Q. The grisly-looking guillotine doesn't seem like a humane mode of execution. You might be surprised at who thought it was.
A. Not Nobel Prize-winning author Albert Camus, whose 1959 "Reflections on the Guillotine" publicized medical studies showing that signs of life continued in the head and body for "minutes, even hours." But French Revolutionary physician-lawmaker Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (1738-1814) had himself helped win approval to replace the noose and the broadax with an efficient decapitation machine that seemed to reduce cruelty in capital punishment, says Mark Davidson in "Right, Wrong, and Risky: A Dictionary of Today's American English Usage."
Thus did the good doctor's name become associated with the infamous Revolutionary slaughter of thousands, even though the machine was by an unknown inventor and Guillotin had spent much of his later life trying to correct the false impression about himself. In fact the French version had been called the "louisette" for its 1792 debut, constructed under the direction of surgeon Antoine Louis. "But thanks in part to local songwriters who liked to rhyme Guillotin with machine, the louisette became `la guillotine.'"
Q. If there were truly a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow, would we all get rich?
A. Frustrated is more like it. For while you may see the end of a rainbow, you can never visit it, says Craig Bohren in "Clouds in a Glass of Beer: Simple Experiments in Atmospheric Physics." When you see a rainbow, you're at its center. When you move, the rainbow moves. You can no more get to its end than you can get to your image in a mirror.
So forget the fortune but if you want a little fame, photograph a complete rainbow. Most rainbows people see are semicircles whose bottom is blocked off by the Earth below. Full rainbow circles of 360 degrees are rarely observed. "To photograph one, you'll need an airplane, better yet a helicopter because your view must be unobstructed, and a wide-angle lens on your camera. You'll need to persuade your pilot to fly in stormy weather. If you survive your flight, you'll have acquired something rare indeed."
Q. With only a handful of thumb tacks and a box of matches, devise a way to mount a short inch-thick candle on a bulletin board. Hint: Beware boxed-in thinking.
A. Solving this requires realizing that a box need not always serve as a container, says David G. Myers in "Psychology." Just empty the matchbox, tack it up on the board, and drip-stick the candle onto a horizontal surface.
Another classic: Try to connect nine dots in a 3-by-3 array, using four straight lines and no re-tracings or picking up your pencil. Can't do it until you see to go outside the "box," then it's easy.
Rather more fanciful flex-thinking let 60s celluloid hero James Bond, armed with only a ballpoint pen filled with poisonous ink, escape a small island surrounded by alligators, in the movie "Live and Let Die," says Erick Lauber on his "Cognitive Psychology Tutor" Web site. "With death imminent, Bond notices that five alligators have lined themselves in a row stretching from the island to the mainland. Rather than try to outswim the beasts or kill them with his pen, he runs to the safety of the shore by stepping on the tops of the alligators' heads."
Some steppingstones!
Q. Umpire's baseball fan-aticism gets the best of him, so he decides to aid his beloved Yankees in a way more subtle than shading calls on balls and strikes. For his pinstripers, it'll be the Oven Treatment; for the opposition Cleveland Indians, the Freezer Treatment. What's he up to?
A. Having read "The Physics of Baseball" by Yale's Robert K. Adair, this man in blue knows that a baseball put in the oven at about 175 degrees F. for a day then sitting at room temperature for an hour for camouflage will bounce livelier by about 13 percent, whereas a ball kept in a deep freeze at -10 degrees F goes dead by 10 percent.
"This translates to a change in distance of a fly ball hit 375 feet with a normal ball to about 350 feet for cold balls and over 400 feet for the hot balls," says Adair.
Now if this partisan ump can just figure a way to smuggle the doctored balls into the game, in timely temperature fashion, and to avoid getting them confused before passing them on to the respective pitchers...
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