Miscellaneous articles — scepticscribe

A silly slogan

A conversation with a river red gum tree on “saving the planet”

When for a few days, I heard a soft whimpering voice from the sky as I walked on a lonely track along a creek, I worried that I was suffering from psychosis.

The creek once was part of the walking track followed by the Australian Aboriginal Boon Wurrung people for many thousands of years. As I walk, I see a tattered and faded Aboriginal flag flying on a flagpole in a little park. A yellow circle in the centre of a rectangle divided in half horizontally, the upper half black and the lower ochre red reminding anyone who cared to find out about an ancient culture’s spiritual connection to the land and the sun — the planet and the cosmos. Are the ancient spirits sending me a message?

One day the voice was louder, “Hey mate, I’m talking to you.” I looked around and saw nothing. “Look up, mate.” The only thing I could see was the high canopy of a huge river red gum tree, a common eucalyptus species in these parts. Oh, the tree was talking to me, I realized. “What can I do for you?” I said, struggling to find the right word to address this old, majestic tree; “mate” seemed so ordinary and disrespectful.

“Could you please remove this plastic banner some idiot has wrapped around my trunk?” the tree asked gasping. “It’s killing me.”

I removed the banner and looked up. “From here I can’t read the writing on the banner,” the tree said. “What does it say?”

“Save the planet.”

“Is the planet dying?” the tree asked anxiously.

“Not really. The planet has been around for 4.5 billion years and still be here for another 4.5 billion years even if its atmosphere heats up by hundreds or even thousands of degrees. A big, rogue asteroid may disturb its orbit a bit if it hits it hard. That’s all.”

“Why then this silly slogan?” the tree exclaimed. “You should be shouting, save our species. Better still, save us from our silliness. Your stupid species is indiscriminately destroying the land and water with imperishable plastic and choking the air with noxious carbon. How could you save yourself from your excesses when you print a silly slogan on a plastic banner and leave it around to kill other species?”

My human mind had no answer. I nodded to show my concern.

The tree seemed genuinely angry. It continued, “I have been here for more than 200 years, and I’ve noticed the air becoming warmer. Too much carbon dioxide for us trees to breathe in and not many of us to breathe out oxygen.”

“Well, the level of carbon dioxide is going up every year. Now there are 415 molecules of carbon dioxide molecules in every million molecules in the air. It was 400 in 2013.”

“I don’t care about these numbers, but I do care about the numbers of our species of river red gum trees decreasing dramatically. I give a damn about your species. As you say, mate, the planet, though it’s atmosphere a little bit warmer, will still be here for another 4.5 billion years. I’m sure once your self-indulgent and self-destructing species have disappeared forever the planet will look forward to hosting a truly intelligent life that respects its own kind and the other kinds and its environment.”

Lost for words, I took a sip of water from my reusable water bottle.

“What’s that green sticker on the bottle?” the tree asked. “It looks like a eucalyptus leaf.”

“It says, save 2000 plastic bottles by using this reusable bottle and save the planet.”

I heard a loud laugh and then the tree saying, “Silly slogans and symbols won’t save human beings; a little respect for the environment and the other species may. Where are the blackfellas who had a spiritual connection with the land around this creek?”

A message from space

The Mystery of the “Wow” Signal

It came from outer space and only lasted 72 seconds. On the computer printout, it simply appeared as 6EQUJ5 – a code that revealed it was a strong, intermittent radio signal confined to a narrow band of frequency. It was so unusual that it caused an excited astronomer to scrawl ‘Wow!’ in the margin of the printout, a label that is inextricably linked to it.

What was it? A message from an alien intelligence? A momentary hiccup from a cosmic event, or a polluting burp from a terrestrial transmission? Three decades on no one knows what really created the signal, and the debate continues.

The Big Ear radio telescope at the then Ohio State University Radio Observatory had been involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence since 1973. On the night of 15 August 1977, its 79-metre dish was tuned to 1420 megahertz, the frequency of hydrogen atoms.

The interstellar space is filled with hydrogen atoms, at a density of about one atom per cubic centimetre. The individual atoms chirp at a frequency of 1420 megahertz, like a miniature radio station. The chorus of these countless atoms can easily be heard by any radio telescope. As hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, many people believe that aliens might choose this frequency to broadcast their presence to us. Even if the aliens do not use this frequency, they are likely to send a narrowband signal, which has a precise frequency and a longer range. A broadband signal, on the other hand, is like a noise that covers a wide range of frequencies. Stars and many other cosmic objects emit broadband noise. Radio stations broadcast narrowband signals, but the hiss between stations is broadband noise. The terrestrial intelligence advises that an alien intelligence would not want their message to be mistaken as ordinary star noise.

For this reason, the Big Ear had been converted from measuring the location and strength of wideband signals to narrowband signals. In a radio telescope signals received from a large area are focused by the dish to a receiver that amplifies the fluctuating voltages of the signals. You can’t just plug in your headphones into the receiver and listen to the chatter, natural or alien-made. Even if you could, all you would hear is a hissing sound. The Big Ear used a computer to record the signals. The floor-standing desk size IBM 1130 used by the observatory was equipped with 16 kilobytes of RAM and a megabyte of storage on a magnetic disc. This stone-age storage capacity meant that the daily observations had to be printed out and examined by volunteers as the observatory did not have any funding for the program.

Jerry Ehman, a professor at Ohio State University, took responsibility for this task. A few days after 15 August, he began his routine review of the printouts, not expecting to find anything unusual. As he worked his way through the reams of paper for the night of 15 August, he was astonished to see the string of numbers and characters 6EQUJ5 on the printout. It represented a burst of radio waves, like a thunderclap in the middle of a piece of quiet music. Ehman immediately recognised it as a narrowband signal confined to a frequency of around 1420 megahertz. Without thinking he wrote ‘Wow!’ and circled the string 6EQUJ5 on the printout. ‘It was the most significant thing we had seen,’ recalls Ehman. A month after the discovery, he and his colleagues looked for the signal again at least fifty times but found nothing.

Each character of the alphanumeric code used by the observatory’s computer represented the strength of a received signal over 12 seconds. The code 6EQUJ5 revealed that the Wow signal rose and fell over the course of 72 seconds:

6 6

E 14

Q 26

U 30

J 19

5 5

(The numerals in the right-hand column show approximate signal-to-noise ratios; that is, how many times the signal is stronger than the background noise. For example, the strongest signal received, U, was about 30 times stronger than the background noise. Most of the background noise is generated within the receiver itself; some noise comes from buildings, trees, grass and other surroundings, and the celestial sky.)

The fact that the signal rose and fell over the course of 72 seconds is intriguing. The Big Ear was a fixed telescope (it was demolished in 1998) allowing the Earth’s daily spin to pick up cosmic signals from a tiny angular section of the heavens. The string 6EQUJ5 shows that as the radio source passed by its intensity rose as the Earth’s spin brought it within the telescope’s range, reached a peak in the centre, and then faded away. For the Big Ear, this rise and fall should last 72 seconds, and that’s what happened. If the signal were from a terrestrial source, it would suddenly flood the telescope and then switch off after some time.

Under certain conditions, a terrestrial signal reflected off a piece of space debris could appear as if it were coming from a point source like the Wow signal. ‘I now place a low probability on this alternative,’ says Ehman. A terrestrial signal also scores low probability for another reason: radio transmissions in the frequency band around 1420 megahertz are prohibited by international agreement.

Did the Wow signal include a message? The signal was unmodulated. Unlike modulated AM or FM radio signals (in which characteristics of the signals are changed or modulated to include data), it was a blast of radio noise. However, it is still possible that there could be modulation at frequencies that were not within the range of the range of the observatory’s detection equipment. ‘We would not have seen that modulation, and hence we could say that modulation is within the realm of possibility,’ remarks Ehman.

Ehman and his colleagues also looked at other possible sources of the signal:

Planets: None of the planets was close to the signal source position. Planets do generate some radio waves, but they have much broader frequencies.

Asteroids: Asteroids are essentially small planets. None of the larger asteroids was in the vicinity.

Satellites: An investigation of the orbits of all known satellites showed that none was within the telescope’s range. Satellites do not use the protected frequency band of 1420 megahertz.

Aircraft: Aircraft also do not transmit in the protected band. An aircraft will also show a significant motion with respect to the stars, which would cause the pattern of signal to be very different from that expected from a point source.

Spacecraft: Spacecraft are also prohibited from transmitting in the protected band; none was within the telescope’s range.

Interstellar scintillation: We see the stars twinkling because their light is scattered unevenly by the Earth’s atmosphere. Similarly, when light and radio waves travel through interstellar space, they also ‘twinkle’. It is possible that a radio signal could become stronger as it passes through interstellar space. If it did occur to the Wow signal, it still points to a signal coming from a source many light years away from us. ‘This gives more support for the hypothesis of a signal of an extraterrestrial origin,’ says Ehman.

Gravitational lensing: Gravity can bend light and radio waves. Did the gravity of an intervening star focus a much weaker signal into the stronger Wow signal? Ehman rules out this explanation on the ground that gravitational lensing usually lasts many days or months depending on the motion of the source.

So, the evidence stacks up in favour of an alien source. Not quite. The Big Ear used two funnel-shaped metal structures called horns, situated side by side, to collect radio waves focused by the dish. The path of the radio waves collected by a horn is called a beam. As Earth rotates any cosmic radio source would be seen first in beam one (for 72 seconds) and then – about 3 minutes later – in beam two (also 72 seconds). Ehman’s computer printout showed it only on one beam, instead of the two beams expected. The computer was not programmed to identify whether the signal came from the first or the second beam. ‘Suspicious and disheartening,’ remarks Seth Shostak of SETI Institute (SETI stands for search for extraterrestrial intelligence).

