by Garth Sundem
SUPER GLUE
Contrary to popular belief, Super Glue was not originally used to seal cuts on the battlefield; that application came later. First, Harry Coover (who even in 1942 must have been teased for his name) stumbled onto the substance while trying to develop a clear plastic for use in gunsights.
VULCANIZED RUBBER
In 1839, Charles Goodyear spilled rubber, sulfur, and white lead onto a stove. Voilà: the hearty rubber instrumental in the development of automobile tires.
MAUVE
In 1856, a novice chemist named William Henry Perkins tried to synthesize quinine, instead (after much exploratory futzing) stumbling onto a color he named mauve. The synthetic dye industry was born.
SILLY PUTTY
In the early 1940s, the war effort required massive quantities of rubber. Scientists at General Electric thought it would be swell if they could synthesize it. Instead, Silly Putty was born. Oh, applesauce, as they say.
TEFLON
In 1938, while searching for a new type of Freon, the geekily ono-matopoetic Roy Plunkett stumbled onto Teflon.
Radar, polyethylene, the microwave oven, X-ray machines, Velcro, cellophane, Viagra, artificial sweeteners, rayon, potato chips, the popsicle, penicillin, Post-it notes, LSD.
SCOTCHGARD
Working at 3M in 1953, a lab assistant spilled experimental rubber on Patsy Sherman's shoes. Despite scrubbing with soap and water, and then with alcohol, the gunk wouldn't come out. While said lab assistant did not help his chances of getting a date with the newly deshoed Sherman, Scotch-gard was born.
SAFETY GLASS
In 1908, Jacques Brandenberger knocked a glass flask off his desk. Inside the flask was the evaporated film of a liquid plastic. Instead of shattering across the floor, the glass shards were held together by the film. The discovery proved hugely useful for World War I gas mask lenses and later for automobile windshields.
GREAT MOMENTS IN PSEUDOSCIENCE
DEREK OGILVIE: BABY TELEPATHIST
Is your baby inconsolable? Do you live in Scotland? If so, Derek Ogilvie might be your answer. A failed bar owner, Ogilvie now promotes himself as a “professional medium and baby telepa-thist.” He discovered his ability to commune with the incommunicable after a chat over tea with a recently departed next-door neighbor. According to his website, M r. Ogilvie's favorite color is blue, and he would like to be an elephant in the next life.
A FLAT EARTH
“You can't orbit a flat earth,” says Charles K. Johnson, president of the Flat Earth Research Society. “The Space Shuttle is a joke—and a very ludicrous joke.” And, according to Johnson, at the South Pole lies an insurmountable wall of ice, ringing the disk-shaped world. You, too, can join the Flat Earth Society, but only after signing a promise never to defame it.
HUMANS FROM ALIENS
A long time ago in a galaxy not so far away, intelligent extraterrestrials visited a small, blue planet, the third from a G2V star later named the sun. Depending on whom you believe, the human population of this planet descended from these extraterrestrials, or said extraterrestrials thoroughly freaked out the existing protohumans to the point of being immortalized in cave paintings and such. Think this is straight kooksville? Carl Sagan gave it some brain space.
USELESS STATS OF FAMOUS PIRATES
ALEX ORBITO'S PSYCHIC SURGERY
A patient lies stripped to the waist on an operating table. Or-bito lunges, using his bare hands to rip a small hole in the patient's abdomen. There's little blood, but Orbito extracts what is surely a massive tumor. It works even better underneath the eleven-meter-high glass-and-stone pyramid of his Asia Spiritual Healing Center in the Philippines (currently closed due to termite damage). In 2005, Alex Orbito was arrested in Canada for fraud, but the case was dismissed. Orbito also cures blindness by extracting, cleaning, and reinserting eyeballs.
SYLVIA BROWNE SAYS:
In heaven, it is 78 degrees all the time, and you can build your house wherever you like, as long as it doesn't obstruct the view. The frequent Larry King Live and Montel Williams guest also has a string of forty churches across the United States, each of which preaches her doctrine of Novus Spiritus and pays Ms. Browne a licensing fee. Dumb like a fox?
PHRENOLOGY
No discussion of pseudoscience is complete without phrenology—the idea that skull bumps hold clues to a patient's personality and potential criminality.
We also broadcast signals into the sky, the most famous of which was the Arecibo broadcast of 1974. In this broadcast, we zapped a coded message toward star cluster M13, nearly 21,000 light years away The message contained coded information about our solar system, DNA, and human physiology. We should expect a reply around the year 43,974 A.D. Interestingly this is the same year in which current analysis predicts NASA will send a manned mission to Mars. Coincidence?
THE BASICS OF EXTRATERRESTRIAL DETECTION
Most scientists agree that our best bet of discovering alien intelligence is “listening” to the sky, using the various dishes and dish arrays constructed for this purpose. One such listening system is Project Phoenix, which uses the massive radiotelescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, to scan the sky for intelligent, extraterrestrial radio signals. A new program meant to update Phoenix is now under way: the Allen Telescope Array (thank you Paul Allen). The first 42 antennas went live on October 11, 2007. When completed, the ATA will consist of 350 six-meter dishes. It will be very, very cool.
