cello, and she has often pondered the mystery of why there aren’t more left-handed string players. It’s time to change the paradigm, according to contrarian Michele:

  After watching my son, a lefty, learn the cello and many other people play myriad stringed instruments, I came to the conclusion that all stringed instruments are made for left-handed people. Take into consideration that a significant number of creative people are left-handed and that musicians are creative, and I think you will begin to see my logic.