Perhaps the aliens turned off their transmitter after 3 minutes and went on holiday. Was the signal a wish-you-were-here-postcard? We just don’t know. Unlike alien astronomers, terrestrial astronomers are workaholics. From observatories around the world, they have performed more than 100 searches of the same region of the sky. No report yet of an astronomer running naked through the street, shouting “Wow! Wow!”.

Robert Gray, an independent SETI researcher from Chicago, has been trying to solve the riddle of the Wow signal for more than a decade. In 2001, using a radio telescope 100 times more sensitive than the Big Ear, he looked for a radio source – artificial or natural – at the position that Wow came from but found nothing. In a recent survey, Simon Ellingsen of the University of Tasmania, looked at the possibility of a periodic source to explain the single-beam detection of the Wow signal. Pulsars, stars that emit rapid pulses of radio waves, are familiar examples of cosmic periodic sources of radio waves. Using a 26-metre radio telescope, Gray and Ellingsen made six 14-hour observations of the Wow spot in the sky. Their conclusion: ‘No signal resembling the Ohio State Wow was detected.’

Calculations show that the Wow signal came from the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius; the nearest star in the constellation is 220 light years away. If someone were sending a message from such a faraway star, they would need a large 300-metre dish and a gigantic 2.2-gigahertz transmitter. ‘That’s daunting, but not altogether impossible,’ assures Paul Shuch, an American SETI enthusiast. Even if we believe Shuch, the message might not have been meant for us. It might have been a message from an alien civilisation to another alien civilisation. Did the Big Ear inadvertently eavesdrop on an interstellar phone conversation?

Ehman believes that even if the Wow signal were an alien signal, they would do it far more than once: “We should have seen again when we looked for it fifty times.” Shostak agrees: “So until and unless the cosmic beep measured in Ohio is found again, the Wow signal will remain What signal.”

A section of the computer printout (below)
showing Jerry Ehman’s “Wow!” and the circling of 6EQUJ5 (Image: Jerry Ehman, North American Astrophysical Observatory, the continuing organisation of the Big Ear Radio Observatory).

Satire

Confession of a “gun-adept” teacher

My name is Krystal, and I’m a brand-new and enthusiastic elementary school teacher. My uncle Chuck, who is a great fan of Australian rhyming slang (he calls his wife “trouble and strife”), started calling me “pistol.” That name has stuck. Even the kids in my school sometimes call me Miss Pistol.

When our Dear Leader declared that “gun-free” schools are not safe for students and teachers (and helicopter parents who hover around their kids), our principal immediately called a staff meeting and asked for volunteers to be trained to become “gun-adept” teachers. I was the only one to raise my hand. “Chickens,” I muttered as I waved my hand fiercely.

In our small town, there is only one “tactical training academy,” and I enrolled in a two-day tactical pistol course. All expenses were paid by the school and two days away from screaming, little bastards. Every teacher’s dream school is a school without kids.

The tactical training academy, in reality, a euphuism for a crappy shooting range, is run by Uncle Chuck. Mr Chuck Gunn is a victim of some dangerous affliction. It’s called nominative determinism, and people suffering from it are inexorably drawn to their profession by their name. Whether they are suited to their chosen profession is a question no one has bothered to research and answer.

No worries, Uncle Chuck is an NRA Certified Instructor, and I was in safe hands to master how to

effectively engage multiple targets at distances from seven to 100 yards. A desirable “distance and multiple-targets” training for a school teacher — is when a group of gunslingers appears right at the classroom door or at the end of the long hallway. One has to be prepared for the future when school shootings aren’t acts of deranged individuals but maybe social-media collaborative acts of many wackos.

My two training days overlapped the visit of a bus-load of Japanese tourists fascinated by teachers learning the use of firearms to save their students. Smooth-talking Uncle Chuck made them believe that everyone at his academy on that day was apparently a schoolteacher. Were the Japanese visitors wondering: why is their great country missing out on this unique phenomenon – shooting of innocent kids or gun-wielding teachers? I don’t know.

Uncle Chuck became busy with them and left me to my own devices. I found the pistols too tiny and settled for a respectable AR-15 rifle. Uncle Chuck gave me a quick lesson in loading the magazine and pointed me toward the firing range.

After two days of self-training, I was a Certified Gun-Adept Teacher. I borrowed a pistol and holster from my uncle (and stuffed one of his A-15 rifles in my gym bag without telling him). The next day, the pistol holster around my waist was to assure everyone that the school was now safe as a gun-adept teacher staffed it. As I didn’t know how to use the pistol effectively, I also carried AR-15 in a guitar box and left it in the corner of my Grade 1 classroom, just in case.

I have a vague memory of what happened that afternoon. I heard a few “gunshots”, quickly took out AR-15, loaded it and walked into the hallway. The noise came from a classroom at the far end, and the school’s only armed guard was quickly walking out of the hallway. “Coward,” I shouted and started shooting at the classroom windows … (they told me that the noise was from a Grade 6 classroom where the teacher was showing some science experiment involving helium balloons).

Our body characteristics

Seductive signals

What makes you attractive to others? These laws of magnetism (of a personal kind) have the answer.

What makes a face attractive to you? You are most likely to agree with the research finding that men and women throughout the world prefer a face with symmetrical features. We find symmetric faces, like nose and mouth precisely at an equal distance between eyes, more attractive because they reflect ‘good genes’.

Yet, as the old saying goes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A study by Laura Germine of Harvard University and her colleagues reveals that 50 per cent of people’s preferences for faces is unique to them, even among twins: ‘This fits with the common intuition that on the one hand, fashion models can make a fortune with their good looks, while on the other hand, friends can endlessly debate who is attractive and who is not.’

Instead of focusing primarily on universal features of attraction such as symmetry, the researchers wanted to know more about where those disagreements over facial attractiveness come from. Their study shows surprisingly that an individual’s face preference is mostly based on experience, not genes. Those experiences are truly unique to each individual; they are not even shared by those who grew up in the same family.

A face that is attractive to you is the result of the faces you have seen before: in the media; your friends and colleagues; or perhaps even the face of your first boyfriend or girlfriend. You are also likely to fall for a face with positive information such as a good friend’s physical characteristics.

If it’s not in your genes or upbringing, what makes you attractive to others? Here’re a few more new laws of attraction. The well-known law ‘opposites attract’ still holds true.

Add a touch of ‘breathiness’ to your voice

When you are physically attracted to someone, you would think it’s a random, subconscious choice. Science doesn’t agree: our subconscious choices are not random; they are based on some relevant biological traits. For example, women are typically attracted to distinctively masculine facial features because they indicate high testosterone levels and physical strength. Men’s preference for women with exaggerated youthful features such as large eyes and full lips gives them an evolutionary advantage when coupling with mates that seem younger.

Like face, voice is also a sexual characteristic. It also affects how we perceive someone attractive. Women like men with low-pitched deep voices; they become most attractive when these voices are softened by a touch of breathiness. Men prefer women with breathy, moderately high-pitched voices. It’s all about the body size the voices signal, say researchers from University College London, led by Yi Xu. A deep male voice signals a large body size; a high female voice conveys that the speaker has a small body.

Xu’s team worked this out after playing recordings of digitally manipulated voices to male and female students, all native speakers of English. But they were puzzled by female participants’ slightly nuanced choice of a touch of ‘breathiness’ in deep male voices. Their hypothesis suggests that breathiness presumably neutralises the aggressiveness associated with the large body projected by a low-pitched deep voice. A poll of the participants also showed that the breathy deep male voices sounded much happier and less angry than the male voices that were less breathy.

Again, men’s preference for smaller women and women’s preference for larger men can be explained in evolutionary terms: males benefit by mating with smaller females, and females by mating with larger but less aggressive males. This is the strategy widely used by animals to guarantee success in survival and reproduction. That’s why birds and other mammals advertise their physical attractiveness via the sound of their mating calls. These mating calls also project their body size.

Adding a touch of breathiness to your voice doesn’t seem like a bad idea, after all.

Women with small feet have prettier faces

At least, that’s what Jeremy Atkinson and Michelle Rowe, evolutionary psychologists at the University of Albany in New York, say. They measured the hand length, foot length, thigh length and hip width of 60 white female college students and adjusted each measurement to account for individual differences in overall height. They then separately combined the faces of eight women with the shortest feet and eight women with the longest feet in two composite faces or morphs. They then asked 77 heterosexual male students to rate these morphs according to attractiveness. The men were three-and-a-half times more likely to pick the short-footed morph as being more attractive. They were also 11 times more likely to pick the narrow-hipped morph as more attractive, and eight times as likely to choose the long-thighed morph. All this from just looking at a photograph.

Atkinson and Rowe believe that millenniums of evolutionary adaptation have given men the subconscious ability to judge features of women that are markers of a healthy childhood. Stress and poor nutrition during foetal development and puberty can cause hormonal imbalances, leaving such women relatively short and stout. A stress-free and well-fed childhood, on the other hand, allows growth for longer resulting in a slender, more stereotypically feminine face and body.

Worried? Slip on a pair of stilettos. Fashion experts say high heels give the illusion of smaller feet.