A SAM LOYD PICTURE PUZZLE
Cut the board into the fewest number of pieces that will fit together to form a perfect square.
TEN SPORTS REQUIRING ALMOST NO PHYSICAL EXERTION
The crux of this question is the definition of the word sport. Does billiards count? How about golf? This list defines sport as something more than a game of skill—something requiring at least a minor physical component, that component being more than hand-eye coordination. Granted, this allows a somewhat blurry line, but what are you gonna do?
1. Casting: like fishing but without all the strenuous reeling in of struggling aquatic creatures.
2. Lawn bowling: like bowling but without the heavy ball and with tea instead of beer.
3. Skydiving: once you throw yourself out of the airplane, gravity will do the rest.
4. Sport stacking: the timed stacking and unstacking of empty plastic cups. (This is real.)
5. NASCAR: a popular NASCAR e-zine states, “The NASCAR driver's physical conditioning is very similar to athletes in other sports except different areas are built up.” For an athlete who spends the sport's duration sitting on a rather unpadded seat, one can only imagine what these built-up areas must be.
6. Curling: like bocce, only much, much colder.
7. Skijoring: while cross-country skiing is one of the most physically demanding sports, in the refine-ment known as skijoring, competitors on skis strap themselves to a horse or a team of dogs, while enjoying the combined effects of too much alcohol and too little common sense.
8. Yachting: OK, you may need to operate a winch. But it's not like you're paddling.
9. High Speed Telegraphy: decoding Morse code can lead to carpal tunnel syndrome, implying a level of physical exertion and thus making this a valid sport per the listed rules.
10. Cricket: slower than baseball. Enough said.
FOUR OF HISTORY'S GREATEST HEISTS
THE BRINKS-MAT BULLION HEIST
At 6:30 on the morning of November 26, 1983, six men posing as security guards entered the Brinks-Mat warehouse near London's Heathrow Airport. After overpowering the real guards, dousing them with gasoline to generate loose tongues, and disabling the vault's advanced electronic security systems, the gang opened the vault door to find—instead of the cash they expected—over 26 million pounds sterling in gold bullion. The flexible thieves commandeered the vault's fork-lift to load their getaway van and, two hours later, made a clean escape.
thefts are all the rage. In addition to the Mona Lisa, the following paintings have been-at
one time or another-jacked: Panels from the Ghent Altarpiece, three paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe, Vermeer's The Concert, Rembrandt's The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, Mather Brown's Thomas Jefferson, Edvard Munch's The Scream, Madonna, and Blue Dress, various works by Gainsborough, Brueghel, Renoir, Picasso, Monet, Cassatt, Pissarro, Henry Moore, and many others. Clocking in at four thefts since 1966, Rembrandt's Jacob de Gheyn III is the world's most stolen piece of art.
Unfortunately, the heist's masterminds didn't necessarily deserve the “master” portion of their title. They were apprehended a couple weeks later inside a grand estate, paid for in cash and guarded by two Rottweilers responding to names Brinks and Mat.
THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY
On August 8, 1963, the Glasgow-to-London mail train met an unexpected red light and rolled to a stop. Just as the train's fireman discovered that the cables of the emergency call box had been cut, a gang of twelve men jumped from the ditch. Using nothing more deadly than fists and one quick whack with a crowbar, the gang overpowered everyone on the train and drove off with more than 2.5 million pounds in booty. Unfortunately, the gang had left fingerprints all over the nearby farmhouse they had purchased as a hideout, and soon the jig was—as they say—up. The aftermath of the robbery is almost as good as the crime itself, involving slick trial moves resulting in acquittal for one of the gang, anonymity of the remaining gang members, known only as numbers one, two, and three, and a jail escape followed by plastic surgery that allowed one member to stay hidden in Brazil until giving himself up in 2001.
SIXTEEN ESOTERIC TEXT MESSAGE ABBREVIATIONS
THE MONA LISA THEFT
In 1911, Vincenzo Perugia hid in the Louvre after it closed, and then, in the middle of the night, walked off with the Mona Lisa. After a two-year search that included questioning Pablo Picasso and arresting one of Picasso's friends, who was innocent, the police still had no leads. That is, until Vincenzo got greedy. He was arrested after trying to sell the painting to a gallery in Florence. Vincenzo claimed that, as an Italian patriot, he had stolen the famous painting to return it to its rightful home in Italy.
BANCO CENTRAL BURGLARY: BRAZIL
Truckloads of soil frequently left the new landscaping company that was located near Brazil's Banco Central. Neighbors had no idea this supply of soil came from beneath the business itself—specifically from a 256-foot tunnel that stretched underneath two city blocks from the landscape company to the vault of the bank. On the weekend of August 6–7, 2005, burglars tunneled the last 3.6 feet, broke through steel-reinforced concrete, and carried off over $70 million in loot. A couple of the thieves have been caught, a few have turned up dead, but many remain at large.
