Hi, gang!
It's always a little disturbing to find out that so many of
the facts you studied hard to learn are just plain wrong. Think
about all of the effort wasted in first learning and then
unlearning things that could have been put to more useful
pursuits - like doing crossword puzzles or watching "The
Simpsons." It makes you wonder what other facts you may be
missing. Are bats really blind? Abraham Lincoln was a country
lawyer, right? And do you really remember where you left your
car keys?
Many of these stories posing as truth take on a life of
their own. In some cases, they are stories made up about famous
figures, either by admirers or opponents, depending on whether
the stories ar true or not. For whatever reason, these often
turn out to be things that people really want to believe. But
the real facts are usually much more interesting, even if it
means that we have to see these famous folks as poor flawed
humans like the rest of us.
Seekers of truth this week include: Eva YuHwa Lu, Jerry
Taff, Fumiko Umino, Sue Yan, Kerry Miller, Yukari & Toshi
Kawabata, Caterina Sukup, Hiroe Sugiyama, Paul Roser, Laura Hong
Li, Dale Frederickson, Sylvia Libin He, Carol Becwar, Nnamdi
Elleh, Tomoko Naito, Alison & Mark Becwar (& good luck at State,
Marco!) and Beth Butler. I'm fairly sure that I didn't leave
anyone out, but then, we all make mistakes.
Have a Great Week,
--:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)--
SCIENCE BEE
-----------
Everyone has heard the story that scientists can't figure
out why bees fly, since their wings are too small to support
their bodies. No one quite knows how this story got started, but
speculation is that someone compared airplane wing design tables
to a bee, and came up with the idea that bees don't make sense.
The same guy would compare a car and a bicycle and conclude that
bicycles don't make sense because they fall over.
Bees don't have much in common with airplanes - most
airplanes would have a tough time landing on a flower, for one
thing. Since bees beat their wings rapidly while flying, they
are much closer in design to helicopters. It's easy to see that,
compared to helicopters, bees have considerably more wing than
needed for their body size. Either that, or helicopters have too
little. But you never hear anyone saying that scientists haven't
figured out how helicopters fly.
--:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)---
IDEAS IN MID-FLIGHT
-------------------
As long as we've started talking about airplane myths, we
might as well go right back to the beginning and say something
about the Wright Brothers. The idea that the airplane was
invented by two poor, uneducated bicycle mechanics from Ohio
makes a great story. And, like most really good stories, it
stinks as history. While Wilbur and Orville were not upper crust
university types, they were far from uneducated. The brothers
did design and built bicycles - racing bicycles. Comparing these
machines to your kid's mountain bike is like comparing a Buick to
an high-tech Indy race car.
The Wright Brothers bicycle works was prosperous enough to
have a well-equipped machine shop and several assistants. In
many ways, designers of racing bicycles were ideally suited to
invent the airplane; they used exotic (for the time) materials,
designed extremely strong, light-weight machines, and they had an
accurate scientific understanding of physical forces. They seem
to have been the first to realize that an airplane would have to
lean into a turn, just as a bicycle does. That the Wright
Brothers produced the first practical airplane wasn't a fluke,
they were just the first guys with the Wright stuff.
--:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)---
ALL WET DEPARTMENT
------------------
Despite the fame of it's soggy transportation system, Venice
is not the European city with the most canals. Birmingham,
England has the most. And if you guessed that, you either live
there or are a winning contestant on "Jeopardy."
--:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)---
JUST A GAME...
-----------
The big tourist attraction in Cooperstown, New York is the
Baseball Hall of Fame. The museum was founded there because
Cooperstown was the home town of "The inventor of the game of
baseball, Abner Doubleday." Now, Doubleday was an amazing
character: he was a West Point graduate, Civil War general, and
successful writer who spoke at least four languages fluently.
Among other ventures, he was the first to obtain a charter to
build a cable car system in San Francisco. No wonder the group
of writers and businessman assembled in the early 1900's by
sports millionaire A. G. Spalding were attracted to the idea that
such an all-round hero invented America's national pastime in
1839. Spalding just hated the idea that baseball was just a
variant of an old British game called "rounders." The notion
that Doubleday had anything at all to do with baseball was based
on second hand information in a single letter written by a
dubious source. In fact, Doubleday wasn't even in Cooperstown in
1839 - he was in the army at the end of the war with Mexico. In
fact, there's no good evidence that Abner ever even SAW a game of
baseball, let alone invented the game.
--:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)---
HONEST INJUN...
------------
By this time most of you have seen the Disney movie where
brave Pocahontas saves Capt. John Smith's life, right? It was a
nicely made movie, but had nothing to do with the real story.
For one thing, Pocahontas wouldn't have been that old when Smith
& Co. got off the boat in 1608. Best guess is the she was about
12, which makes you wonder why Capt. Smith was fooling around
with little girls. Further, it's very likely that she didn't
save his life - Smith never mentioned her at all until 1624. By
then, Pocahontas had married a colonist named John Rolfe and he
had brought her back to England, where she became quite a
celebrity. Suspicion is that Smith was just trying to share in
some of her fame to make himself look better. John Smith
certainly wasn't above spicing up a story to make himself look
heroic - he claimed that no less than three different women saved
his life at different times. With the way he could tell a story,
it's a miracle he became a military man instead of a politician.
And the lady in question wasn't even named Pocahontas. Her
real name was Matoaka. Pocahontas ("Playful one") was just her
father's pet name for her. Since her father, Chief Powhatan, had
about one hundred wives and over thirty children, it's not
surprising that he had trouble getting his kid's names right.
--:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)---
WALL TO WALL...
------------
It's been repeated so many times that the story has taken on
a life of it's own - that the Great Wall of China is the only
man-made object that can be seen from the Moon. One problem with
this is the assumption that there really is a "Great Wall of
China." For all of it's fame as a tourist attraction, the
surviving sections of the "Great Wall" are relatively short -
only a few miles long. Only the restored sections are
recognizable as a structure of any kind, with most of the rest
having the appearance of a long, low mound of earth.
But even if the wall was completely rebuilt, it still
couldn't be seen from the moon. As seen from the Moon, the Earth
would appear to be about the same size as a compact disk held 12
feet (3.5 meters) away. On this scale, the Great Wall you
couldn't the Great Wall would be like a microscopic scratch.
Humbling, isn't it?
--:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)---
JEWELRY DEPARTMENT...
------------------
Diamonds may be a girl's best friend, but they aren't the
world's most valuable gems. Not that you can find them laying
around on any roadside, but diamonds are far more common than
other common jewelry stones such as rubies. A good ruby may be
four times more valuable than a white diamond of the same size.
Diamond prices are kept higher than they should be through the
monopoly efforts of DeBeers Consolidated Mines, which controls
three-quarters of the market. Think about it - you've never seen
a national ad campaign for rubies or sapphires, right?
Now that we've dulled the gems, we'll move to settings.
Most people believe that 24 Karat gold is one hundred per cent
pure. Though it's the highest gold content found in jewelry, it
still contains a small amount of copper. Pure gold is so soft
that it would wear away just rubbing on clothing.
--:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)---
YE OLD MISTAKE...
--------------
Everyone has seen those quaint old signs that use the cute
"Ye Olde ... Shoppe." Surprisingly enough, the "Ye" part is
accurate, it's just that we modern folks don't know how to
pronounce it. Roman letters came to ancient England along with
Julius Caesar and a boatload of invading Romans. And we've been
stuck with them ever since. The alphabet, I mean, not the
Romans. One of the problems in adapting the alphabet to local
use was that the "th" sound common in many English words doesn't
exist in Latin. Not as a single letter, anyway. The ancient
Brits got around this by continuing to use the Norse alphabet
symbol (called a rune) "thorn" when writing a "th" sound. And
that went fine up until the introduction of printing. The Latin
letter that looked most like "thorn" was "y," which explains why
"the" became "ye." It still should have been pronounced as "th."
And it was, until enough generations had gone by to forget that
it wasn't really a Y. Just another example of how to 'rune' the
English language.
--:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)---
ABE LINCOLN, LOBBYIST
---------------------
The most amazing thing about Abraham Lincoln is the crazy
things about him that really are true: he was born in a log
cabin, he did have a good sense of humor and he did grow his
famous beard in response to a fan letter from a 13-year-old girl.
And he was an exceptionally brave and honorable leader at a time
when the country needed one. Those of you who hate lawyers
aren't going to like this, but most of Lincoln's practice was in
corporate law and political lobbying, with the Illinois Central
Railroad as one of his biggest clients. In reality, Lincoln was
successful, ambitious and politically connected. He may have
started poor, but he didn't stay that way. Within a few years of
starting his practice in Springfield, Lincoln was earning between
$1,200 and $1,500 a year - more than the governor of Illinois
earned at the time.
--:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)---
SOMETHING'S A LITTLE FISHY...
--------------------------
Though they are much less popular than years ago, you can
still find canned sardines in most any store. The only odd thing
about that is that there is no fish called a "sardine." Canned
sardines are mostly immature pilchard or herring. The sardine
name just sounds better for marketing. This seems to happen to
fish a lot. Tuna wasn't the original name for that popular fish,
either. Until they changed the original name -- "horse mackerel"
-- they couldn't give the stuff away.
--:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)---
KNIGHT AFTER KNIGHT...
-------------------
Nearly every middle ages movie involving knights has a scene
to show that armor weighs a ton and a fallen knight is as
helpless as an upside down turtle. That just doesn't make sense.
A fighting man that vulnerable wouldn't last long on any
battlefield, ancient or modern. Medieval armor was ingeniously
constructed to be flexible and was very well-balanced, if a
little on the hot and scratchy side. Bathroom trips without
causing rust must have been a problem, too. But the suits were
amazingly well designed for mobility on the battlefield - in a
recent demonstration, an assistant to Britain's Royal Armourer
proved this by easily doing a cartwheel while wearing a full suit
of 12th century plate armor.
A full kit of 11th or 12th century armor weighs in at about
75 pounds (34 kg). By coincidence, that's nearly the same weight
that our modern, high-tech warriors carried into battle in the
Gulf War. And they had to do it without horses.
--:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)---
PROMONTORY POINTLESS
--------------------
Nearly every America history book features an article on the
completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 with the
driving of the Golden Spike at Promontory Point, Utah. Usually
accompanied by a photo of the magnificent oil painting by Thomas
Hill showing the crowd of gentlemen in swallow-tail coats and
finely dressed ladies. Fortunately for us, a photographer named
Col. Charles Savage was present to record the scene. The real
ceremony was about what you'd expect in a construction camp
hundreds of miles out in the wilderness in 1869. The photo shows
that the crowd consisted mostly of railroad workers in dirty work
clothes. Several carry liquor bottles and more than a few appear
to be very drunk. The few women in the photo wear more makeup
than was considered acceptable at the time and rather gaudy
clothes - most historians believe that they were camp
prostitutes.
In any case, the ceremony uniting East and West didn't take
place at Promontory Point. It took place at Promontory Summit,
24 miles (38 km) to the north and over 700 feet (215 meters)
higher in elevation. Somehow, the reporters on the scene got the
location wrong when wiring stories back to their editors. Maybe
they were drunk, too.
--:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)---
BLIND AS A ... ?
----------
Oh, come on - you were going to say blind as a bat, right?
Except that bats aren't blind. Many of the species have better
eyesight than humans, especially in low light. The idea that
bats are visually challenged comes from the ancient Greeks, who
were at a loss to explain why the bats fly around in such a
confused manner. The Greeks never quite figured out that the
bats were chasing insects, so they logically assumed that the
bats were flitting about blindly. Just shows that you can't
figure everything out using only logic.
--:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)---
DO YOU CARROT, ALL?
------------------
Most people believe that eating carrots is good for the
eyes. While it certainly does no harm, it doesn't help much,
either. The carrot story is just a leftover bit of wartime
propaganda that was far more successful than it should have been.
You knew there was a story in this or we wouldn't have brought it
up, right?
In England during the Battle of Britain, the vastly
outnumbered British fighters were shooting down far more German
bombers than they should have, because of the British secret
weapon. The British had set up the first successful "radar net"
that coordinated all of the their fighter planes, making the
Brits deadly efficient. After a time, someone on the British
side got nervous, since the Germans also had radar technology.
If the Nazis figured out how the net operated, they might be able
to use the same idea against the British.
To throw the Germans off, the Brits did something clever.
Knowing that the Germans had been the big brains in vitamin
research over the years, the English put out a story that they
were feeding extra carrots to the fighter pilots to improve their
night vision. Like all really good lies, this was just within
the realm of possibility, since a shortage of Vitamin A can cause
certain kinds of night-blindness. The trick was so successful
that folks still believe the lie half a century after the end of
the war.
Of course, there are still folks who believe the Adolph's
"real" name was Shicklgruber, but that is another story for
another time...
--:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)-----:-)--
© 1999 by Bill Becwar. All Rights Reserved.
![[ BACK]](btn_rwdr.gif){kind=small}
![[NEXT]](btn_fwdr.gif){kind=small}