How Does Aspirin Find a Headache?

by David Feldman

  From his shoulder Hiawatha

  Took the camera of rosewood,

  Made of sliding, folding rosewood;

  Neatly put it all together,

  In its case it lay compactly,

  Folded into nearly nothing;

  But he opened out the hinges,

  Pushed and pulled the joints and hinges,

  Till it looked all squares and oblongs,

  Like a complicated figure

  In the second book of Euclid,

  This he perched upon a tri-pod—

  Crouched beneath its dusty cover—

  Stretched his hand enforcing silence—

  Mystic, awful was the process,

  All the family in order

  Sat before him for their pictures:

  Each in turn, as he was taken,

  Volunteered his own suggestions.

  First the governor, the father:

  He suggested velvet curtains

  Looped about a messy Pillar;

  And the corner of a table.

  He would hold a scroll of something

  Hold it firmly in his left hand;

  He would keep his right hand buried

  (Like Napoleon) in his waistcoat;

  He would contemplate the distance

  With a look of pensive meaning,

  As of ducks that die in tempests.

  Grand, heroic was the notion:

  Yet, the picture failed entirely:

  Failed, because he moved a little,

  Moved because he couldn’t help it!

  Who would have ever thought of Lewis Carroll summarizing the answers to an Imponderable, while simultaneously contemplating the plight of a Sears portrait photographer?

  Submitted by Donald McGurk of West Springfield, Massachusetts. Thanks also to Wendy Gessel of Hudson, Ohio, and Geoff Rizzie of Cypress, California.

  Why Are Carpenter’s Pencils Square?

  Two reasons. Carl Reichenbach, product manager at pencil giant Dixon-Ticonderoga, told Imponderables that the square shape enables carpenters to draw thin or thick lines more easily than with conventional pencils.

  But a more pressing point: If we drop a pencil from our desk, it’s not a big deal to lean over and pick it up from the floor. However, what if we happen to drop a pencil from a beam on the thirty-fourth floor of a construction site? Or the roof of a home? As Ellen B. Carson of Empire Berol USA put it, “The carpenters’ pencils are produced in a square shape so they won’t roll off building materials.”

  Submitted by Nate Woodward of Seattle, Washington.

  Why Don’t Windshield Wipers in Buses Work in Tandem Like Auto Wipers?

  Hearing that two Imponderables readers were obsessed with this question made us feel less lonely. We’ve always wondered whether we were the only ones bugged by the infernal racket and displeasing look of two huge, awkward, asymmetrical windshield wipers churning away on rainy trips.

  The answer turns out to be simple, if technical. Most automobiles use one motor to power two windshield wipers. With bigger windshields and blades, the two bus wipers are driven by separate, independent motors, so the movement of the two blades is not coordinated.

  Isn’t there any way to get the two wipers to work together? Sure, for a cost, as Karen Finkel, executive director of the National School Transportation Association, explains:

  A larger motor to accommodate the larger blade and windshield could be developed. However, there isn’t a reason to synchronize the wipers so it hasn’t been done.

  Hmmm. Not driving us nuts, we guess, isn’t reason enough to change the status quo.

  Submitted by P.M. Cook of Lake Stephens, Washington. Thanks also to Karyn Heckman of Greenville, Pennsylvania.

  Why Were Athos, Porthos, and Aramis Called the Three Musketeers When They Fought with Swords Rather Than Muskets?

  The Three Swordsmen sounds like a decent enough title for a book, if not an inspiring name for a candy bar, so why did Dumas choose The Three Musketeers? Dumas based his novel on Memoirs of Monsieur D’Artagnan, a fictionalized account of “Captain-Lieutenant of the First Company of the King’s Musketeers.” Yes, there really was a company of musketeers in France in the seventeenth century.

  Formed in 1622, the company’s main function was to serve as bodyguard for the King (Louis XIII) during peacetime. During wars, the musketeers were dispatched to fight in the infantry or cavalry; but at the palace, they were the corps d’élite. Although they were young (mostly seventeen to twenty years of age), all had prior experience in the military and were of aristocratic ancestry.

  According to Dumas translator Lord Sudley, when the musketeers were formed, they “had just been armed with the new flintlock, muzzle-loading muskets,” a precursor to modern rifles. Unfortunately, the musket, although powerful enough to pierce any armor of its day, was also extremely cumbersome. As long as eight feet, and the weight of two bowling balls, they were too unwieldy to be carried by horsemen. The musket was so awkward that it could not be shot accurately while resting on the shoulder, so musketeers used a fork rest to steady the weapon. Eventually, the “musketeers” were rendered musketless and relied on newfangled pistols and trusty old swords.

  Just think of how muskets would have slowed down the derring-do of the three amigos. It’s not easy, for example, to slash a sword-brandishing villain while dangling from a chandelier, if one has a musket on one’s back.

  Submitted by John Bigus of Orion, Illinois.

  Why Don’t Public Schools Teach First Aid and CPR Techniques?

