I have been keeping an eye on it to see what, if anything, happens. I’ll report any interesting developments, if they occur.
We responded excitedly:
You are our eyes and ears! Keep an eye on it and let us know. Has it moved at all? Will it be there on Monday or the next time you come to campus? The suspense is killing us.
Then on Monday, the devastating news:
Well, this morning the slipper has disappeared. Quite frankly, I was surprised it stayed as long as it did. The grounds crew is pretty good about keeping the campus tidy. I also expected it to be gone when I came to work on Monday as we won our home football game this past Saturday and there was a fair amount of celebration going on. So, the suspense of checking each day is over, but the mystery continues.
Nothing says celebration more than picking up slippers, evidently. Foiled again in our attempts to get to the bottom of the single shoe Imponderable!
That’s the problem with single-shoe research: First hand evidence is always so elusive. That’s one reason why we’re always interested in hearing from perpetrators. Or would-be perps, anyway. We received a long e-mail from Ashley Odell of Manchester, Connecticut. She regaled us with stories about her family summer vacations, driving to points north in an old, beat-up Econoline van, complete with three bench rows in the back and precious few windows that would open. Ashley has six older siblings and they all piled into the Econoline along with the parental units and the maternal grandmother. And as kids on long drives tend to do, they would agitate the parents, until Dad, the designated driver, told Mom to mediate by infiltrating the back section. Theoretically, this settled the problem, but it also rewarded one of the random kids by allowing them the front passenger seat:
Invariably, whichever bratty kid got put in the front would immediately roll down the window, tilt the chair back, and put their feet up. The left foot would be placed on the dash, while the right foot would be stuck just a little ways out—you guessed it—the window.
Ever since these trips in early childhood, Ashley has had her eyes peeled. She went on a long trip from Connecticut to Minnesota, and then all the way down to Fort Worth, Texas, and noted:
Contrary to what I had believed all along, my older siblings aren’t the only people who stick their right feet out car windows. I saw people doing it in Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Everywhere we went, I was sure to see at least one foot dangling out a window. I noticed it the most with trucks and moving vans…
Since that time, I’ve been looking for this odd behavior when I travel by road. I-93 in Vermont? Dangling right feet. I-95 through Jersey? Dangling right feet. Alligator Alley? Dangling right feet, and also not a single alligator. I noticed it on the roads leading to Gettysburg and Valley Forge just a few months ago.
Now can I say that I’ve actually seen a shoe fly off someone’s foot and land on the side of the road? No, I can’t. But I do believe that if you gathered up all of the single shoes on roads, you would find that 90 percent of them are right shoes, and that they arrived there after slipping off the feet of weary travelers who just wanted to relax a little.
Of course, that still leaves the problem of the 10 percent of shoes designed for left feet unexplained. Unless people stick their feet out of the left windows of cars as well as the right, I guess this will remain an Imponderable, though you can’t say I didn’t try.
A cross-cultural study is needed. If your theory is correct, then left shoes should be found on the side of the road in England. But if folks stick their feet out of the left window in the United States, by the established laws of Newtonian Single Shoe Theory, wouldn’t most of these shoes end up on the left side of the road? This seems like a relatively easy thesis to prove. We still believe that more shoes are deliberately thrown out of windows than are “innocently” lost to sleeping, out-the-window leg-stickers.
Speaking of gross things in and out of cars, it’s been a few books since we’ve had a scary report about cockroaches in automobiles. In How Does Aspirin Find a Headache?, we answered why we don’t usually see cockroaches even in crumb-filled cars, and indicated that both cold and a lack of liquids drives the vermin to happier hunting grounds. Here’s a distasteful exception that proves the rule and confirms a stereotype or two. Take it away, Vinnie O’Connor from Oceanside, New York:
Cockroaches do live in some cars, namely police cars, big-time. It seems the eggs get in the cars from the clothing or personal items of people who are transported in the backseat. When the eggs hatch, there is plenty of food, especially doughnut crumbs. Cops also tend to spill a lot of drinks, due to the nature of the business, supplying plenty of liquids to go with the doughnuts. As far as heat goes, the cars usually run 24-7 and have heaters. It is not uncommon for a car to be put out of service to be fumigated because of cockroaches.
Other animals have a more ambiguous relationship with liquids. We discussed why cats don’t like to swim in the book of the same title. We argued that house cats were quite agile in the water, but shunned gratuitous swimming because their fastidiousness nature led them to figure a swim just wasn’t worth all the cleaning off afterward. In other words, they are lazy. Those were fighting words to David Ardnt, Jr. of Fort Hood, Texas:
I am a cat fanatic and probably the biggest cat lover on earth. I have done a lot of research on cats. In the book Why Do Cats Sulk?, it says: “Cats were originally desert animals. They have only been domesticated for about 5,000 years. Unlike dogs who’ve been domesticated for over 10,000 years.
