Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  RISE OF THE MACHINES

  We’re not saying they’re about to take over, but robots are becoming more integral to our world all the time. Here are some innovative ways they are being used today.

  Name: ROBOP

  Profile: Garry O’Hagan, manager of the Easter Roads Stadium in Scotland, was fed up with invading flocks of pigeons. They fouled the seats, annoyed the fans, and sometimes even disrupted play on the field. He wanted to find a humane way to get rid of the unwanted birds, so O’Hagan hired a pest-control expert who spent nine months developing Robop, an electronic robot peregrine falcon. But pigeons aren’t easily fooled by most fake falcons, so this one was designed to flap its wings, move its head, and utter a realistic screech. It works. Robop now stands guard over the stadium and scares the pigeons away.

  Name: ROBONAUT

  Profile: Still in the design stages at NASA, this humanoid figure looks like something out of Star Wars. Slated to take on the most dangerous extravehicular jobs on the International Space Station, Robonaut will be run by “telepresence,” a virtual-reality system controlled by astronauts in the station. How will they do it? They’ll don a special suit to maneuver the robots: every movement the astronaut makes, Robonaut will make, too.

  Name: ROBORAT

  Profile: Engineers have been trying to build small robots that can navigate through rubble to find disaster victims, without much success. Meanwhile, rats have shown that they have the brains and agility to perform search missions—but only in a laboratory setting. Let them outside the lab, and the rats do pretty much whatever they want.

  So physiologists at the University of New York have combined the best of both worlds to create RoboRat, a cyborg (part animal, part machine) rodent that will go anywhere it’s told. A tiny backpack carries a miniature video camera; tiny electrodes go into its brain. A human controller can guide RoboRat with a laptop computer, sending signals directly to the pleasure center of the rat’s brain. The scientists are surprised how easily this is done—they’ve even been able to get them to climb trees, something most rats don’t do.

  What is ichthyosis? A disease that gives human skin the appearance of fish scales.

  Name: THE MILKER

  Profile: Taking the farmer out of farming, all that this fully automatic machine requires is a cow. Once a cow gets to the milking station, she “spends a few minutes munching grain while the robot’s quietly moving parts prod at the animal’s udders.” First, a laser finds the cow’s teats, then a roller disinfects them. After that comes the “milking claw”—an apparatus with long, white suction cups. The robot is self-cleaning and will even call itself in for repairs.

  Name: MONROE

  Profile: It’s easy for humans, but tough for robots. What is it? Walking. It’s taken 30 years of experimentation—with a lot of trips and falls along the way—but the persistence has paid off: biped walking robots are here. One such leggy bot named Monroe (after Marilyn Monroe) has been developed by the Mechatronics Design Laboratory in Japan. Each of Monroe’s legs has a hip joint, a knee joint, an ankle joint, and a toe joint. A complex system of sensors and gyros helps it maintain balance. The lab is also working on robots that can run and jump. Their ultimate goal: an android—an autonomous robot that can walk, talk, see, and manipulate objects with its hands.

  Name: CYBERFLORA

  Profile: “So many robots are seen only as mechanical drones that do physical labor,” says Cynthia Breazeal, a professor of arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab. “I wanted to communicate a more humane vision of technology.” So she created cyberflora. Her futuristic garden consists of “flowers” that are actually metal skeletons fitted with silicon and electronic sensors capable of reacting to light and body heat. To walk among them is a completely unique experience. These robotic blossoms change colors, sway in the wind, and open their buds to capture light. And in addition to producing sweet odors, some also emit soft, ambient music for those patient enough to stop and…listen to the flowers.

  The Library of Congress has 327 miles of bookshelves.

  URBAN LEGENDS

  Hey—did you hear about the guy who invented a car that can run for months on a single tank of gas? We’ve looked into some urban legends to see if there’s any truth to them.

  LEGEND: If you eat a lot of cup-of-soups, you must remove the noodles from the Styrofoam cup and put them in a bowl before you add boiling water. Why? There’s a layer of wax lining the cup that will liquefy when you pour in hot water. The wax can accumulate in your system, causing a deadly “waxy buildup.”

  HOW IT SPREAD: Via word of mouth, for more than 20 years. The latest version is an e-mail that describes how a college student lived on the stuff for months to save money, only to die when so much wax built up in his stomach that surgeons were unable to remove it.

  THE TRUTH: Cup-A-Noodle cups and those of similar soups don’t have a wax lining—they’re just ordinary Styrofoam cups. And even if the cups did contain wax, wax is so easy to digest that it’s a fairly common ingredient in candy and other foods.

  LEGEND: On the day he retires, a longtime General Motors employee is invited down to the factory lot to pick out any car he wants as a retirement gift. He picks a Chevy Caprice. But after weeks of long drives in the country he finds he still hasn’t used up the first tank of gas. When he calls GM to praise the car’s performance, they react suspiciously…and the very next morning he looks out into his driveway and sees two mysterious men in white lab coats working under the hood of his car. The retiree chases the men away, but from then on his car gets only normal gas mileage.