  Wouldn’t our world be a safer place if every high school required students to take a class in life-saving techniques? Reader Charles Myers sure thought so, so we tried to find out why CPR isn’t a part of school-room curriculums in most communities. Considering the violence in our schools, the argument needn’t be made that such training would only be usable in the “outside world.” In fact, this issue recently has become a hot topic among educators, particularly because of concerns about the response times of fire, paramedic, police, and other emergency medical services in many communities.

  All of the health officials we contacted felt that CPR and first aid training in public schools could be valuable, but they provided a litany of reasons why we shouldn’t expect to see it in the near future. Why not?

  1. Money. Most school systems are riddled with financial problems. CPR training is labor-intensive. While a normal classroom might have a ratio of twenty-five or thirty students per teacher, CPR requires a six-to-one or eight-to-one radio. And training teachers to learn and then teach CPR costs money.

  2. Liability problems. “America,” says Bill Powell, prehospital emergency training coordinator for Booth Memorial Medical Center in Flushing, New York, “is the land of the suing.” What if a student botches a rescue operation? Would the school be legally and financially liable for poor training?

  3. No one should be forced to administer CPR. Several of our sources indicated that although it is an admirable goal to have every student learn first aid techniques, in practice it might not be a good idea to force those who don’t desire to learn or who are incapable of administering them properly. Georgeanne Del Canto, director of health services for the Brooklyn, New York, Board of Education, told Imponderables that good intentions notwithstanding, asking every student to learn first aid would be a little like asking every schoolkid to go out for the wrestling team: Too many students would be insufficiently strong, energetic, or limber to apply CPR adequately, and more than a few would be too squeamish.

  If we required all students to learn CPR, we would be forcing them to learn a technique that they would not be obligated to use outside of school. In most states, Bill Powell told us, lay citizens are under no legal obligation to act as a Good Samaritan (in most states, physicians do have such an duty), even in life-threatening situations.

  4. Motivation of students. Powell isn’t too sanguine about the desire of students to learn CPR properly. Why should they pay any more attention to
first aid training than they do to math or history? Most non-health professional students in CPR courses are people who are friends or family of someone who they fear is at risk; few learn CPR out of sheer altruism or an abstract academic interest.

  5. Time. CPR certifications must be renewed every two years, not so much because first aid techniques change but because most students, thankfully, never get a chance to apply their lessons in real life. Constant retraining of students might be another financial and labor drain on schools, although this problem could be ameliorated by introducing the subject in the junior year of high school, thus saddling colleges with the task of recertification.

  6. Training of trainers. “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” emphasizes Ira Schwartz, project director of the New York State Regents Advisory Committee on Community Involvement. Schwartz and others we talked to thought that finding a ready supply of teachers qualified to teach CPR, or training nonqualified teachers to do so, was a major hurdle.

  7. Competition. CPR isn’t the only health item clamoring to be included in public school curriculums. Although she joined in the chorus of educators who thought that universal CPR training would be a noble idea, Arlene Sheffield, director of the school health demonstration program for the New York State Education Department, told us that many educators believe that teaching students about bulimia, anorexia nervosa, and child abuse has a higher priority. Sheffield’s program, for example, focuses on eliminating drug abuse among students, a subject of more pressing importance to students, educators, and parents than CPR. As Sheffield puts it,

  The pool of money and time available for schooling in any given subject is finite and CPR and first aid have a lot of healthy competition.

  CPR training is not totally abandoned in our public schools. Many schools offer kids training on an elective basis; community groups and hospitals offer low-cost courses. And a few public school systems, such as Seattle’s, find the time, money, and training resources to offer all students CPR courses.

  Charles Myers was not alone in wondering if some of that time he (and, let us admit, we) wasted in school might have been better spend learning a skill that could save others’ lives. When we asked Emmanuel M. Goldman, former publisher of Curriculum Review, this Imponderable, he echoed our sentiments exactly:

  As to why CPR isn’t taught, at least in high school: It beats me. Probably because it is such a logical, desirable, and useful skill.

  Submitted by Charles Myers of Ronkonkoma, New York.

  Why Do Peanuts in the Shell Usually Grow in Pairs?

  Botany 101. A peanut is not a nut but a legume, closer biologically to a pea or a bean than a walnut or pecan. Each ovary of the plant usually releases one seed per pod, and all normal shells contain more than one ovary.

  But not all peanut shells contain two seeds. We are most familiar with Virginia peanuts, which usually contain two but occasionally sprout mutants that feature one, three, or four. Valencia and Spanish peanuts boast three to five seeds per shell.

  Traditionally, breeders have chosen to develop two-seeded pods for a practical reason: Two-seeders are much easier to shell. According to Charles Simpson, of Texas A & M’s Texas Agricultural Experiment Station, there is little taste difference among the varieties of peanuts, but the three-seed peanuts are quite difficult to shell, requiring tremendous pressure to open without damaging the legume. We do know that patrons of baseball games wouldn’t abide the lack of immediate gratification. They’d much rather plop two peanuts than three into their mouths, at least if it means less toil and more beer consumption.

