You Asked For It: Tamim Answers Reader Questions
Thanks for all the e-mails, readers: You've made me laugh, you've made me cry, but most of all you've made me scratch my head. I explored a few of your intriguing questions, and here's what I've discovered.
Why are bluejays blue? Don't they eat the same worms and bugs as sparrows? Also, why do many birds have such bright feathers? Don't bright colors make them easier for predators to spot and kill? If so, how come evolution hasn't weeded out this trait?
--Ann L.
They say you are what you eat. But they never say, "You look like what you eat." The reason is that in most cases your food has nothing to do with the color of your fur, feathers, or skin. If it did, cows would be green. As for plumage, only male birds have the bright feathers, generally, and for them it's a trade-off. Yes, predators can spot them more easily, but so can female birds. Natural selection is not just about survival; it's also about mating. Both factors influence whose genes get passed on, which is the bottom line in evolution by natural selection. Female birds generally have boring plumage that blends in with their environment because they don't need to compete for suitors. They do, however, need to survive the long weeks of sitting quietly on their eggs. For the male birds--and for the males of many species in nature--it's a jungle out there, and only the pretty survive.
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Why is New York City called The Big Apple?
--Betty H.
New York City is called The Big Apple because it sounds so much cooler than Fun City, the dorky nickname used in all the promotional literature put out by the city's convention and visitor's bureau prior to the 1970s. In that decade the bureau revamped its publications, in part because the tourist industry seemed to be slumping. Someone spotted the term Fun City in the pamphlets and said, "Hey, there's our problem right there." (Fun City sounds exactly like something a publicity department would invent.) A search was launched for a new nickname, and that's when someone dug up Big Apple. The term was coined in the 1920s by African American musicians who made their living moving from town to town, mostly playing little clubs and dives. Those musicians had a saying: "There are many apples on the tree, but when you pick New York City you picked the Big Apple." That nickname was largely forgotten until the New York City Convention & Visitors Bureau dug it up and made it popular again. (Incidentally, Sacramento, California, in a moment of self-deprecation, followed suit by promoting for itself the nickname the Big Tomato. No word yet on whether any cities will be nicknaming themselves the Large Cucumber, the Plump Rice Grain, or the Grande Latte.)
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I have a friend who believes that Neil Armstrong never walked on the Moon. He says the whole thing was a hoax set up by NASA and produced in a Hollywood studio. He has two main reasons for his opinion. First: The lighting on the Space Craft was too good--every word across the entire space shuttle was perfectly legible, almost as if it was spotlighted. Two, the American flag was blowing in the wind. What wind? There is no wind on the moon. Is my friend right? Have I been gullible all these years?
--Curious Kelley
Frankly, your friend's reasons don't impress me. I would expect light to look different on the Moon than it does on Earth, because the Moon has no atmosphere to soften or diffuse it. With no atmospheric distortion, the letters on the spacecraft would look sharper and clearer than anything filmed on Earth. As for the flag, I assume NASA supplied Armstrong with a flag made of some stiff material that would hold its shape, so that when he stepped onto the Moon, the stars and stripes would show. I mean, let's face it--those guys were rocket scientists.
If the Moon shot were faked, think how many people would have had to have been in on the conspiracy. (Watch the credits next time you see a film that has a lot of special effects.) Think about what a great story this would be for some journalist. Then calculate how many journalists are crawling around out there, looking for a story. Then consider how much the tabloids might pay for such a story. Do you mean to tell me that in all these 30-something years, for that kind of money, no one has spilled the beans? People walking on the Moon I can believe, but this other idea? No way! I'm not that gullible.
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If you're going in and out of a room, is it more cost-efficient to flip the light switch on and off or to leave the light on until you're done with that room?
--Len M.
Computing energy efficiency is always a tricky business because you have to take hidden costs into account. Here, you'd have to take into account the fact that a regular light bulb wears out faster if you keep switching it on and off. Even so, according to my power company, it's more cost-effective to turn a light off when you leave a room if you're going to be gone any longer than a minute.
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Why did we evolve the capacity to experience excruciating pain? It seems more logical that we should experience just enough pain to encourage us to pursue a solution to whatever problem is making us hurt?