  It turns out that the car he picked was actually a 200+ mpg prototype that GM is hiding from consumers, so that they have to buy more gas than is really necessary. When GM realized the Caprice had gotten out of the factory, they dispatched two company engineers to “fix” it.

  HOW IT SPREAD: The story has been floating around since the 1920s, spreading first by word of mouth, then by photocopies posted on bulletin boards and lately by e-mail. The tale resurfaces every few years with fresh new details—new auto companies and updated makes of car—that keep it believable.

  Exhibitionists: Houseflies prefer to breed in the middle of a room.

  THE TRUTH: This story fails the common sense test: why would any auto company suppress technology that would give it such a huge advantage over its competitors? If GM could make a 200+ mpg car using patented technology that its competitors didn’t have, it would dominate the industry.

  This legend has been kept alive by generations of con artists who claim to have invented 200+ mpg carburetors or magic pills that can turn tap water into auto fuel. When frustrated investors demand to see proof that the “inventions” really do work, the con artists frequently claim that the invention has been stolen by mysterious men in black suits or that it’s been suppressed by the auto industry. Rather than admit they’ve been conned, gullible investors sometimes pass these claims along as true.

  (Similar urban legends haunt the tire industry, which is supposedly suppressing tires that will last for a million miles, and the drug industry, which is accused of buying up the patents to electric headache cures so that the public has to keep buying aspirin.)

  LEGEND: The screams of a UCLA coed being sexually assaulted are ignored because the assault takes place during a midnight “scream session,” when students scream out their dorm windows to relieve the stress of final exams. The attack forced a change in university policy: “To this day, anyone screaming unnecessarily during finals week at UCLA is subject to expulsion.”

  HOW IT SPREAD: Originally by word of mouth, then by e-mail, from one college student to another.

  THE TRUTH: No such attack ever happened—and UCLA doesn’t expel students for screaming during finals. This legend, which has been attributed to many different universities around the country, is kept alive by the insecurities of incoming freshmen, nervous about living away from home for the first time.

  LEGEND: On October 2, 1994, Lauren
Archer let her three-year-old son Kevin play in the “ball pit” of a McDonald’s play area. Afterward Kevin started whimpering, telling his mommy, “It hurts.” That night when Archer bathed her son, she noticed an odd welt on his butt. It looked like he had a large splinter. She immediately made an appointment with the doctor to have it removed the next day, but when Kevin became violently ill later that evening—she rushed him to the emergency room.

  Lost in translation: A French kiss is known as an English kiss in France.

  Too late. Kevin died from what an autopsy revealed to be a heroin overdose…and the “splinter” in his rear end turned out to be the broken-off needle of a drug-filled syringe. How did it get there? Police investigators emptied out the McDonald’s ball pit and found, according to one version of the story, “Rotten food, several hypodermic needles, knives, half-eaten candy, diapers, feces, and the stench of urine.”

  HOW IT SPREAD: First by e-mail beginning in the mid-1990s, then by word of mouth from one frightened parent to another. The story’s credibility is supported by the fact that the original e-mail gives specific names and dates, and even cites a newspaper article that supposedly appeared in the October 10, 1994 issue of the Houston Chronicle.

  THE TRUTH: It’s a hoax. No such incident ever happened and no such article ever appeared in the Houston Chronicle. Don’t take our word for it—after years of denying the rumors, the Chronicle finally printed an official denial in February 2000. A similar story about rattlesnakes in a ball pit—at Burger King—is also false.

  * * *

  CELEBRITY EXCUSES

  “Crack is cheap. I make too much money to use crack.”

  —Whitney Houston, on why crack wasn’t on

  the long list of drugs she admitted to having used

  “I was told that I should shoplift. My director said I should try it out.”

  —Wynona Ryder, to the security guard who

  busted her at Saks Fifth Avenue

  “I’ve killed enough of the world’s trees.”

  —Stephen King,

  on why he’s quitting writing

  The Tin Woodsman’s real name in the Oz books was Nick Chopper.

  BUDDHA’S WISDOM

  Siddhartha Gautama, known as the Buddha, or “Enlightened One,” died in 480 B.C., but his wisdom lives on.

  “Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.”

  “Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else.”

  “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”

  “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”

  “Better than a thousand hollow words, is one word that brings peace.”

  “Every human being is the author of his own disease.”

  “In the sky, there is no distinction of east and west; people create distinctions out of their own minds and then believe them to be true.” “It is a man’s own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways.”

  “We are what we think.”

  “Let us be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die. So, let us all be thankful.”

  “There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.”

  “Work out your own salvation. Do not depend on others.”

  “Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.”

  “Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it.”

  Uncle John’s wisdom: “Go with the Flow.”

  THE BIRTH OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

  Major political parties aren’t born overnight. They usually begin when a group of dissenters gets so fed up with the party they belong to that they break away to form a new one.