Sniff his sweaty shirt

If you’re looking for Mr Right, several studies have discovered that by sniffing sweaty shirts worn by men overnight, women can tell whether they find men wearing them attractive or not. The key is a set of genes known as MHC genes, which fight disease. We are more attracted to the odours of those whose MHC genes are different from our own. This makes sense since children of parents with differing MHC genes would have more diverse disease-fighting genes.

A team of Dutch scientists led by Gün Semin of Utrecht University have discovered that women can tell by sniffing sweaty shirts whether the men wearing them had been fearful or happy. These emotions were induced by videos they were watching.

We produce chemical compounds, or chemosignals when we are happy or fearful which are detectable by others who smell our sweat. Chemosignalling has been shown to convey fear and disgust, but Dutch scientists are the first to show that we can convey happiness through smell. ‘This suggests that somebody who is happy will infuse others in their vicinity with happiness. In a way, happiness sweat is somewhat like smiling — it is infectious,’ says Semin.

Smile while you are exercising and your smile and the smell of your sweat will make everyone around you doubly happy.

It’s not only about the waist-hip ratio

Women with waist-hip ratios of about 0.7 are most attractive is the popular notion. Misha Donohoe of the University of New South Wales in Sydney and her colleagues say that this notion is only true if the rest of the body is average. They asked 100 men to judge the attractiveness of 200 line drawings of female torsos with different hip, waist and shoulder measurements. The men showed a strong preference for women of average-sized hips, waist and shoulder measurements.

Interestingly, four groups of real women — Playboy centrefolds, 1920s models, 1990s models and contemporary Australian escorts — didn’t match the preferred body shape. The fifth group that best represented the average Australian women between the ages of 25 and 44 most closely matched the preferred body shape.

The average can be the winner when it comes to body shape.

It’s all in your fingers

The ratio of the lengths of your index and ring fingers says a lot about you.

Take a ruler, stretch your right-hand palm up and measure the length of index and ring fingers, starting from the crease nearest your palm to the tip of the finger. Or, you can take measurements from a photocopy of the hand. Now divide the length of your index finger, called the second digit or 2D, by the length of your ring finger (fourth digit, 4D). The result is known as second-to-fourth-digit-length ratio (2D:4D), or simply the finger ratio. In most people, both hands have slightly different finger ratios. The ratio is higher in females than males: the average for women is 1 or above 1 and for men less than 1.

In the early stages of pregnancy, the womb is washed over by sex hormones oestrogen and testosterone. If you were exposed to more oestrogen than testosterone in the womb, the index finger will be longer than the ring finger (high ratio). If you were exposed to more testosterone the ring finger will be longer than the index finger (low ratio). Although oestrogen and testosterone are present in both sexes, oestrogen is a female sex hormone and testosterone is a male sex hormone.

Simply put, a relatively long ring finger is ‘masculine’ as it shows more exposure to testosterone in the womb. A relatively large index finger is ‘feminine’.

Our early exposure to oestrogen and testosterone affects how our body develops. There is growing evidence that it may affect predisposition in later life to disease and sexual orientation — and even our behaviour and personality.

A measure of attractiveness

Compared with men whose ring fingers are shorter than their index fingers, men who have longer ring fingers are likely to have more attractive faces. Finger ratio is a good predictor of facial attractiveness in men because physical features such as face symmetry are closely linked to foetal levels of testosterone, according to a research team led by Camille Ferdenzi of the University of Geneva. But voice and body odour, others traits of male qualities, are not linked to finger ratio. These traits are believed to be directly controlled by circulating testosterone later in life history.

It’s also about your personality

Relatively short index fingers are associated with an extroverted personality and willingness to take risks. Both men and women with shorter index fingers, that is a low finger ratio, tend to be assertive. According to American anthropologist Helen Fisher, if you have a longer index finger, ‘you have good verbal skills, can find the right word rapidly, are good at remembering, better at compassion, nurturing, patience, have good people skills.’ If you have a longer ring finger, ‘you tend to have poorer social skills but be direct, decisive, ambitions, competitive’.

Successful financial traders are not aggressive risk-takers. They are usually very calm and don’t lose their temper. Research has linked these qualities to traders’ finger ratio, a marker of prenatal testosterone exposure. After studying the finger ratio of male traders in the City of London, John Coates of the University of Cambridge and his colleagues have found that traders with longer ring fingers, and therefore higher pre-natal testosterone, made on average six times more profit than traders with shorter ring fingers. They also tended to remain traders for longer.

If you are thinking of applying for a trading job in the financial market, you would still need a detailed CV, not simply a photocopy of your hand.

A delicate matter of length

Korean researchers have stretched the ‘power of prediction’ of finger ratio a bit too far by linking it to penis length. They have found that men with a lower ratio tended to have a longer penile length. Their result is based on the study of right hands of 144 men 20 or older who were hospitalised for urological surgery. Their results: the average flaccid and stretched penile lengths were 7.7 cm (3 in) and 11.7 cm (4.6 in) respectively, while the average finger ratio was 0.97.

Don’t rush to generalise these results. The Korean study, led by Ho Choi, was conducted on a single ethnic group of men, and the finger ratio has been shown to vary among ethnic groups.

Other studies have suggested that men with a lower finger ratios have more children. We are not saying that it’s correlated with their (supposedly) longer penises.

And the serious issue of cancer

The Korean study led to silly headlines in the popular media such as ‘Sexy ratio: Your hands give away your hotness’. Forget the ‘sexiness’ of the ratio and look at two reports in the British Journal of Cancer. The first report says that scientists have discovered a substantial link between prostate cancer and finger ratio: men with higher ratios run a significantly higher risk of prostate cancer.

The second report says that the difference in finger ratio of a woman’s right hand compared with the left hand may indicate whether she has a higher risk of breast cancer. Women with a greater difference between the finger ratio of their right and left hand, which is an indicator of foetal levels of testosterone, were at a slightly lower risk of breast cancer. The researchers didn’t find any association between finger ratios of one hand and breast cancer risk.

Finger ratio is simply an indicator of hormone exposure; it’s not a replacement for screening tools for breast or prostate cancer.

Don’t jump to a conclusion

Gay men seem to have significantly higher finger ratios than heterosexual men and gay women have a low ratio. This indicator is not strong enough to allow you to jump to a conclusion about someone’s sexual orientation by just looking at their fingers.

Casanova would have passed the ‘marshmallow test’

The number of studies on finger ratio — 2D:4D in researchers’ jargon — runs into hundreds. Among other things, they reveal that men whose index fingers are longer are prone to schizophrenia and early heart diseases. But they are less likely to be autistic or have ADHD.

Men whose left hands weren’t exactly mirrored images of their right hands (meaning their left and right hands have different finger ratios) are more likely to have low sperm counts — and the sperm they do have often can’t swim. This news comes from John Manning, the author of The Finger Book.

The most interesting of 2D:4D studies is the one that was inspired by the famous Stanford University ‘Oreo cookie’ experiment that in 1972 measured preschooler’s ability to delay gratification. The experiment has been replicated may times using other rewards, including marshmallows. In the latest version of the experiment, 141 Brazilian children, ages 4 to 6, at six kindergartens took part.

The teacher gave one candy to each child at the beginning of the class and told them that they could eat it anytime during the class. Additionally, the teacher also explained that, if they resisted the temptation of the first candy and waited for further instructions, they would be given another candy as a reward. After 20 minutes, the teacher offered a second candy to those children who had resisted the temptation to eat the first candy. The result of the study — led by Sergio Da Silva of the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil —showed that children with a lower finger ratio failed to delay gratification (a delay in eating candy to receive more candy) more often than those with a higher finger ratio.

Look at your fingers and see how long you could resist the temptation of eating that chocolate doughnut.

And for trivia fans, Casanova believed that the ring finger is relatively longer than the index finger for both men and women. Those with a longer ring finger have a low ‘masculine’ finger ratio of less than 1. This is called the ‘Casanova pattern’. Casanova’s longer ring finger indicates he had a charming face — and self-control. As a young boy, he would have, for sure, resisted the temptation of eating the ‘marshmallow’.

Crossing your fingers may not help you to win a lottery; it would certainly reduce pain. Similarly, crossing your arms eases pain by confusing the brain.

Cross out pain

‘Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional,’ writes Haruki Murakami in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. You can indeed make suffering from pain — physical pain, not the heartache of spurned lovers —optional by crossing your fingers or arms.

These ‘tricks’ are like optical illusions that can trick the brain. In the same way, pain is a perception, and this perception can be tricked not reflecting accurately the sensory input. Our body’s successful interaction with its surroundings hinges on its ability to match its internal reference with the spatial frame of reference. When the physical arrangement of body parts changes, the brain must constantly update its current position. Placing your hands or fingers in unfamiliar positions relative to the body confuses the brain. It disrupts the processing of pain messages by mismatching our body’s frame of reference with our external frame of reference. Simply put, our body position can influence how pain signals are sent to the brain.

A study by researchers at University College London has shown that pain vanishes when we cross the middle finger over wither the index or ring finger such that it is no longer in the middle. You don’t have to prick your finger with a pin to prove whether the researchers are right. The researchers didn’t hurt their study participants either. They used a trick known as the thermal grill illusion to create a phantom pain sensation. They applied a warm sensation to the index and ring fingers and a cold sensation to the middle finger by strapping thermal pads to the fingers. This grill-like pattern of hot-cold-hot creates a burning sensation in the middle finger. The brain seems to use the spatial arrangement of all three stimuli to produce the burning sensation in just one finger. ‘This can certainly feel painful, but doesn’t involve any tissue damage,’ says Angela Marotta, the lead researcher.

