Uncle John's Fully Loaded 25th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (Uncle John's Bathroom Reader)

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  * * *

  WEDDING BELL BLUES

  • Murphy’s Law. In 1995, Bebe Emerman and Steve Wolfe. organized a huge outdoor wedding at Yosemite National Park. A storm swept in, forcing the event to be held in a tent. Unfortunately the storm also flooded several roads into the park, which rerouted guests to additional roads that added 140 miles to their trip. The wedding ceremony itself went fine, But during the reception, a squirrel got into the tent and walked all over the wedding cake. Then the wedding photographer had to leave early because he was doubled over in pain with a kidney stone. And Emerman accidentally dropped the back of her dress into a toilet.

  • Crabby Day. The night before Mary McPhail got married, she held her rehearsal dinner at the restaurant where she and her fiancé Geord Douglas had had their first date. Touched by the romantic gesture, the restaurant gave the party a surprise gift: a large tray of expensive stone crabs. The next day, McPhail felt ill, but attributed it to wedding day jitters. It wasn’t. She made it down the aisle, and as she and Douglas were reciting their vows, she clenched her hand over her mouth to prevent herself from puking. Aware of the situation, the priest quickly wrapped up the ceremony and pronounced the couple married to get McPhail out the door. As soon as she left the church, she let loose, all over her gown. “I was mortified, but it was the highlight of everyone’s day,” said McPhail.

  A kitchen faucet would need to be turned on for at least 45 years to equal the amount of blood pumped by the human heart in an average lifetime.

  THE ORIGIN OF DNA TESTING

  On page 501 we told you the story of the Innocence Project—the organization that uses DNA testing to help get people wrongfully convicted of crimes freed from prison. Here’s how that technology was discovered in the first place.

  EUREKA MOMENT

  On September 10, 1984, geneticist Alec Jeffreys, 34, was working in his lab at the University of Leicester, in central England. More precisely, he was in the lab’s darkroom, studying an X-ray that had been soaking in a developing tank over the weekend. The X-ray was the result of a process through which recently discovered DNA sequence anomalies appeared on a sheet of film as rows of black lines interspersed with blank spaces—almost like bar codes. The particular X-ray he was looking at showed DNA “bar codes” from three people: one of his technicians and her mother and father.

  Jeffreys had no idea what to expect from the X-ray—he was just inventing this process, hoping to see evidence of change to specific regions of DNA between the parents and their daughter. But after looking at the blurry mess of dark and light spaces for a few moments, he suddenly realized that, completely by accident, he had discovered a way to tell if people were related. “It was an absolute Eureka moment,” he told a reporter in a 2009 interview with The Guardian newspaper. “It was a blinding flash. In five golden minutes, my research career went whizzing off in a completely new direction.”

  AFTER THE EUREKA

  What Jeffreys saw in that blurry X-ray: 1) each of the three family members had their own unique “bar code,” 2) all three of the family members’ bar codes related to one another (which makes perfect sense, as each of us gets our DNA as a combination of our parents’ DNA), and 3) the relationships were plainly visible. Jeffreys quickly realized that his findings would have implications regarding paternity. With such technology you could prove with scientific certainty whether someone was—or wasn’t—someone else’s child. Or even whether they were closely related. The technology could be of use in criminal cases where the perpetrators left blood or other biological evidence behind.

  Jeffreys had apparently discovered something extraordinary—but what to do with it? Surely it would take decades for it to have any applications in the real world, he thought. So he simply kept working on what he dubbed his “DNA fingerprint” process, trying to improve it. Meanwhile, he wrote a scientific paper titled “Individual-Specific Fingerprints of Human DNA,” which was published in the scientific journal Nature in July 1985.

  Two weeks later, he got a phone call.