--David F
Anything less than excruciating pain is probably not going to be "just enough to encourage pursuit of a solution" in some circumstances. You hear of athletes who keep going in the face of what looks to be unbearable fatigue, stress, or pain. Even more astonishing stories are told about soldiers. For this reason, an organism needs to be able to ratchet pain past that point of tolerance in order to signal: "No, really. This time is different. No fooling. Don't try to macho through this one, escape now." If pain did top out at a certain level, which members of a species would tend not to make it? The ones who didn't know when to stop.
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Why does no one remember ever seeing a baby crow?????????????
All anyone sees are big ones!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
--Southern M.
Your punctuation suggests that you consider this an unusual phenomenon that is particular to crows. Actually, however, the babies of any wild animal species are rarely seen because the parents raise them in hidden and inaccessible places. They do this, of course, to keep their vulnerable young safe from savage predators such as...people. Pigeons, for example, are the most abundantly seen wild creatures in any large city, but I've never seen a baby pigeon. Have you?
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Which is correct: "When I was finished..." or "When I had finished..."?
--Anonymous
This is just the sort of question that fascinates language geeks like me. In my opinion, "I had finished" and "I was finished" are both correct, but they have slightly different meanings.
In the first clause, finished is a verb. Had is a helping verb that specifies its tense. In the second clause finished is an adjective. It modifies (or describes) I and it follows the linking verb was.
The first clause is an active statement that tells about an event in time. We can expect to learn what happened next: I had finished my dinner when a giant burst into the room. The second clause tells about a state of being, like "I was red," or "I was happy": The moment that giant burst into the room, I knew I was finished.
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Why do your fingers wrinkle in the bathtub or pool? It seems like they would plump up, not shrivel.
--Lennie H.
The skin on your fingers would plump up only if the water made your inner tissues expand more than your skin. In that case, a hot bath would make your fingertips look like ripe grapes. But the whole point of having skin is to keep out the elements, such as hot water. So the warm bath water touches only your skin, loosening up the cells so that the skin itself expands somewhat. Your same old fingers are then wearing a slightly oversized skin; wrinkles result for the same reason that adult socks look baggy on a baby's feet.
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Suppose it was zero degrees yesterday, and it is twice as cold today. How cold is it today?
--Mark J (and several other readers)
Hmm. How cold is twice as cold as zero? That does sounds like a real brain-buster. But it's a trick question, I think, and I'll tell you why: Twice as cold as zero is not a meaningful statement because it implies no starting point. It's as meaningless as asking, "What's twice as far as Des Moines?" Your first reaction would be to say, "From where?" By contrast, the question "What's twice as far from Denver as Des Moines is?" makes perfect sense and is easy to answer. With the temperature question, then, you might say, "Day before yesterday it was ten degrees centigrade and yesterday the temperature dropped to zero. Today it got twice as cold as that. How cold is it today?" The answer would be: 20 degrees below zero.
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What is the average life span of a groundhog?
--Many readers
(...and if Phil dies, does Punxatawny get another groundhog?-- DDaniel05)
Well, readers, a groundhog's average life span is five years, tops. Phil has been predicting the weather over there in Punxatawny, Pennsylvania, for over 100 years, so the answer to DDaniel05's question would have to be yes: When one Phil dies another is appointed. I guess Phil is not so much a name as a kind of title, like "Caesar."
Incidentally, Phil is probably one of the few groundhogs who actually gets to live out his life span. Because in the language of coyotes (and foxes, owls, wolves, and lots of other creatures) the word groundhog means "hamburger," if you know what I mean, and I think you do.
(Incidentally, some readers have informed me that Punxatawny Phil is not the world's most famous groundhog, at least not hands down. Another candidate for that honor is the Canadian version of Phil, Wiarton Willie, of Ontario. Thanks to David S. and others; I did not know that!)
Your question, though, got me wondering about animal life spans in general: Who has the shortest life? Who lives longest? Where do we humans fit in? Here's what I found out.
Speaking of animals...
How come there are so many pigeons, but you hardly ever see dead ones?