In another study, also at University College London, the researchers gave volunteers a series of painful ‘jabs’ to the back of one of their hands using a laser for four milliseconds. Half of the participants received jabs when they lay down on a desk. The other half, with the arms crossed. The participants rated the pain from 0 to 100, with 100 being the most pain you could possibly imagine. The results show that the pain perception was weaker when the arms were crossed.

‘In everyday life, you mostly use your left hand to touch things on the left side of the world, and your right hand for the right side of the world — for example when picking up a glass of water on your right side generally you generally use your right hand,’ says Giandomenico Iannetti, a co-researcher. ‘Crossing your hands causes a mismatch and it makes the processing of pain more difficult.’

The trick may even work for some people with chronic pain.

In Wolf Hall, the BBC TV series based on Hilary Mantel’s novels, when King Henry VIII explodes and berates Thomas Cromwell in front of the court, ‘You think you are the king, and I’m the blacksmith’s boy!’, Cromwell raises his hands and crosses his wrists, and says, ‘God preserve Your Majesty and now will you excuse me.’ A flashback shows a young Cromwell burning himself in his abusive father’s blacksmith workshop. ‘Cross your wrists,’ his father shouts, ‘it confuses the pain.’

Crossing the arms did confuse the pain suffered by the young boy (and the participants in the University College London study); it might also help you if you are ever in pain.

Dampfnudel

When steamed dumplings saved a town

The Thirty Year War (1618-48) is arguably the most destructive war in German history, resulting in a loss of about 8 million people. The war began when the Roman Catholic Empire attempted to control the religious activities of its subjects, which started a rebellion among Protestants in Germany. The war involved Sweden, France, Spain and Austria, all waging campaigns on German soil.

Legend has it, in around 1642 a very hungry Swedish cavalry division arrived in Freckenfeld, a small town in Rhineland-Palatinate, and threatened to murder everyone and destroy the town. However, if the townspeople fed the soldiers, they would leave in peace. It was a time of real hardship, and the food was scarce, but a fortunate stroke of serendipity saved the town. The town baker Johannes Muck came up with the idea of cooking dampfundel (plural dampfundeln, literally steamed noodles) with a sack of flour he had in his bakery. He mixed the flour with water, yeast, salt, butter and sugar. With the help of his wife and maid, he formed the dough into balls about the size of an egg, left them to rise and then cooked them in a closed pot. He made 1,286 dampfundeln and served then with wine sauce to hungry soldiers. Fed and satisfied soldiers left the town peacefully.

Dampfundel is a typical dish in southern Germany. It’s a white bread roll and served either with savoury accompaniments such as cabbage, salad, gherkins and potato or lentil soup or as a dessert with custard or jam.

In 1660, Johannes’s grandson built a gate with 1,286 little stone dampfundeln. The gate, known as Dampfnudeltor, still stands in Freckenfeld, now a town with a population of about 1,600. Dampfnudeltor even features in the town’s coat of arms.

The Execution

“The time will come when all will see as I see”

9 February 1600. It is freezing cold in the vast and ornate Hall of Inquisition in Rome. Fifteen illustrious cardinals of the Holy Office are seated on high-backed plush chairs forming an arc around the accused – a 51-year-old, small, thin man with black hair and deep brown eyes, kneeling silently. The Grand Inquisitor, Cardinal Severina, reads the charges.

The eight counts of heresy include belief in the movement of the Earth and an infinite universe filled with innumerable worlds. Severina asks him to recant his belief and pray for mercy to God. The man remains silent. Severina excommunicates the heretic and sentences him to die “without shedding of blood” (in other words, burn him alive at the stake).

The defiant man lifts his head and declares: “Perhaps you, my judges, pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it. The time will come when all will see as I see.”

He is given eight days’ grace to recant and deny his beliefs. His belief in the truth remains unshakable.

19 February 1600. The man lies naked on a rack, his ankles and wrists bound tightly, in a dark, dreary, and damp dungeon in the terrible Tor di Nona prison in Rome, which has been his home for the past two years. In the feeble light of winter dawn, his guards ask him to put on the sulphur-coloured garb of heresy, covered with pictures of devils and crimson flames and crosses. He is then led in chains through a howling, fanatical crowd to the site of the execution, a public square called the Campo de Fiori. He walks calmly and with dignity, his face serene, his head high. He is stripped naked, and a shirt of pitch that extends from his waist to his feet is put over him so that he will not die as quickly. The executioner ties him to the stake, piles firewood, and charcoal, kindling up to the chin and places a torch between the feet. As the flames blaze around him, a priest pushes forward and presses a crucifix into his hands, but the man turns his head away. Within seconds, flames sear him, and smoke and fire surround him. When the fire subsides, his remains are powdered and blown in the wind so that no relic of the heretic would survive.

***

The man, Giordano Bruno, lives on. In 1889 a statue in honour of him was erected at the site where he was burned. The statue in Campo de Fiori, within walking distance of the Vatican, is now surrounded by a colourful and busy market.

Bruno, an astronomer and Dominican monk, was an ardent believer in the Copernican system. In 1543 Copernicus rejected the ancient and commonly held wisdom that the Earth stood still at the centre of the universe and that the sun spun around it. To the contrary, he declared that the moon rotated around the Earth and the moon, and the Earth together spun around the sun.

In 1584 Bruno published two important books, The Ash Wednesday Supper and On the Infinite Universe and the Worlds. The second book started his fatal dispute with the powerful and dogmatic Catholic Church whose motto was “Do not examine, only believe.” Bruno looked at the problem of the relations between God, the universe and man from a different point of view. In this view, the man was no longer at the centre of the universe; man’s place in the universe became a minor incident in the history of an insignificant planet. The Church feared that Bruno’s view would threaten the idea of heaven lying just beyond the sphere of fixed stars and would be dangerous to the Christian faith.

The Inquisition

A trial and a public abjuration

22 June 1633. Ten stern-faced cardinals of the Inquisition at Rome, each splendidly dressed in a scarlet cassock, white surplice trimmed with lace and a short-hooded cape fastened with pairs of buttons down the front, are sitting on exquisitely carved chairs behind a large table in the forbidding Hall of Inquisition. A frail, old man dressed in a white gown of penitence is kneeling at the centre of the hall. He speaks in a soft, subdued voice:

I, Galileo Galilei, son of the late Vincenzio Galilei of Florence, aged seventy years, being brought personally to judgment … having before my eyes and touching with my hands the Holy Gospels, swear that I have always believed, do believe and by God’s help will in the future believe all that is held, preached, and taught by the Holy Catholic Church ... I must altogether abandon the false opinion that the sun is the centre of the world and immovable and that Earth is not the centre of the world and moves and that I must not hold, defend, or teach in any way whatsoever, verbally or in writing, the said false doctrine ...

The great scientist is so convinced that it is Earth that moves, as he rises from his knees stamps his foot on the ground and mutters under his breath, “Eppur si muove” (“And yet it moves”).

***

This public recantation ended the most tragic trial in the history of science. Though saved from the Inquisition’s deadly dungeons when the Pope commuted his sentence, he was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life; his book was banned and placed on the Index of Prohibited Books.

Galileo was the first to study the heavens through the telescope, which he invented independently in 1609 “by means of reasoning” when he heard the news of a spyglass made by a Dutch spectacle- maker Hans Lippershey. Everything he saw through his telescope convinced him that Copernicus was right. Earth and other planets do not only spin on their axes; they also revolve around the sun in circular orbits. Dark “spots” on the surface of the sun appear to move; therefore, the sun must also rotate, he concluded. The craters and mountains on the moon and the sunspots, he argued, prove that the ancient theory of perfect heavenly spheres was wrong.

Like Giordano Bruno, he also believed there might be life on other planets. As a scientist he was interested in the possibility of life on other worlds, he said, and not interested in venturing into the religious question of whether Christ had redeemed these extra-terrestrial creatures.

In 1632 Galileo published his masterpiece, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, in which he eloquently defended and extended the Copernican system. Against the universal practice of his time to write on philosophical and scientific subjects in Latin, Galileo wrote in Italian “because I wished everyone to be able to read what I wrote.”

His views were thought to contravene the teachings of the Church. A year later, he was tried for heresy by the Inquisition and forced to renounce his theories. Under the threat of torture, he agreed to “confess,” against his belief that “the Bible teaches us to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.”

More than three and a half centuries later, in 1992, John Paul II made a speech to restore and honour Galileo’s standing as a good Christian. The Pope said that in the 17th-century theologians failed to distinguish between belief in the Bible and the interpretation of it.

The Monkey Trial

Teaching evolution goes to court

10 July 1925. Dayton, a Tennessee mining town of 1,800. Horse-drawn wagons fitted with settees and chairs and small Ford automobiles especially built for rocky mountain roads jam the dusty Market Street. The horde of visitors from nearby mountain farms has come to witness a bizarre evolution-creationism trial that has turned the tiny town into a carnival. Banners hang from buildings. Signs tied to the trees exhort sinners, “Read your Bible daily” and “Be sure your sins will find you out.” Two blind minstrels sing mountain hymns and promises of reward for the weary and faithful. Stalls sell “Monkey Fizz” lemonade, “Your Old Man’s a Monkey” buttons and books for or against evolution.