  ONE-PARTY SYSTEM

  The two-party political system was a basic element in the founding of the United States, right? Wrong. As we told you in Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader, America’s Founding Fathers were vehemently opposed to the idea of political parties. Why? England’s political parties seemed to spend their time battling one another instead of working together to advance the national interest, and the Founding Fathers hoped to avoid that.

  But they couldn’t—by 1787, as the Constitutional Convention was being held in Philadelphia to draw up the country’s new constitution, political factions were already beginning to emerge. There were “Federalists,” who wanted to create a strong federal government by giving it powers that had previously belonged to the state governments. And there were “Anti-Federalists,” who opposed the new constitution, which in its final form promised to do just that.

  The Federalists won that debate, and the new constitution went into effect on March 4, 1789. In 1796 they succeeded in electing Vice President John Adams president after George Washington, who was non-partisan, declined to run for a third term.

  THE JEFFERSONIAN REPUBLICANS

  And who did Adams beat? The leader of the Anti-Federalists: Thomas Jefferson (he lost by only three electoral votes). As the Federalists won one debate after another, Jefferson’s supporters decided to make a clean break and resurfaced as the “Democratic-Republican” Party, also known as the “Republicans” or the “Jeffersonian Republicans.” Ironically, these Republicans are considered the direct antecedents of the modern Democratic Party, not the Republican Party.

  The Jeffersonian Republicans opposed the Alien and Sedition Acts, new laws that outlawed associations whose purpose was “to oppose any measure of the government of the United States.” The Acts also imposed stiff punishments for writing, printing, or saying anything against the U.S. government. The Republicans saw these acts as targeted at them and also as a grave threat to democracy. Jefferson put his hat in the ring for the 1800 presidential election, and after the Republicans mounted a fierce campaign, he won.

  Wonder Woman’s bullet-proof bracelets were made of a metal called feminum.

  SWAN SONG

  The Federalists went on to lose again in 1804, then again in 1808, and again in 1812. That year they made the mistake of publicly opposing the War of 1812, and even secretly discussed seceding from the Union because of it. When this came to light in 1814, they were finished as a political force. They lost the presidency again in 1816, and by 1820 they were so far gone that they didn’t even field a candidate for president. That year, President James Monroe ran for reelection unopposed.

  For the moment, it seemed that American democracy might be returning to a one-party system. What prevented that from happening? The fact that four men—Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, Secretary of the Treasury William Crawford, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, and Speaker of the House Henry Clay all wanted to succeed Monroe as president.

  Calhoun and Crawford were not above using the patronage and other perks of their offices to gain an advantage in the race. And both of them leaked details of the other’s doings to news reporters. In the process, the entire Monroe administration became tainted with a reputation for corruption.

  ACTION JACKSON

  Many Americans were outraged by Calhoun’s and Crawford’s scheming. One such man was General Andrew Jackson, hero of the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 and a man so tough his soldiers called him Old Hickory after “the hardest wood in creation.” As the first war hero since George Washington, Jackson was the most popular living American, and for years his admirers had urged him to run for president. For years he had turned them down.

  But the corruption of the Monroe administration changed his mind. It convinced Jackson that it was “his public duty to campaign for the presiden
cy and engage in what he called ‘a general cleansing’ of the federal capital,” historian Paul Johnson writes in A History of the American People. “Jackson became the first presidential candidate to grasp with both hands what was to become the most popular campaigning theme in American history—‘Turn the rascals out.’”

  Throughout history, nearly all religions have had a midwinter celebration at about the same time Christians now celebrate Christmas.

  Jackson became the fifth candidate to enter the race for president in 1824. Although he was the least politically experienced of the candidates, he was the most popular man in the country. Result: on election day, Jackson won more votes and carried more states than any other candidate.

  But amazingly, it wasn’t enough.

  POLITICAL SCRAMBLING

  Because the electoral college vote was split among four candidates, none of them, not even Jackson, won an absolute majority of electoral votes. According to the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, that meant that the House of Representatives would have to choose between the top three finishers: Jackson, Adams, and Crawford. Each state’s delegation would get one vote.

  Because he came in fourth, Henry Clay was excluded from consideration for the presidency. But as Speaker of the House, he was well positioned to steer it to the candidate of his choice, and his choice was John Quincy Adams. Crawford had suffered a stroke during the campaign and was in no condition to assume presidential duties, and Clay saw Jackson as “a mere military chieftain” with a bad temper and not nearly enough political experience to be president. By comparison, Adams was the Harvard-educated son of a former president, and had served stints as secretary of state and U.S. ambassador to Russia.

  Clay worked hard to deliver the presidency to Adams, but when the time came to vote in the House of Representatives, he was still one vote short—he needed New York. But the New York delegation was evenly split, which, according to the rules, meant that its vote wouldn’t even be counted unless someone in the delegation changed their vote.