  Submitted by Thad Seaver, A Company, 127 FSB.

  Why Are Children Taught How to Print Before They Learn Cursive Handwriting?

  While most of us were taught how to print in kindergarten and learned how to write in late second or third grade, this wasn’t always the case. Until the early 1920s, children were taught only cursive handwriting in school. Margaret Wise imported the idea of starting kids with manuscript writing (or printing) from England in 1921, and her method has become nearly universal in North America ever since.

  Wise used two arguments to promote the radical change: With limited motor skills, it was easier for small children to make print legible; and print, looking more like typeset letters than cursive writing, would enable children to learn to read faster and more easily. Subsequent experimental research has confirmed that Wise’s suppositions were correct.

  In the seventy years since Wise revolutionized kindergarten penmanship, other reasons for teaching children printing have been advanced: Print is easier for teachers and students to read; students learn print more quickly and easily than cursive writing; and despite protestations from some, children can print as fast as they can write. While adults tend to write faster than they can print, experiments have indicated that this is only true because most adults rarely print; those who print as a matter of course are just as fast as cursive writers.

  We have pored over many academic discussions about children’s writing and haven’t found anyone strenuously objecting to teaching children how to print first. What surprised us, though, is the lack of reasoned justification for weaning children from printing and, just after they have mastered the technique, teaching them cursive writing. After reviewing the literature on the subject, Walter Koenke, in an article in The Reading Teacher, boiled the rationales down to two—tradition and parental pressure:

  Since printing can be produced as speedily as cursive handwriting while being as legible and since it is obvious that the adult world generally accepts printing, it seems that the tradition rather than research calls for the transition from some form of printing to cursive handwriting.

  A litany of justifications for cursive writing has been advanced, but none of them holds up. If print is easier to read and write, why do we need to learn cursive script? Why do we need to teach children duplicate letter forms when there is hard evidence that the transitionary period temporarily retards students’ reading and compositional ability? (One study indicated that for each semester’s delay in introducing cursive handwriting, students’ compositional skill improved.)

  In a wonderful article, “Curse You, Cursive Writing,” the University of Northern Iowa’s Professor Sharon Arthur Moore argues passionately that there is no need to teach children cursive writing and rebuts most of the arguments that its proponents claim. It is not true, as conventional wisdom might have it, that cursive writing is harder to forge than manuscript print, nor is it true that only cursive writing can be a valid signature on legal documents (X can still mark the spot).

  Moore feels that parental pressure and a belief that cursive is somehow more “grown up” or prestigious than print permeates our society and leads to an unnecessary emphasis on cursive style:

  From the time they enter school, children want to learn to “write”; near the end of second or the beginning of third grade, the wish comes true. The writing done to that point must not be very highly valued, or why would there be such a rush to learn to do “the real thing”?…perceptions are so much more powerful than reality at times that it may not even occur to people to question the value of cursive writing.

  Why, she argues persuasively, do business and legal forms ask us to “please print carefully”? The answer, of course, is that even adults print more legibly than they write cursively. If cursive is superior, why aren’t cursive typefaces for typewriters and computer printers more popular? Why aren’t books published in cursive?

  Moore, like us, can’t understand the justification for teaching kids how to write, and then changing that method in two years for no pedagogical purpose. She endorses the notion of teaching cursive writing as an elective in eighth or ninth grade.

  Several handwriting styles have been advanced to try to bridge the gap between manuscript and cursive styles—most prominently, the “D’Nealian Manuscript,” which teaches children to slant letters from the very beginning and involves much less lifting of the pencil than standard printi
ng. Proponents of the D’Nealian method claim that their style requires fewer jerky movements that may prove difficult and time-consuming for five-and six-year-olds and eases the transition from manuscript to cursive by teaching kids how to “slant” right away. And the D’Nealian method also cuts down the reversal of letters that typifies children’s printing. It is far less likely that a child, using D’Nealian, will misspell “dad” as “bab,”, because the “b” and “d” look considerably different. In standard manuscript, the child is taught to create a “b” by making a straight vertical line and then drawing a circle next to it. But in D’Nealian, the pencil is never picked up: the straight but slanted vertical line is drawn, but the “circle” starts at the bottom of the line, and the pencil is brought around and up to form what they call the “tummy” of the “b.”

  We’ll leave it to the theorists to debate whether the D’Nealian, or more obscure methods, are superior to the standard “circle stick” style of manuscript. But we wish we could have found a clearer reason why it’s necessary to change from that style into cursive writing—ever. We couldn’t argue the cause more eloquently than Janice-Carol Yasgur, an urban elementary schoolteacher:

  Just as kids begin to get competent in printing their thoughts, we come along and teach them cursive—and what a curse it is! Now they devote more of their energy to joining all the letters together than to thinking about what they’re trying to communicate, so that it’s a total loss: It’s impossible to make out their scribbles; but even if you can, it’s impossible to figure out what they’re trying to say. It’s a plot to keep elementary schoolteachers in a state of permanent distress.