There is a chimpanzee outside the courthouse that has been brought to the town to “testify” against the defendant John Scopes, a 24-year-old biology teacher at the Rhea County High School at Dayton, who had assigned his pupils a simple task: reading five pages of a popular biology textbook dealing with evolution. He is charged with violating a State of Tennessee law that made it illegal “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”

9 a.m. Visitors and local citizens (including over 100 reporters from newspapers around the country) pack the hot and humid courtroom and overflow onto the well-kept lawns of the courthouse shaded by maple trees. Judge J. T. Roulston empanels a jury of 12 men (one of them is unable to read), and the trial begins.

William Bryan, counsel for the prosecution, speaks in defence of revealed religion, as he and his followers believed, and introduces the Bible in evidence.

Clarence Darrow, counsel for the defence, paints the trial as “the first case of its kind since we stopped trying people for witchcraft … we cannot test every fact in science by religious dictum.”

11 July 1925. The New York Times headlines on the front page, cranks and freaks flock to Dayton. strange creeds and theories are preached.

21 July 1925. After two weeks of testimony and arguments between the prosecution (“If evolution wins, Christianity goes”) and the defence (“Scopes isn’t on trial; civilization is on trial”) and eight minutes of deliberations by the jury, Scopes is found guilty and fined $100.

After pronouncing the sentence, Judge Roulston exclaims, “Oh, have you anything to say, Mr Scopes, as to why the Court should not impose punishment on you?”

Carrot-coloured-haired, boyish-looking Scope replies in a trembling voice, “Your Honor, I feel that I have been convicted of violating an unjust statute. I will continue in the future, as I have in the past … to teach the truth as guaranteed in our Constitution, of personal and religious freedom. I think the fine is unjust.”

The court session ends with a roar of laughter when Judge Roulston gladly accepts an assistant defence counsel’s offer: “May I ask Your Honor to allow me to send you On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin?”

July 1926. The Tennessee Supreme Court overturns the verdict and dismisses the charges, concluding, “Nothing is to be gained by prolonging the life of this bizarre case.”

***

The Tennessee law was repealed in 1967. John Scopes left Dayton shortly after the verdict and became a geologist for mining companies. He died in 1970, outliving the law he was convicted of violating.

After 80 years, evolution was again challenged in a US court. In 2004, the Dover Area School District in Pennsylvania directed teachers to preface the teaching of evolution with a disclaimer saying that evolution is not a fact. After a 40-day evolution–Intelligent Design (ID) trial, the court ruled in 2005 that ID is not a scientific theory but a repackaged creationism and banned the district “from requiring teachers to denigrate or disparage the scientific theory of evolution”.

Drama becomes a fact

When H. G. Wells’ menacing Martians “invaded” Earth to enslave humanity

At 8:50 pm on 30 October 1938, the day before Halloween, the marauding monsters (without their Halloween masks) arrived at Grovers Mill, a sleepy hamlet in New Jersey, at least on the radio:

The metal casing is definitely extraterrestrial – not found on this earth ... This thing is smooth and, as you can see, of cylindrical shape … Someone’s crawling out of the hollow top … I can see … two luminous disks – are they eyes? It might be a face. It might be [shout of awe from the crowd]

Good heavens, something’s wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now it’s another one, another one, and another one! They look like tentacles to me. I can see the thing’s body now. It’s large, large as a bear and it glistens like wet leather. But that face, it – ladies and gentlemen, it’s indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it, so awful. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate. The monster of whatever it is can hardly move …

Ladies and gentlemen, I have a grave announcement to make. Incredible as it may seem … those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars.

Millions of listeners heard this “live commentary” when they tuned in to a popular Sunday night program on CBS radio, The Mercury Theatre on the Air, that featured plays directed by Orson Welles. The play that night was an adaptation of The War of the Worlds, presented as simulated news bulletins and scene broadcasts to heighten the dramatic effect. Welles had made another important change: he transplanted the action from H. G. Wells’ Victorian England to contemporary America.

As the play unfolded dance music from a hotel was interrupted several times by fake news flashes about a professor at an observatory noting a series of gas explosions on the planet Mars. News bulletins and scene broadcasts followed, reporting the landing of a “meteor” in New Jersey, “killing” 1,500 persons, and the discovery that the “meteor” was a “metal cylinder” containing strange creatures from Mars armed with “death rays.”

The radio drama was introduced as a work of fiction, but those who missed the announcement at the beginning (the next one didn’t arrive forty minutes into the play) confused fiction for fact and “a wave of mass hysteria seized thousands of radio listeners throughout the nation between 8:15 and 9:30 o’clock,” The New York Times reported next day in a lead story “radio listeners in panic, taking war drama as fact” that filled nearly three-fourth page of the broadsheet. “The broadcast, which disrupted households, interrupted religious services, created traffic jams and clogged communications systems, was made by Orson Welles, who as the radio character, ‘The Shadow,’ used to give ‘the creeps’ to countless child listeners,” the report said, “This time at least a score of adults required medical treatment for shock and hysteria.”

Mass hysteria mounted so high that in some cases people told the police they saw the invasion.

The Times report recounted several reports of panic, including: “In Indianapolis a woman ran into a church screaming: ‘New York destroyed; it’s the end of the world. You might as well as go home to die. I just heard it on the radio.’ Services were dismissed immediately and the bartender of a tavern … closed the place, sending away six customers, in the middle of the broadcast to ‘rescue’ his wife and two children.”

The broadcast even fooled two Princeton University geologists: “They armed themselves with the necessary equipment and set out to find a specimen. All they found was a group of sightseers searching like themselves for the meteor.”

Sticky Notes

Bookmark this page

A Sunday morning in 1974. Arthur Fry, a chemical engineer, and a keen choir singer, is in the habit of inserting little scraps of paper into his choir book so that he can quickly find the right hymns. As he stands from the front pews of his local Presbyterian church to join the choir, his bookmarks slip out and fall on the floor. He is embarrassed and frustrated. The singing is followed by the Sunday sermon. Instead of listening to the “dull sermon” he starts to daydream about the bookmark problem. An idea flashes across his mind: “What I really need is a little bookmark that could be stuck on, and removed, without damaging the book.”

On returning to work on Monday morning, came the eureka moment: it occurred to him that an adhesive invented by his colleague Spencer Silver at 3M, a multinational company in St Paul, Minnesota, could be used to create a better bookmark. Six years earlier Silver had developed an adhesive that stuck readily, but not tightly to surfaces. As happens with many inventions, Silver could not find a marketable use for his adhesive.

Fry uses some of Silver’s adhesive to coat his markers. The markers stay in place yet are lifted off without damaging the pages. The humble sticky note is born.

***

In 1979, 3M launched sticky notes as Post-it notes (so-called because of the American use of the term “post”, meaning to stick up a notice) in pads of three-inch-square canary-yellow notes. Though 3M’s patent has now expired, they still sell them. Today sticky notes can be found in a wide variety of sizes, shapes, and colours.

In 2010, Fry and Silver were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. They made no money from their invention, but the humble sticky note, a ubiquitous office product, is a monument to the creativity unleashed by accident: a bookmark slipping out of a book. “It was a eureka, head-flapping moment,” Fry recalled decades later, “I can still feel the excitement.”

Typos

An inevitable aspect of writing and printing

The movable type was invented in China (made from clay in c.1041; made from hardwood in c.1297). But in Europe in the early fourteenth century, there were only handwritten books or some short texts, printed by words having been carved into wooden blocks.

Johannes Gutenberg was a young engraver and gem-cutter when he considered using movable type to compose whole books. He experimented over several years, borrowing large sums of money to cover costs. He made moulds of letters for casting individual characters in metal. He invented devices for composing the types on a wooden plate and for inking the composition evenly, and finally a hand-printing press for making impressions of the plates on paper.

He tested his press by printing an old German poem over and over. He was now ready for the job he had been dreaming of for years, printing the Bible in Latin. He composed 1,286 pages of 42 lines each and printed 180 copies. The first book ever printed from movable type was ready in 1455.

We now know that printing’s long history is riddled with typographical mistakes or typos, but the first printed book was miraculously free of typos. Only 49 copies of the Gutenberg Bible are known to exist today, of which only 21 are complete. Only one of these complete copies has an unusual error: the third and fourth lines of both columns were accidentally transposed by the compositor.

The world’s most famous book typo happened in 1631 when the London printers Robert Barker and Martin Louis were asked to print a new edition of the King James Bible, which was first published in 1611. The compositor left out the word “not” from Number Seven of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:14) changing it into ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.” The printers were summoned by order of King Charles I to the court and were fined £300 and their printing license revoked. Most of the 1,000 printed copies were burned, but around ten copies are believed to still exist today. Known as the ‘Wicked Bible” it has now become a sought-after collector’s item valued at as much as US$100,000.

The typo in the “Wicked Bible” was not an exception; mistakes in the earliest days of the book were expected. “The history of early printing suggests, very strongly, that authors and printers weren’t pursuing a kind of perfect text,” says Adam Smyth, professor of English literature and the history of the book at the University of Oxford. “Error was inevitable … and what authors and printers argued about was how much error and instability were acceptable for a book to be called a book. It was about tolerating, rather than eliminating, reasonable mistakes.”

The word erratum (from Latin “error,” meaning error in printing or writing) also originated in the mid-sixteenth century. In the early days of printing, errata (a list of corrected errors appended to a book) were markers of well-made books. Smyth calls errata lists “one of print’s signature traits.”