Dogs have had a lot more time to settle down and get used to the new lifestyle. Cats kind of still have one paw in the desert, so to speak.
It seems to us that a desert animal would be more than happy to frolic in the water if given the opportunity. Our opinion is that cats sulk to impose maximum punishment on humans.
Cats won’t swim and elephants won’t jump. According to James Gleick of Garrison, New York, the elephant’s reluctance to leap is a good thing:
It has to do with scaling. It’s not an accident that an elephant is fat and stubby in design. You couldn’t have (with available earthly biological materials) an elephant shaped like a gazelle but scaled up in size; its bones would snap. This is because an animal’s mass is proportional to the cube of its length (or height). That is, if it’s ten times longer, it’s 1,000 times heavier (more or less). But the strength of a limb doesn’t go up 1,000 times when you make it ten times thicker. I think that for the same reason you couldn’t design an elephant that would be strong enough to jump.
He didn’t ask for the plug, but if you want to know more about scaling, we’d suggest a look at Jim’s book, Chaos, which has a fascinating discussion of scaling as it pertains to humans, animals, and weather, starting on page 107.
Speaking of scales, macadamia nuts are fattening. Which is why, perhaps, it’s a good thing that they are semi-impossible to crack open in their natural state. In Do Penguins Have Knees?, we wrote:
Macadamia nuts do have shells. But selling them in their shells would present a serious marketing problem. Only Superman could eat them. According to the Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut Corporation, the largest producer of macadamias in the world, “It takes 300-pounds-per-square-inch of pressure to break the shell.
A couple of Imponderables readers had bones to pick, or shells to crack, about this. First we heard from Katie Barnes, a third-year veterinary school student at the University of Georgia:
There are several animals out there who are more than happy to muster up the necessary 300 psi [pounds per square inch] of jaw pressure to break open macadamia nutshells, such as the spotted hyena (estimates from 1,000 to 4,000 psi), crocodile, and several species of sharks.
Of course, a shark is unlikely to sample macadamia nuts, unless offered some inadvertently by inebriated fishermen, but Katie was ready for our argument:
One in particular that I know not only has the capability but also the desire to do so—the very rare but very beautifu
l Hyacinth Macaw. My godmother raises these birds and I have had the pleasure of watching them (even the young ones) casually split these shells open with their massive beaks and then proceed to gently gnaw on their owner’s earlobes or hair (yikes!). So there are animals who can and frequently do shell macadamias and eat them.
We e-mailed Katie and asked her if any other animals might be able to crack open macadamias. She replied:
I don’t know of any other animal other than the Hyacinth Macaw that would eat macadamias. I know of the South American agouti (a type of lagomorph), which can gnaw through Brazil nuts and their extremely hard husks, but I don’t think that even the Brazil nut can match the toughness of a macadamia nut.
Macadamia nuts are from Australia originally (not from Hawaii as the Mauna Loa Company would have us believe) and Hyacinths are from South America, so this is not a natural food of theirs, but they do eat them in captivity. I don’t think any native Australian animal can manage them—they don’t have any native macaws down there and their other birds are pretty wussy.
We posted Katie’s contributions to our blog at Imponderables.com and heard quickly from Suzanne Shriner, one of three generations of a family-run farm and bed-and-breakfast operation in Honaunau, Hawaii. The Lions’ Gate Farm includes five acres of coffee and five acres of macadamia nuts. Suzanne, who manages the farm, adds to Katie’s list:
I wanted to add a couple of animals that can manage the “hardest shell in the world.” Wild boars have no problem cracking them open. In fact, they are second only to rats in the amount of crop damage done to farmers here.
We also have a dog that can worry the nut open. She’s broken two canine teeth this way, but that doesn’t stop her from laying in the field and cracking nut after nut.
And I’ll bet the dog isn’t afraid to swim, either.
And dogs have been known to chase a ball or two. But not orange balls—at least if the balls hang on power lines. We wrote about why you sometimes see orange balls on power lines in Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses? The main reason for the balls, we argued, was to alert low-flying aircraft, and to a lesser extent, birds, to the presence of power lines. Christopher Durkin of Glendale, Arizona, dissents:
While the orange balls do provide excellent visibility (and sometimes may be used expressly for this purpose), it is not the reason that most of them are on power lines. And even as non-ornithologists/non-electric-company-CEOs know, I doubt the power company will spend great deals of money and risk human life in high voltage installations on lines accessible only to helicopters (in some cases), just to allow migrating birds a place to rest.
The real reason these were developed…is to reduce or eliminate the phenomenon of standing waves in power lines. You see, sometimes the wind will catch lines just right, and they will undulate up and down (this depends on the length of the span, the tension in the wire, and the direction and speed of the wind)…these lines start to wave up and down. One is going up while the one above it may be coming down, and ZAAAAPPPPP! Gotham is in the dark.