TÊTE DE VEAU: A RECIPE FOR A TRULY DISTURBED FRENCH FOOD
The French have long been famous for their cuisine. This, despite serving cow tongue, camel's feet, and steak tartare cheval (raw horse meat). But who are we—living in the country of Rocky Mountain oysters and SPAM—to judge? Caution: Henry Harris, an English chef who serves tête de veau at his restaurant, Racine, in Knightsbridge, encourages aspirant chefs to “allow [tête de veau] to cool completely, otherwise it will explode.”
TWO LIKELY OPTIONS FOR A SECOND EARTH
THINGS THAT WILL MAKE YOUR BRAIN HURT II: EINSTEIN'S GENERAL RELATIVITY
Back to Newton: his apple fell due to the force of gravitational pull exerted by Earth (yes, the apple had a little gravitational pull, too, but not much because it wasn't a very big apple). Einstein wondered what exactly created this pull. Specifically, in the vacuum of space, what transmitted this pull in the absence of any “stuff” to convey the information of force? (Very basically, think of force like sound waves, needing to travel through something.)
So, instead of a sucking force, Einstein's theory of general relativity proposed that stars, planets, and very large apples warp the fabric of space-time, so that anything nearby rolls toward them like pennies in the big donation funnel that sits in the lobby of your local publicly funded science museum. (Picture it—this is actually a very close analogy.)
WHAT RICHARD FEYNMAN KNEW ABOUT SAFECRACKING
While as yet unproven, a promising theorem in particle physics states that physicists are people, too. (If you prick them, the theorem goes, they are likely to bleed, etc.) So far, the strongest support for this idea is the anecdotal evidence of Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist who was almost certainly a person. Feynman's reputation for humanizing buffoonery included his ability to open supposedly secure safes—a skill he honed while working on the atom bomb at Los Alamos during World War II.
First, Feynman noticed that safe dials were not as precise as they might be. A combination might include the number 42, but Feynman found that the adjoining numbers 40, 41, 43, and 44 also worked. This narrowed the total possibilities from nearly 1,000,000 (1003) to only 8,000 (203). With practice, Feynman found that he could try 400 combinations in thirty minutes, so even in the unlikely case of opening the safe on the last possible permutation, it could take a maximum of only ten hours. Still, who has ten hours to spare when also racing Nazi Germany into the atomic age?
If Feynman could define one of a combination's three numbers, then opening the lock could take him only a maximum of half an hour (202 combinations). To do this, when in a colleague's office with the safe open, Feynman would pretend to idly play with the lock. In fact, he found that a lock resets itself only after spinning past the first number in its combination. So Feynman would turn the combination lock, going one number further each time until the lock clicked shut, at which point he would know he had found the combination's first number. Voilà—half an hour, tops.
In fact, it usually took much less time, as Feynman first tried psychologically likely numbers—the factory preset, birthdays, phone numbers, or, most common at Los Alamos, a snippet of the number pi.
THE CLASSES REQUIRED FOR MIT'S B.A. IN ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING AND COMPUTER SCIENCE
In addition to core classes in science, math, humanities, and open-ended electives, classes from the following lists are required. One can only assume that comprehending the class description is a prerequisite.
FOUR OF THE FOLLOWING:
6.002—Circuits and Electronics: Fundamentals of the lumped circuit abstraction.
6.003—Signals and Systems: Fundamentals of signal and system analysis.
6.004—Computation Structures: Introduces architecture of digital systems.
6.005—Principles of Software Development: Topics include key paradigms and design patterns, the role of interfaces and specification in achieving modularity and decoupling, reasoning about code using invariants, etc.
6.006—Introduction to Algorithms: Introduction to mathematical modeling of computational problems, etc.
6.007—Applied Electromagnetics: Photons and their interaction with matter in detectors, sources, optical fibers, and other devices and communication systems.
AND THREE OF THE FOLLOWING:
6.011—Introduction to Communication, Control, and Signal Processing: Input-output and state-space models of linear systems driven by deterministic and random signals, etc.
6.012—Microelectric Devices and Circuits: Microelectronic devices modeling, and basic microelectronic circuit analysis and design.
6.013—Electromagnetics and Applications: Electromagnetic phenomena are explored in modern applications.
6.021J—Quantitative Physiology: Principles of mass transport and electrical signal generation for biological membranes, cells, and tissues.
this picture, the Cassini space probe fires radio signals through a conceptualized matrix showing Einstein's general relativity. Researchers measured the time the signal took to travel from the space probe to Earth. It was delayed as predicted by general relativity—the path was warped and thus extended because of the sun's gravitational bending of space-time.
6.033—Computer System Engineering: Techniques for controlling complexity; strong modularity using client-server design, operating sys
tems, etc.
6.034—Artificial Intelligence: Applications of rule chaining, heuristic search, constraint propagation, constrained search, inheritance, etc.
6.046—Design and Analysis of Algorithms: Topics include sorting; search trees, heaps, and hashing; divide-and-conquer; dynamic programming; greedy algorithms; amortized analysis; graph algorithms; and shortest paths.