Errata lists in some ways can absolve books from the sins of typos, but the public signs, notices and billboards littered with typos need grammar geeks like Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson to make them free of errors. In 2008, armed with markers, chalk, and correction fluid the duo journeyed across America for nearly three months righting the glaring errors displayed in grocery stores, museums, malls, restaurants, mini-golf courses, beaches and even a national park. They discovered 437 typos and corrected 236 of them. Misused apostrophes were the most common error, they say, occurring “like a virus.” Their penchant for punctuation landed them in federal court when they corrected a missing comma and apostrophe on an old sign in Grand Canyon National Park. They were sentenced to a year on probation for vandalizing federal property. In The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time (2011), they chronicle their adventures correcting typos, including a typo in the court summons that claimed that they had violated “criminal statues”. It should have been “statute” if you are wondering.

Erasers

Rubbing out our written mistakes

In 1770 Joseph Priestley, the English scientist who discovered oxygen and soda water, described “a substance excellently adapted to the purpose of wiping from paper the mark of lead pencil”. The substance, then known as “India gum,” he remarked, required rubbing action on the part of the user. He called it rubber. (In Britain, erasers are still often called “rubbers.”) Though Priestley discovered rubber’s erasing properties, it was Edward Nairne, an English scientific instrument maker, who is credited with developing and marketing it.

Until 1770 the preferred way of erasing pencil marks was breadcrumbs moistened and balled up. One day Nairne inadvertently picked up a piece of rubber instead of breadcrumbs to remove pencil marks and discovered rubber’s remarkable erasing properties. Quick to exploit his discovery, he began selling cubes of rubber at his London shop. Touted as erasers, they sold for an astonishingly high price of 3 shillings per half-inch cube. These expensive erasers posed problems for users: natural rubber is perishable, smelly and tends to rot. In 1834 Charles Goodyear, an American inventor, figured out how to make rubber stronger and more elastic.

In 1858 Hymen Lipman, an American stationer, patented a rubber-tipped pencil. These little erasers on pencil ends are known as “plugs,” and the metal bands that contain the plugs are called “ferrules.”

There is no toxic lead in lead pencils (the name comes from a lead stylus used in ancient Rome). The core of pencils is made up of a non-toxic mixture of graphite and clay. By varying the graphite-to-clay ratio, the “hardness” and “blackness” of the core can be adjusted. When a pencil is put on paper, graphite particles mix up with the fibre particles that make up the paper. Polymers that make up an eraser are stickier than the particles of paper, so graphite particles end up getting stuck to the eraser instead.

If you think that the delete key has made the eraser obsolete, you are wrong. The humble eraser is still the best tool for removing pencil markings, even 250 years after its discovery. A good old “plug” made of rubber, or a new high-tech eraser made of vinyl is worth “3 shillings” only if it: (a) lifts pencil marks from paper with the lightest touches without smudging and smearing, and (b) avoids paper trauma; that is, no matter how hard you rub, the paper stays hole-less.

Tea bags

A revolutionary infusion in our cups of tea

Thomas Sullivan, a New York tea merchant, starts shipping out samples of tea to his customers in small silk pouches. He did not intend for his customers to put them directly into the hot water, but some dip them in cups of boiling water. Seeing these little bags so convenient, they ask for more of the same. Finding that the mesh on the silk was too fine for perfect infusion, Sullivan switches from silk to gauze. The tea bag is born.

***

True tea aficionados have always known that various kinds of tea need to be brewed for different periods of time, and tea tastes its best when tea leaves are removed from the hot water at the end of its specific brewing period.

When tea became popular in the late 18th century in Britain and America, it was always brewed in pots which needed a tea strainer. Some unknown inventor—who apparently disliked cleaning loose tea leaves out of a pot—came up with the idea of a removable tea infusion device. A perforated metal container filled with loose tea leaves and immersed in boiling water, and then removed using the attached chain. Small egg- and ball-shaped perforated metal containers became extremely popular as they made it easy to brew tea in a cup. They are still sold.

A few years after Sullivan’s gauze tea bags became popular, manufacturers developed them for commercial production. But it was not until the 1950s, the tea bag took off. In 1952, tea manufacturer Lipton introduced its “flo-thru” tea bag made of paper fibre. A 1952 Lipton advertisement claimed, “See how the boiling water gets to the tea faster. That means complete infusion … better extraction of the full flavour and aroma from the tea leaves.”

In 1964, the finely perforated tea bag was developed with about 2,000 perforations in an average bag. Since then, every possible shape of the tea bag has been patented, even cylindrical. Not only a tea bag saves tea as it uses only uses so much tea as required for a single cup of tea, but it is also environmentally friendly. Even a used tea bag is useful: refrigerate it and place it on the eyes to reduce puffiness.

Born by accident, the little mesh bag tied to a string is so brilliant that it has radically changed our tea-drinking habits.

Cookery

Mrs Beeton’s kitchen rules

The eldest of 21 (yes, 21) siblings, Isabella Mary Mayson was born in London in 1836. She married to Samuel Beeton, an ambitious young publisher when she was hardly 20 years old. Soon after marriage, she started writing articles and books on cookery and household management. She died young at the age of 28. She is remembered now for classics such as Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (published in 1861, it’s one of the great publishing successes of all times, nearly 2 million copies were sold by 1868) and Mrs Beeton’s Every Day Cookery and Household Book (1862).

Mrs Beeton believed that if novices would commit her culinary maxims to memory, they would have before them the fundamental truths of the art of cookery. A selection:

A good cook looks ahead ... there is no work like early work.
Muddle makes more muddle.
Dirty saucepans filled with hot water begin to clean themselves.
Wash well a saucepan, but clean a frying pan with a piece of bread.
Thrust an oniony knife into the earth to take away the smell.
Pour nothing but water down the sink
Green vegetables should be boiled fast with the lid off.
Fish boiled should be done slowly, with a little vinegar.
Water boils when it gallops, and oil when it is still.
A stew boiled is a stew spoiled.
One egg, beaten well, is worth two not beaten.
Draw fresh water for the kettle to boil for tea, cocoa, or coffee.
Make the tea directly after the water boils.

The first ‘domestic goddess’ (a moniker made famous by Nigella Lawson) was also the first to support worry-free, free-range chickens when she warned: Never eat a depressed chicken.

Money maxims

(Usual disclaimers apply)

All money matters have disclaimers in the fine print. Here’s our fine print: Although maxims and rules of thumb encapsulate knowledge, they are not universal truths that can be applied to every investment situation.

The rule of 72. The rule of 72 says that in order to find the number of years required to double your money at a given compound interest rate, you can just divide 72 by the annual interest rate. For example, to find out how long it would take to double your money at 6 per cent interest, divide 72 by 6 and you get 12 years. The rule also works backwards. You can use it to calculate the interest rate if you know your money would double in so and so many years by dividing 72 by the number of years.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. You can spread the risk by putting your money to work in different investment types – shares, managed funds, property, bonds and collectables such as art and antiques. You can reduce the risk further by widely spreading it within each investment type. For example, you can diversify investment in shares by investing in national shares, international shares, industrial shares, resources shares, large ‘blue chip’ company shares and small company shares. Also, spread your risk over time; that is, spread your buying and selling over a longer period.

Past performance is not an indicator of future performance. Most financial institutions advise that caution should be exercised in relying upon past performance as an indicator of future performance.

Don’t follow a particular investment or friend like a sheep. Make your investment decisions based on your circumstances and advice from investment professionals.

A rule of thumb

‘Jesus saves but he couldn’t on my wage,’ laments a graffiti artist on a wall. Remember the first maxim of managing your money: Money grows only when it is saved and invested wisely.

When am I ready for investments? This old rule of thumb can help you decide when is the right time to make some investments: When you have saved three to six months’ income, you can take some risk with the additional money you save.

‘100 minus age’ rule. This popular rule-of-thumb concerns the type of investment you should consider: Subtract your age from 100, which is the percentage you should invest in high-risk growth investments such as shares. The balance should be put in low- to moderate-risk investments such as fixed-interest bonds. If you are about 50, investments should be spread evenly: one-third in high risk, one-third in moderate risk and one-third in low-risk investments. Many financial planners do not like this rule as it leaves no room for individual choices, longevity or inflation. Some advice because of the increase in longevity we should subtract age from 110.

Don’t fall into an interest-free debt trap. It is better to buy on credit now than to save and wait until next year when everything will be more expensive. This is an urban myth. As a rule of thumb, the interest you are likely to pay would be more than twice the rate of inflation. For example, if inflation is 5 per cent and the rate of interest is 12 per cent, you have already paid 7 per cent more for your goods. That’s only the simple interest rate, but on most debts interest is calculated on a compounding basis and the effective interest rate is much higher.

Murphy’s law

Should I take the umbrella, dear?

Life’s little annoyances – such as being unable to find a matching pair of socks, or taking along an umbrella that turned out to be unneeded or not taking one when it was needed – caused James Payne, a Victorian poet and satirist, to lament in 1884:

I never had a piece of toast
Particularly long and wide
But fell upon the sanded floor
And always on the buttered side.

These little annoyances acquired a ‘scientific’ name — Murphy’s law — when in 1949 Captain Edward A. Murphy Jr of the United States Air Force came across a gauge that had been wired wrongly. He cursed the technician responsible and muttered something like, ‘If anything can go wrong, it will.’