  TEST CASE: PATERNITY

  The call came from a London lawyer who told Jeffreys she’d read a newspaper article about his “DNA fingerprinting” and wondered if it could be used in an immigration case she was handling. A British-Ghanaian woman’s 13-year-old son had gone to stay with her estranged husband in Ghana for some time, and when he returned, British authorities didn’t believe it was him. They thought the family was trying to sneak someone else—possibly a cousin—into the country on the son’s passport, and they wanted to deport the boy. Could Jeffreys prove that the child was the woman’s son?

  Jeffreys agreed to give it a try. He took blood samples from the mother, three of her other children, and the boy in question, and made DNA bar codes for each of them. His conclusion: The boy was definitely the woman’s son. The lawyer presented the evidence to the British Home Office, and even though DNA testing had never been used in a case before, they were convinced. The boy was legally accepted as the woman’s son and allowed to stay in the country. Not only that, British immigration officials said they would allow DNA testing to decide any future cases that had paternity questions. The British Home Office had, perhaps without realizing it, made the brand-new, still not widely understood use of DNA testing a legally legitimate procedure.

  Western diamondback rattlers bite more people in the U.S. than any other venomous snake.

  TEST CASE: GUILT OR INNOCENCE

  In November 1983, the body of 15-year-old Lynda Mann, of Narborough, Leicestershire (not far from where Jeffreys worked), was found. She had been raped and strangled. Three years later, in July 1986, the body of 15-year-old Dawn Ashworth, of the nearby town of Enderby, was found. She too had been raped and strangled. Evidence taken from both crimes showed only that the attacker in both cases had the same blood type.

  Shortly after the second murder, Richard Buckland, a 17-year-old kitchen porter, was questioned by police. During interrogation he appeared to know facts about the crimes that only the killer could have known. He was arrested and subsequently confessed to the second murder. Police were convinced he had committed the first murder, too, but he insisted he had nothing to with it.

  Having heard about the paternity case that Jeffreys had solved, police investigators asked the scientist to help them identify Buckland as the murderer of Lynda Mann. Jeffreys agreed to help. He extracted DNA from semen left at both crime scenes, and from a blood sample taken from Richard Buckland, then ran them through his process, made the bar codes, and established that one person had indeed carried out both attacks…except it wasn’t Richard Buckland.

  Nobody was more disappointed than Jeffreys. “As a man with a young family, living in the local area,” Jeffreys told the BBC years later, “I was as keen as everyone else that our discovery should catch the killer. We couldn’t believe what we were seeing. We’d tested and retested our findings."

  BLOODHOUNDS

  With Buckland off the hook, police were left with no suspects at all, so they decided to try something that had never been done before: In early 1987, they put out a call asking all male residents of the villages of Narborough and Endbury between the ages of 17 and 34 (about 5,000 men) to voluntarily submit to a DNA test. Some objected, seeing the request as an almost science-fictionlike infringement of their privacy rights. But most of the men, understandably distressed by the idea that a vicious killer might be in their midst, were behind it wholeheartedly.

  Good excuse: Studies have found that playing Tetris improves brain function.

  Nearly all 5,000 men in the region voluntarily gave blood. And while Jeffreys’s new forensic technology didn’t solve the crimes directly, in the end it did help nab the killer. A man named Ian Kelly was overheard boasting in a pub that he’d been paid to give a blood sample in someone else’s name. Police interrogated Kelly, then arrested a 27-year-old Leicester baker with the distinctive name of Colin Pitchfork. Pitchfork confessed immediately, and later pleaded guilty to the rapes and m
urders of both Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth. He was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum of 30 years served.

  AFTERMATH

  Christiana and Andrew Sarbah (the mother and son in the paternity case) were the first people in history to have a paternity case solved through DNA testing. Richard Buckland was the first person to be proven not guilty of a crime through the use of DNA, and Colin Pitchfork the first person convicted of a crime as a result of DNA testing. News of these events made global headlines. Within a year, DNA fingerprinting—now known as DNA profiling—was being used in the United States, and in just a few more years it was considered a standard part of forensics almost everywhere in the world. And not just to find out whodunnit—but also to determine who-didn’t-dunnit.