--Anonymous
Okay, the answer to this one--are sure you want to know?--is rats.
Yes, rats and other scavengers--which are creatures that eat dead animals--eat dead pigeons. Sharks, vultures, rats--oh, and pigeons too--are scavengers. In the wild, scavengers make sure hardly anything lies around dead for more than a few hours. In nature, actually, what we call a natural death, or dying of old age, is pretty rare. Most animals get killed and eaten by predators once they get old and weak.
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Why do some eggs have double yolks? (And if you're cooking something that calls for eggs, does a double-yolked egg count as one egg or two?)
--Deborah H.
Double-yolked eggs come from young hens whose reproductive systems haven't matured yet and periodically release two yolks instead of one. They're practice eggs, you might say--perfectly good to eat, but they usually won't hatch. The yolks in these eggs are somewhat smaller than that of a single-yolked egg, so use a double-yolked egg as one egg in a recipe.
Believe it or not, eggs are a pretty interesting subject. For example, before I researched this question I thought eggs were one big cell--the shell being the membrane, the white the cytoplasm, and the yolk the nucleus. But I was wrong.
A cell has these three parts, but a chicken egg is different. The part of a chicken egg that will become a chicken is a tiny speck of protoplasm within the egg as a whole. The rest of the egg's contents is food that nourishes the developing baby chicken. Mammals' eggs have no shell, white, or yolk because--with the exception of monotremes--mammal eggs mature inside the womb.
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Why do we celebrate birthdays?
--Many readers
Well, I do it mainly for the presents; but the idea of celebrating birthdays goes back at least as far as the Greeks. They believed that each person was born with a particular guardian spirit and that honoring this deity put it in a good mood. However, among the Greeks, it was the guardian spirit who got the "presents" (also known as sacrifices).
Medieval Europeans believed people were especially vulnerable to demons on the day they were born: Gift-giving and good wishes such as "Happy birthday" gave them some protection. Maybe there was a little pity mixed in there, too. Mostly, though, only kings and nobles got the birthday-child treatment in those days; no one cared when commoners lived or died.
Birthday celebrations as we know them--kids' parties with cakes, candles, gifts, and all that--started only about 200 years ago, in Germany, where they were called kinderfestes.
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Want to Learn More?
Birthdays are celebrated lots of different ways and not always with cakes. In Russia, people get birthday pies. In the Philippines, kids get birthday noodles, which represent long life. In Japan, children celebrate by wearing a brand-new suit of clothes. And then there's Argentina, where birthdays are celebrated by pulling on a person's ears--one pull for each year he or she has been alive.
Is it true that Clement Moore didn't write The Night Before Christmas?
--Many readers
This theory has been floated recently.
The man who came up with it is wanted by the FBI and police all over the country--not for any crime, though: They want his help. Donald Foster, professor at Vassar College, is a self-styled "forensic linguist." He does computer analyses of literary texts to verify who wrote them. His program measures the frequency of various words and usages, hyphenation, sentence patterns, and the like.
According to Foster, a writer's language patterns are as distinctive as fingerprints. When Foster was a graduate student, he found an old, unsigned English poem, an elegy to someone named William Peeter. He ran his program on it and determined that it was written by William Shakespeare.
Since then Foster has maintained a pretty high profile. In 1996, for example, he used his system to identify the anonymous author of Primary Colors, a fictional exposé of Bill Clinton's presidential campaign. Foster fingered Newsweek magazine writer Joe Klein as the author, and he was right.
Foster's suspicions about The Night Before Christmas were kindled by the fact that the poem has such jolly, hearty language, yet Moore was a strait-laced classics scholar. One of Moore's certified Christmas poems has lines like this:
The steady friend of virtuous youth,
The friend of duty, and of truth,
Each Christmas eve he joys to come
Where love and peace have made their home
Compare that to:
T'was the night before Christmas and all through the house
not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
Could the same guy have written both of those? Foster says no and claims that the real author of The Night Before Christmas was a good-natured farmer and judge named Henry Livingston. (Incidentally, two of Livingston's descendants became president of the United States--both are named Bush.)
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