Murphy’s law, which now has many variations, occurs too frequently to be pure chance. Haven’t you noticed that whenever you are trying to park your car along a busy road, all the empty spaces are on the other side; or the supermarket checkout queue you are standing in, moves slower than the one next to you? Robert A. J. Matthews, a British physicist, believes Murphy’s law isn’t just nonsense. Scientific principles can explain it. In 1995 he showed, in five pages of mathematical equations, why toast usually lands with the buttered side down. And after years of research, he’s still complaining that today’s highly accurate weather forecasts are still not good enough to prove Murphy’s law of umbrellas (‘Carrying an umbrella when rain is forecast makes rain less likely to fall’) wrong.

Intuition and deduction

We exist as long as we’re thinking

In his early years, the 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes was sceptical of almost everything, even his own existence. He lost this scepticism after reaching a conclusion, ‘Cogito, ergo sum’ (‘I think, therefore I am’), philosophy’s most famous statement.

When he was sent to a boarding school at the age of eight, he enjoyed exceptional privileges because of his poor health. ‘My philosopher’, as his father used to call him, was excused from morning school duties and allowed to stay in bed until late. This habit of morning reflections in bed clung to him throughout his life.

In his later life, Descartes reflected upon how to arrive at knowledge without any fear of error. He concluded that only two mental acts, intuition and deduction, are the two most certain paths to knowledge. He said intuition is the undoubting conception of a pure and attentive mind. Intuition proceeds by deduction, by which we understand all that is necessarily concluded from certain other facts already known.

To discover what, if anything, he can know with certainty, he presents a series of arguments to cast doubt on the knowledge he has accepted as truth: All those things that have entered my mind were no truer than the illusion of my dreams. Or, a deceiving God or an evil demon is causing me to go wrong about knowledge, which is self-evident and which I seem to see so clearly. Because my senses may sometimes deceive me, the source of my knowledge cannot lie in my senses. I can only be certain about the experience of thinking. I cannot doubt that I think, therefore, I exist as long as I’m thinking.

Belief in God

A famous wager

The 17th-century French mathematician Blaise Pascal is one of the founders of probability theory, which now pervades numerous aspects of our daily lives from insurance to educational measurements to assessing the reliability of cars and household appliances. This gifted mathematician’s contribution to mathematics goes beyond probability theory, but he is now more widely known for Pensées (Thoughts), a collection of meditations on the nature of human life.

He makes at least one application of the theory of probability in one of his meditations, now known as Pascal’s Wager. God either is or He is not. If we bet on whether God exists, there are two chances. If we win the bet the reward is enormous (eternal happiness) and the loss is insignificant (only the time we have to spend in worship). If we lose the bet, still we lose little. Believing in God is the more sensible wager.

If the agnostic remains are unconvinced, Pascal offers a different way of looking at the odds. If there were infinite eternal happiness to be won by leading religious life, there is one chance of winning against a finite number of chances of losing. Your chances of winning or losing are finite. You are playing for even odds as there are as many chances on one side as on the other. Therefore, it will pay to lead a religious life.

Pascal said, ‘The heart has a reason, which reason cannot know’; therefore, our belief in God cannot be explained by reasoning.

But we must still follow the course of reason, a reason which is reasonable and respects creativity and morality.

Chaos and fractals

Disorder – not order – rules over the world

Jules-Henri Poincaré was in the habit of buying fresh bread every day from his local baker in Paris. He suspected that the bread weighed less than the advertised weight of one kilogram. He started weighing the bread daily at his home. After a year, he plotted the graph of daily weights, which showed a bell curve with a minimum weight of 950 grams but truncated on the left side of the kilogram mark. He reported the matter to the authorities.

The anecdote, probably apocryphal, gives an insight into the renowned physicist and mathematician’s life-long quest for beautiful mathematical patterns. He said, it may be very hard to define mathematical beauty, but that is just as true of the beauty of all kinds.’

Years later, in 1908, Poincaré made a remarkable observation which led to the foundation of the new science of chaos. He was then working on a problem to predict the positions of planets as they moved around the Sun. The task seemed simple. Note the starting positions and velocities and feed them in a set of equations based on Newton’s law of motion. He encountered no problem when he used data for two planets (the discovery of Neptune in 1846 had been similarly predicted from the observations of deviations in the position of Uranus). But when he worked with data for three planets he was surprised to find the outcome had turned upside down the great laws of motion. He concluded that it’s impossible to predict the motion of more than two planets: ‘Small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena. A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the latter. Prediction becomes impossible.’

Poincaré’s observation received little attention from his contemporaries but has now earned him the title of the ‘founder of chaos theory as we know now that the behaviour of a dynamic system depends on its small initial conditions.

Chaos is the fast-growing area of science that describes disorderly systems. The behaviour of a chaotic system is difficult to predict because there so many variables or unknown factors in the system. Chaos is a dynamic phenomenon. It occurs when the state of a system changes with time. Even simple systems can grow exponentially* with time, making a long-term prediction of the future impossible. The behaviour of a dynamic system depends on its small initial conditions. In a chaotic system, even a small change can bring about major upheaval. Chaos helps scientists to understand the complexities of nature as it provides a bridge between the laws of physics and the laws of chance.

The wider significance of Poincaré’s observation was recognised in 1963 when Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist, developed a computer model to predict weather patterns. While working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he developed a simple computer model to forecast changes in weather at a number of places. In one of his equations, he used a rounded number; for example, 0.506127 became 0.506. He was surprised to see that his model now predicted quite different conditions. This suggested that even a small initial unpredictable condition such as a flapping butterfly could produce a larger global change in weather. Lorenz didn’t call it the chaos theory – the name was invented in 1972 by mathematician James Yorke.

This is now called the ‘butterfly effect’: an action as small as a butterfly flapping its wings, say in Beijing, could bring about a snowstorm weeks later thousands of kilometres away in New York. Chaotic behaviour occurs in phenomena as diverse as the stock market, disease epidemic, population changes and the human heartbeat. Chaos theory, which touches all disciplines of science, can be used to examine the apparently random unpredictable features of the everyday world, such as the turbulent flow of water, traffic jams, the path of the winds and the build-up of clouds.

In 1975 a maverick mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot pioneered the mathematics of fractals (a term he coined from the Latin fractus, broken). His fractals helped to picture the actions of chaos, rather than explain it.

Most patterns in nature aren’t formed of simple geometric figures such as squares, triangles and circles, but of shapes that are jagged and broken up. Before Mandelbrot, mathematicians disdained to describe such shapes mathematically. Classical geometry cannot describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline or a tree. ‘Clouds are not spheres,’ as Mandelbrot says, ‘mountains are not cones, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line’.

Mandelbrot invented a new geometry of irregular and fragmented patterns around us. He called these beautifully complex patterns fractals. ‘Small parts are the same as the big parts; that’s the definition of fractal’, says Mandelbrot. ‘A cloud is made of billows upon billows that look like clouds. As you come closer to a cloud you don’t get something smooth but irregularities at a smaller scale.’ Ferns, cauliflowers, snowflakes, rivers, mountains and lightning – they all are fractals. Fractals can be described by simple mathematical equations that can be used to generate computer images.

Fractal geometry is now used to compress computer images; locate underground oil deposits; build dams; understand corrosion, acid rain, earthquakes and hurricanes; study global climate change; and even to model booms and busts of stock markets.

Some psychologists suggest that the basic idea of chaos also works in our personal lives: a small act of kindness causes a small ripple and if there are enough small acts they could magnify into the butterfly effect of happiness making people happier on the other side of the street, the town, the world.

——

* In mathematics, an exponential is a function that varies with the power (exponent) of another quantity. In y = ax, y varies exponentially with x, the exponent. When x increase, y grows rapidly. This is called exponential growth. A J-shaped curve, commonly known as J curve, shows exponential growth.

Calculus

Don’t drink and derive

Pieces of paper known as derivatives have been blamed for the last decade’s global financial crisis. A derivative derives its value from an asset such as a mortgage. ‘A positive derivative means that the graph is rising/And if it is less than zero, the result is not surprising,’ explains a calculus rhyme. When house prices collapsed in the United States the value of mortgage derivatives approached zero. Not surprisingly, they became financial weapons of mass destruction. As some wit has said alcohol and calculus don’t mix, were these dodgy derivatives derived over gallons of wine?

Calculus is at the heart of financial derivatives. Calculus can be summed up by two basic ideas, the derivative and the integral. Simply put, the derivative is a way of measuring the change in one quantity in response to change in another quantity (the derivative of the position of a moving car with respect to time is its speed at that particular moment). The integral is the accumulation of an infinite number of tiny bits that make up a whole (the distance a car has travelled when only its speed is known).

Mathematician and songwriter Tom Lehrer explains it harmoniously in ‘The Derivative Song’ (The American Mathematical Monthly, May 1974):

You take a function of x and you call it y,
Take any x-nought that you care to try,
You make a little change and call it delta x,
The corresponding change in y is what you find nex’,
And then you take the quotient and now carefully
Send delta x to zero, and I think you’ll see
That what the limit gives us, if our work all checks,
Is what we call dy/dx,
It’s just dy/dx.

You take a function of diet and you call it yummy

Our awareness of the link between body weight and food intake began in 1896 when Wilbur Atwater, an American chemist, showed that different types of food produced different amounts of energy and the efficiency of a diet should be measured in food calories (or kilojoules if you prefer the metric term). In 1919 American scientists J. Arthur Harris and Francis Benedict devised an equation for calculating how many calories we consume daily. The Harris-Benedict equation determines a person’s ideal calorie intake by considering age, gender, height and weight (Google ‘Harris-Benedict equation’ to search online calculators to work out your basal metabolic rate or BMR, a scientific term for ideal calorie intake).