  Jeffreys is still a professor at the University of Leicester, although he is now known as Sir Alec Jeffreys. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1994 for “Services to Science and Technology.” He has received numerous other awards for what turned out to be one of the most momentous scientific discoveries of modern times. And it brought him some well-deserved fame: “Literally every two or three days I get an e-mail,” he said in 2009, “mainly from the States, from school kids saying, ‘I’ve got to do a project on a famous scientist, so I’ve chosen you,’ and I love that. I always respond.”

  A FEW MORE FACTS

  • It may seem elementary to CSI fans, but after his discovery on that fateful Monday morning in 1984, Jeffreys had no idea if the DNA in a bloodstain would be usable in his process. So he did the only thing a good scientist could:

  Largest single source of added sugar in the American diet: soda.

  I spent the next two days cutting myself and leaving blood marks round the laboratory. Then we tested those bloodstains.

  (It worked, of course.)

  • Jeffreys’s original X-rays—the ones mentioned at the start of the story, with the bar codes of the three family members—actually held 11 such codes. The other eight were made from the DNA of animals, including a mouse, a cow, and a baboon. And in case you were wondering, DNA testing works the same for animals as it does for humans.

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  UNCLE JOHN’S PUBLIC DOMAIN THEATRE

  The opening lines of Hamlet, by William Shakespeare

  ACT I, SCENE I

  Elsinore. A platform before the castle.

  FRANCISCO at his post. Enter to him BERNARDO

  BERNARDO: Who's there?

  FRANCISCO: Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.

  BERNARDO: Long live the king!

  FRANCISCO: Bernardo?

  BERNARDO: He.

  FRANCISCO: You come most carefully upon your hour.

  BERNARDO: 'Tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, Francisco.

  FRANCISCO: For this relief much thanks: 'tis bitter cold, And I am sick at heart.

  BERNARDO: Have you had quiet guard?

  FRANCISCO: Not a mouse stirring.

  BERNARDO: Well, good night.

  Alkaptonuria is a rare genetic disorder that causes your urine to turn black.

  THANKS FOR NOTHING

  Aristotle didn’t have it. Neither did Pythagoras or Euclid or other ancient mathematicians. We’re talking about zero, which may sound like nothing, but, as it turns out, is a really big something. Here’s the story.

  COUNT LIKE A HINDU

  Sometime in the early 9th century, a Persian mathematician named Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (circa A.D. 780–850) gained a key piece of knowledge that would eventually earn him the nickname “the Father of Algebra.” What he discovered would also speed up mathematical calculation many times over and, eventually, make a host of amazing technological advances possible, up to and including cars, computers, space travel, and robots.

  What was it? The Hindu number system (developed in India). The system intrigued al-Khwarizmi because it used nine different symbols to represent numbers, plus a small circle around empty space to represent shunya—“nothingness.” To keep from having to use more and more symbols for larger numbers, the Hindu system was a place system. The value of a number could be determined by its place in a row of numbers: There was a row for 1s, a row for 10s, 100s, 1000s, and so on. If nine numerals and a circle to represent “nothing” sounds familiar, it should. Thanks to al-Khwarizmi, the Hindu number system (known in the West as “Arabic numerals”) is the system used in most of the world today.

  A ZERO IN THE HOUSE OF WISDOM

  Al-Khwarizmi knew a good idea when he saw one. He was a scholar and worked in the House of Wisdom, a combination library, university, research lab, and translation service in Baghdad. At the time, the Abbassid caliphs—who claimed to be descendants of Abbas, the prophet Muhammad’s youngest uncle—ruled the Persian Empire. They had turned their seat of power, Baghdad, into the “jewel of the world.” Muhammad had exhorted his followers to “acquire knowledge” and to “seek learning though it be as far as China.” So as Europe descended into the Dark Ages, the caliphs kept the light of knowledge burning bright. They collected as much of the world’s written knowledge as they could get their hands on and had it translated into Arabic. At a time when the largest library in Europe contained far fewer than a thousand volumes, the Abbasids amassed a library believed to have held a million books.