This is particularly probable where lines are likely to acquire ice or freezing rain. The freezing rain hangs down uniformly along a wire, looking much like a knife edge. The wind then turns this edge horizontal, and the ensuing effect is much like that of an airplane wing.
So these orange balls are placed on the lines to quiet the waves. The placement is determined by the same variables that determine wave frequency…The idea is to bust up the waves into harmonics. The harmonics are both harder to start, harder to maintain, and most importantly, have much less amplitude, so the wires are less likely to cross.
The balls are orange because, hey, as long as you are putting something up there, it may as well serve several uses—increased visibility is one of those benefits…
Your theory makes sense, Christopher, but we haven’t been able to confirm it. All the literature from “orange ball” manufacturers talks only about aircraft angle. One of the largest, Tana Wire Markers, puts the Federal Aviation Administration guidelines on its Web site at http://www.tanawiremarker.com/faa.htm. Nary a word about harmonics or birds.
If the FAA isn’t going to talk about birds, we will. In What Are Hyenas Laughing At, Anyway?, we gave all kinds of highfalutin reasons why parrots bob their head. Reader Carolin Duncan thought we were overintellectualizing:
We have owned cockatoos (a Moluccan, a sulfur-crested, and a goffin) for over 20 years, and in my experience with head bobbing, our birds do it because they have learned that they will get attention if they do it. Many birds (and cockatoos are noted for this) will do almost anything to get the attention of their people, ranging from cute to very annoying behaviors.
With our birds, when they bob their heads, they are pretty much guaranteed that one of their people will either bob back and say “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” or do something else that rewards the bird’s head-bobbing behavior. (Okay, so we’re weird). My point is that I imagine many pet birds will engage in head-bobbing behavior (or any other behavior) because they will get human attention.
Traditionally, one way of grabbing the attention of humans, whether or not they own birds, is to send them a telegram. But after 145 years, Western Union has pulled the rug out from under telegrams, suspending service as of January 27, 2006. What’s the closest approximation of a telegram? These days, it’s probably a free radiogram offered by ham operators as a public service. Ham operators sent countless messages from those afflicted by Hurricane Katrina. Ben Burwell, a ham radio operator from Princeton, New Jersey, noted our discussion in When Do Fish Sleep? about why Western Union used “STOP” instead of a period to end sentences in telegrams:
Ham operators, in modern times, send the preamble, station of origin, date, and time first. Then we say the word, “break,” followed by the address and telephone number of the addressee, followed by another break, the text, break, and the signature. We don’t use periods or the word “stop.” We use the character “X” as a stop. For example:
Number 745, precedence R, HXG, 8, KC20WE, 2/15/06, 2003Z, BREAK
* * *
David Feldman
P.O. Box 116
Planetarium Station
New York, NY 10024-0116
(800) 555-5555, BREAK
* * *
HI DAVID X HOW’S THE WEATHER X FROM, break
* * *
BEN BURWELL
The weather’s fine, Ben. Stop!
What isn’t so fine, however, is when a clock runs counterclockwise. It isn’t the way nature intended, or we never would have titled a book Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise? In Do Penguins Have Knees?, a reader wrote to report just such a freaky clock. Bob Carson of Indiana, Pennsylvania, was similarly victimized but decided to confront the problem head-on:
I experienced this oddity with a hanging clock that was fairly large with large hands. After a few occurrences I called the power company to find out what happens when there is a power outage and whether a change of polarization could occur when the power is restored. Naturally, I was greeted with a few snickers—not the sweet kind.
Anyhow, a careful analysis revealed some interesting things. If the minute hand was beyond the twelve (in a downward motion) and before the six, when the power was restored the clock would continue “clockwise.” However if the minute hand was beyond the six (in an upward motion) and before the twelve, the clock would commence to run backwards. Trial and error confirmed this by placing the minute hand at various positions and interrupting the power. My conclusion was that the weight of the minute hand gave impetus to which direction the motor would start…
Speaking of wrong directions, we wrote in Do Elephants Jump? that “all sheet music is read from left to right, even in Israel.” We’ve got to remember that nasty tendency to use the word “all.” Brian Luense of Chicago, Illinois shot us an e-mail:
Attached you should find a photograph I took of an Arabic language hymnal that I found in regular use in St. Savior Parish Church in the old city of Jerusalem in Israel this fall
. You can clearly see that in fact the music in this book is written from right to left.
I would suspect that given the choral nature of the music, it is necessary in order to have the words being sung actually readable and correspond to the needed notes. I would guess that the same would be true for any language that reads from right to left, but it is only a guess.
We sit corrected.
But we don’t sit when urinating. While discussing why the sound of running water gives people the urge to urinate in How Do Astronauts Scratch an Itch?, we quoted a gentleman who claimed that some men needed to flush the toilet before urinating because “They need to hear the water flowing to get going.” But Carlos Robles of the Bronx, New York, points out that often the flush is a premature and futile attempt to save time:
Why Do Pirates Love Parrots? Page 24