Speed Limits

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The cheetah can reach speeds over 70 mph. In a dive, the peregrine falcon can reach 200 mph. But in 1927, entomologist Charles Townsend estimated that the deer botflies he’d observed in New Mexico surpassed both of these, reaching 400 yards per second. That’s 818 mph.

This claim stood for 11 years, until in 1938 chemist Irving Langmuir debunked it in Science:

  • The power needed to maintain this speed amounts to 370 watts, or about half a horsepower. To deliver it, the fly would have to consume 1.5 times its own weight in food every second.
  • Ballistics formulas show that the wind pressure on the fly’s head would amount to 8 pounds per square inch, probably enough to crush the fly.
  • An 800 mph fly would strike the skin with a force of 310 pounds. “It is obvious that such a projectile would penetrate deeply into human flesh.”
  • A supersonic fly would be invisible to the eye, not the “brownish blur” that Townsend had described.

Not to mention that an 800 mph fly would create its own sonic boom. After weighing the facts, Langmuir concluded, “The description given by Dr. Townsend of the appearance of the flies seems to correspond best with a speed in the neighborhood of 25 m/hr.”

Space Bills

When an explosion crippled Apollo 13’s command module, the crew used the lunar module as a “lifeboat.” The two modules had been built by different contractors, so when the mission was over Grumman sent a tongue-in-cheek bill to Rockwell for “towing” the ship to the moon and back:

http://www.futilitycloset.com/2011/05/02/business-trip/

The Associated Press reported that “North American Rockwell replied that the invoice had been examined by the company’s auditor, who pointed out that North American Rockwell had not yet received payment for ferrying LMs to the moon on previous missions.”

(Thanks, Perry.)

The Monster Study

In 1939, University of Iowa graduate student Mary Tudor began an experiment with local orphans, warning them that they were showing signs of stuttering and lecturing them whenever they repeated a word. The children became acutely self-conscious, and many began to stutter, fulfilling the theory that “the affliction is caused by the diagnosis.”

Sixty years later, when Tudor was 84, she received a letter from one of the orphans. It was addressed to “Mary Tudor Jacobs The Monster.”

“You destroyed my life,” it ran. “I could have been a scientist, archaeologist or even president. Instead I became a pitiful stutterer. The kids made fun of me, my grades fell off, I felt stupid. Clear into my adulthood, I still want to avoid people to this day.”

“I didn’t like what I was doing to those children,” Tudor told the San Jose Mercury News in 2001. “It was a hard, terrible thing. Today, I probably would have challenged it. Back then you did what you were told. It was an assignment. And I did it.”

Rigged Latin

When entomologist Paul Marsh was given the chance to name two wasp species in the genus Heerz, he called them Heerz tooya and Heerz lukenatcha.

The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature insists that “A zoologist should not propose a name that, when spoken, suggests a bizarre, comical, or otherwise objectionable meaning.” But a few get through. Examples:

  • Vini vidivici (parrot)
  • Apopyllus now (spider)
  • Lalapa lusa (wasp)
  • Agra vation (beetle)
  • Phthiria relativitae (bee fly)
  • Pison eyvae (wasp)
  • Eubetia bigaulae (“you betcha by golly”) (moth)

Three mythicomyiid flies are named Pieza kake, Pieza pi, and Pieza deresistans.

In 1912 the Zoological Society of London criticized entomologist George Kirkaldy for giving a series of hemipterans the generic names Polychisme, Elachisme, Marichisme, Dolichisme, Florichisme, and Ochisme (“Polly kiss me,” “Ella kiss me,” “Mary kiss me,” “Dolly kiss me,” “Flora kiss me,” “Oh, kiss me!”). In the same spirit, in 2002 a hopeful Neal Evenhuis named a fossil mythicomyiid Carmenelectra shechisme. “The offer’s still good,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 2008. “I’ll be willing to meet her.”

Head Games

The present King of France is bald.

Is this statement true or false? Well, it’s not true — France has no king presently. But if it’s false then its negation ought to seem true: The present King of France is not bald. That’s no better. Yet it’s not gibberish — the sentence seems to have a clear meaning that we can understand.

Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead spent much of their time at Cambridge debating this point. “It is astonishing what intricate and remote considerations can be brought to bear on this interesting question,” Russell wrote to his wife. “We finally decided that he isn’t, altho’ he has no hair of his own. Experienced people will infer that he wears a wig, but this would be a mistake.”

The Bouba/Kiki Effect

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 2001, USCD psychologist Vilayanur Ramachandran presented these shapes to American undergraduates and to Tamil speakers in India. He asked, “Which of these shapes is bouba and which is kiki?” Around 98% of the respondents assigned the name kiki to the spiky shape and bouba to the curvy one.

Psychologist Wolfgang Köhler had found a similar effect in 1929 using the words baluba and takete. “This result suggests that the human brain is somehow able to to extract abstract properties from the shapes and sounds,” Ramachandran wrote, “for example, the property of jaggedness embodied in both the pointy drawing and the harsh sound of kiki.”

The Paradox of Choices

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When you’re a princess you have to kiss a lot of frogs. But you can see only one frog at a time, and once you reject a frog you can’t return to it. How can you know when to stop hoping for a prince and settle down with the frog you have?

“Surprisingly, … there is a method which enables us to select the best candidate with a probability of nearly 30% even if n is a large number,” writes Gabor Szekely in Paradoxes in Probability Theory and Mathematical Statistics (2001). “Let the first 37% (more precisely, 100/e%) of the candidates go and then select the first one better than any previous candidate (if none are better, select the last). In this case the chance of selecting the best is approximately 1/e, i.e. ≈37% however great n is.”

So if there are 100 frogs in the forest, reject the first 37 and then choose the first one that seems to beat all the others. There’s about a 37 percent chance that it’s the best one.

Antipodes

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

What is directly on the opposite side of the world from you? This map answers that question by superimposing each point on earth with its opposite. Some notable sisters:

  • Beijing, China, is nearly opposite Buenos Aires, Argentina
  • Madrid, Spain, is nearly opposite Wellington, New Zealand
  • Bogotá, Colombia, is nearly opposite Jakarta, Indonesia
  • Bangkok, Thailand, is nearly opposite Lima, Peru
  • Quito, Ecuador, is nearly opposite Singapore
  • Seoul, South Korea, is nearly opposite Montevideo, Uruguay
  • Perth, Australia, is nearly opposite Bermuda
  • Charmingly, Cherbourg, France, is opposite the Antipodes Islands south of New Zealand

W.V.O. Quine explains how an enterprising traveler can arrange to visit two precise antipodes: “Note to begin with that any route from New York to Los Angeles, if not excessively devious, is bound to intersect any route from Winnipeg to New Orleans. Now let someone travel from New York to Los Angeles, and also travel from roughly the antipodes of Winnipeg to roughly the antipodes of New Orleans. These two routes do not intersect — far from it; but one of them intersects a route that is antipodal to the other. So our traveler is assured of having touched a pair of mutually antipodal points precisely, though he will know only approximately where.”