  What’s a “chanticleer?” A fancy name for rooster.

  While working for the Abbasids in the House of Wisdom, al-Khwarizmi specialized in astronomy and mathematics. He spent most of his time finding useful real-world applications for mathematical concepts and explaining them in ways that reasonably-intelligent non-mathematicians could understand. Those Hindu numbers opened up a whole new world of mathematical possibility. And he was especially intrigued by the symbol for “nothing.”

  HOLD THAT PLACE!

  “The tenth figure in the shape of a circle,” al-Khwarizmi wrote, would help prevent confusion when it came to balancing household accounts or parceling out a widow’s dowry. The circle was the key: If no numeral fell into a particular column, the circle served as a placeholder, as al-Khwarizmi put it, “to keep the rows straight.” A merchant (or mathematician) could run his finger down each column starting from the right and be confident that the 1s, 10s, 100s, and so on, were in the correct place.

  If this seems less than Earth-shaking, consider this: The Hindu system was based on the abacus, a counting device that some scholars say goes back 3000 B.C. The earliest versions used pebbles lined up in columns to represents 1s, 10s, 100s, 1000s, etc. Later versions used beads strung on wires inside a frame. With this type of abacus, when you counted past nine, you flipped one bead into the 10s column and pushed the beads in the 1s column back to nothing. British mathematician Lancelot Hogben succinctly explained what was so amazing about the Hindu circle:

  The invention of sunya (zero) liberated the human intellect from the prison bars of the counting frame. Once there was a sign for the empty column, ‘carrying over’ on a slate or paper was just as easy as carrying over on the abacus…and it could stretch as far as necessary in either direction.

  That, in a nutshell, is the humble beginning of zero. But a circle used as a placeholder is only half of the story about nothing.

  The U.S. Justice Dept. reported men are 4 times more likely than women to be murdered.

  ZERO HOUR

  For awhile, the Hindu circle remained a placeholder doing nothing more than showing that there was nothing in a particular column. But al-Khwarizmi wasn’t content with that and went back to the books. He studied everything he could find about math from the ancient Greeks and others, and he began considering the existence of negative numbers, in particular what happens when you subtract a larger number from a smaller one. Something about the available literature bugged him. There was something missing.

  Take a problem like 3 - 4 =___. Everybody had figured out that the answer was -1. But al-Khwarizmi knew that he couldn’t arrive at that answer by starting at 3 and counting backward by 4 numbers. When he did that…2, 1, -1, -2…the fourth numbe
r was -2, and that’s the wrong answer.

  Al-Khwarizmi’s “Ah-ha!” moment came when he realized that there was a missing number, one that signified “nothing.” And—Eureka!—a symbol for nothing was already there in the Hindu system, stuck at the end of numerals like 10, 20, 30, and 100, to indicate the numeral’s place in a column of figures. That circle signifying “nothing” (sunya in Sanskrit, sifr in Arabic, and, in time, cipher in Latin) needed to be upgraded from a placeholder to a full-fledged numeral. Al-Khwarizmi gave zero its rightful place: right between +1 and -1. He began using the round placeholder (0) as the missing number in calculations, and suddenly math with negative numbers worked. (His zero also provoked heated philosophical discussions along the line of: “How can nothing be represented by something?” but that’s a different topic.)

  ALGEBRA 1

  Around A.D. 825, al-Khwarizmi wrote a book to explain calculation using the Hindu number system. It was called, fittingly, On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals. But al-Khwarizmi didn’t rest on his zeroes; he expanded his work, developing math that included rational and irrational numbers, negatives, equations, and all the other stuff you’ve forgotten from ninth grade.

  Around A.D. 830, he wrote al-Kitab al-mukhtasar fi hisab al-jabr wa’l-muqabala (The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing). The title gave the world the term “algebra” (from al-jabr), and the content gave the world the advanced math that went with it. Al-Khwarizmi’s intent wasn’t to confuse future generations of middle school students with abstract equations. In his own words, it was to explain…

  Shakespeare was an insomniac.