Once you know your BMR, fighting the battle of the bulge is a simple task: all you have to do is to strike a balance between two variables, diet and exercise. In her book, Calculus Diaries (2010), science writer Jennifer Ouellette, has turned the simple arithmetic of diet and exercise into calculus by introducing another variable: the ‘tastiness’ (in Tom Lehrer’s song on the previous page, it would be y for yummy, the function of diet x). To Ouellette, ‘tastiness’ is ‘the pleasure we derive from our food intake, given a fixed number of calories we can consume per day and a fixed amount of money we can spend on groceries.’

‘So if we know what we’re eating each day now, what small change can we make in our diet to optimize how much we enjoy mealtimes?’ she asks. To record the small, incremental change recommended by her, requires a graph pad, a pencil and a good knowledge of calculus. Wouldn’t you rather eat that chocolate doughnut, now?

Satire

Heavenly reviews

Reviews and opinions (not) found on TripAdvisor of places you must visit after you die.

‘Could not wish for a better place to rest forever, but …’

The place is rather large, larger than the largest expanse of sand I had seen when I was a teenager. It has a lake, so vast that it requires a month’s journey to go around it, and a tree under the shadow of which a fine horseman would travel for a hundred years without covering the distance completely. I walk into my tent, promised to every believer, a tent of single hollowed pearl, the breadth of which is sixty miles from all sides. My tent has seventy-two houses of rubies, each house has seventy-two rooms of emerald, each room has seventy-two couches, each couch is covered with seventy-two carpets of every colour and a large-eyed houri with full breasts and hourglass waist and retiring glances is sitting on each carpet. Each houri is wearing seventy-two see-through silk dresses and I can look through all of them and see her alabaster skin. Every room also has seventy-two beautiful maids serving wine flavoured with musk. Before a maid could offer me wine in a gold goblet, came in angel Gabriel. He dragged me out of the tent and pushed me outside the gate. ‘Your booking is for the other side of the gate,’ he scowled, ‘where you’ll drink, like thirsty camels, boiling water from a boiling spring.’ – ObL

‘Nice place, for sure, but depressingly empty.’

Though I’ve never been to this whatever-they-call-it place, my old buddy DC’s ever-reliable intel informs me that the place is almost empty and the owners are thinking of closing it down. I wonder where would all those jihadists beheading infidels or blowing themselves up go? I’m a great believer in forward planning (as evidenced in that goddamn Eye-raq) and opened up a new facility for these heaven-less people, but the current regime is bent upon closing it down. – GWB

‘A new bushfire.’

Not to worry, GWB, your little brother is ready to start a new bushfire. I-ran. It sounds great, isn’t it? – JB

‘Strike them down.’

‘Forum moderator take note: this forum is only for true believers who have truly departed. Delete the comments of GWB and JB and ban them forever.’ – TA, was and will always remain SH’s loyal (dis)information minister

‘Sea-bed paradise.’

Hello ObL! You were never my kind of guy (that moron GWB thought otherwise), but I’m sorry to hear Angel Gabriel wouldn’t let you in. He wouldn’t let me in either. At least, a sea bed is a cool place to rest and plan your next fiery jihad. For me, it was simply dust to dust. – SH

‘Six-hundred-year orgasm.’

They say Aldous Huxley writes in Moksha that in Paradise each orgasm would last six hundred years. They also say in Paradise I’ll have the strength to make love with each of the houris and maids present there. Is it all true, really? – a (young and curious) IS fighter

‘A better place than Paradise.’

Only bearded men living on the other side of the border (that line whimsically drawn up by the British when they left the subcontinent) think of Paradise when they kneel down and pray. On this side of the border, we have our own heaven. Here’s my tongue-in-cheek account of it:

Yama, the god of death, leads me to Mount Kailasha, the abode of Lord Shiva and his wife Parvati, daughter of the mountain. Nandi, the bull who watches over their gate, lets me go in. As I enter the gate Ganesha, the four-armed, elephant-headed god of wisdom, the son of Shiva and Parvati, directs Nandi to take me first to Dharma Rai, the divine accountant. Dharma Rai takes into account our past deeds, makes sure that we have paid our karmic debts and accordingly decides when, where and how we have to be born again. ‘As you have not practised your religion,’ he says. ‘I deny you nirvana. You’ll be born again; but because of your good karma in the past life, in a higher form of life than a human.’ ‘I would be born as a Bollywood demigod then, Dharma Rai,’ I cry with joy. ‘No,’ says Dharma Rai in his beancounter’s flat voice, ‘you would be reborn on the planet of the apes.’ ‘As Hollywood god Charlton Heston on Planet of the Apes?’ I ask anxiously. ‘I’m sorry,’ replies Dharma Rai with a slight smile, ‘your karma gives you only an extra’s role as a chimpanzee.’

I was surprised not to see any saffron-robed gurus outside the gate manned by Nandi, the bull. Is there a VIP gate for them? We have so many VIPs (and bribe-offering non-VIPs) in our country, I worry the queue outside the VIP gate would be a very long one, indeed. – a not-so-devout Hindu

‘We demand a total ban on TripAdvisor website.’

Our country now has a Hindu nationalist party government and we demand that the prime minister should immediately ban all websites that mock our ancient religion. A peaceful demonstration in front of the American embassy is being planned. – a BJP supporter

‘This pearly-gate Heaven is like any posh Las Vegas resort, but no guns allowed. ****’

The place has a great, high wall with twelve gates, each made of a single pearl, and with twelve angels at the gates. The wall is made of jasper and the rest of the place of pure gold, as pure as transparent glass. The place doesn’t need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the divine glory lights it up brilliantly. The gates are never shut, for there are no nights. Nothing impure is allowed to enter, not anyone who has done what is shameful or deceitful. I would have given it five stars if I had not been forced to leave my gun with the angel at the gate. Where are you NRA? What death has to do with our constitutional right to carry guns? – a disgruntled NRA member

Fox News flash: Watch tonight our panel, totally blond and blinkered, pretending to grill GOP presidential pretenders how they plan to protect our fundamental right to carry firearms afterlife.

The Tunguska Event

Fire in the sky

About 7.14 a.m., 30 June 1908. The Central Siberian Plateau near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, a remote and empty wilderness of swamps, bogs and hilly pine and cedar forests. Not a soul in sight for scores of kilometres. The eerie silence is punctuated by the shuffle of the hoofs of reindeer grazing in the morning sun and the hum of dense swarms of ferocious mosquitoes appropriately called “flying alligators.”

Suddenly a blindingly bright pillar of fire, the size of a tall office building, races across the clear blue sky. The dazzling fireball moves within a few seconds from the south-southeast to the north-northwest, leaving a thick trail of light some 800 kilometres long. It descends slowly for a few minutes and then explodes about 8 kilometres above the ground. The explosion lasts only a few seconds, but it is so powerful that it can be compared only with an atomic bomb – 1,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs.

The explosion flattens 2,150 square kilometres of the mighty taiga, stripping millions of ancient trees of leaves and branches and leaving them bare like telegraph poles and scattering them like matchsticks. A dark mushroom cloud of dust rises to a height of 80 kilometres over the area after the explosion. A black rain of debris and dirt follows. Shortly afterwards, bluish clouds of ice-coated dust grains are seen against the red sky.

At Vanavara, a trading station about 70 kilometres from the explosion site, a trader, S.B. Semenov, sitting outside his house is knocked off his chair by violent shock waves. The explosion emits so much heat that it seems to be burning his shirt. He said later that he had only a moment to note the size of the bright blue “tube” that covered an enormous part of the sky. “Afterwards, it became dark and at the same time I felt an explosion that threw me several feet from the porch and for a moment I lost consciousness.” He regains consciousness to hear a tremendous sound that shakes the whole house and nearly moves it off its foundation, breaks the glass in the windows and damages his barn considerably. The earth trembles and then the sky splits apart and a hot wind, as from a cannon, blows past the houses.

About 600 kilometres to the southwest, the Trans-Siberian Express jars and shakes wildly on its tracks, built only three years earlier. Passengers are frightened by the loud bursts of noise. The startled driver sees the tracks ahead rippling. He brings the train to a screeching halt. Sounds of distant thunder follow.

The explosion is registered by an earthquake measuring station some 4,000 kilometres away in the city of St Petersburg. Disturbances in Earth’s magnetic field – similar to ones produced by nuclear explosions in the atmosphere – are recorded 970 kilometres south of the explosion site. The magnetic storm lasts more than four hours.

***

The so-called Tunguska event has been part of the folklore of science since 1927 when Leonid Kulik became the first scientist to visit the explosion site. He saw an oval plateau 70 kilometers wide where the forest had been flattened. Trees were not uprooted: instead, they were stripped of their branches, snapped off and scattered like matchsticks pointing away from the direction of the blast.

As no one has yet found a crater or other evidence of impact, a giant meteorite or asteroid could not have caused the Tunguska explosion. If it were not a meteorite, then what caused the explosion?

The controversy about the Tunguska fireball continues to this day, and there is no shortage of attempts to explain the cataclysmic explosion. Today, the line-up of suspects includes a comet, a mini black hole, an asteroid, a rock of antimatter or a mirror matter asteroid, a methane gas blast from below, an alien spacecraft, a laser beam fired by ETs in an attempt to communicate with lonely little earthlings, and an experiment on “death ray” which got out of hand.

Read the full story of this dame of science mysteries in

The Mystery of the Tunguska Fireball

Hardcover, paperback and Kindle editions available on Amazon