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STRANGE BUT TRUE By Bill Sones and Rich Sones, Ph.D. Q. How steep a hill could a car climb? Ten degrees? Twenty? Don't try this in the neighborhood, but could a car go straight up a vertical wall? Yes, 90 degrees?! A. Ten degrees doesn't sound like much but is actually a pretty steep
incline. Still, a car could do this fairly easily. The power train of a
typical passenger car can develop torque equivalent to about half the
vehicle's weight, says University of Michigan professor of automotive
engineering Thomas D. Gillespie. So most cars could ascend a slope of up
to 30 degrees, or grade of 58%.
Four-wheel-drive vehicles with low range can do better, with many
having POWER to go right up a vertical wall. Top dragsters are the best,
says Gillespie. At launch, they accelerate at 5 g's, which would be
equivalent to climbing the wall while dragging four other dragsters behind
it!
But these are just raw horsepower considerations. Next problem:
Sufficient friction of tires against the roadway wall. That's trickier,
but mechanical and computer
engineering specialist Ian Charnas poses a way. Build a road that starts
flat and curves slowly upward. As dragster speed builds, the road curves
up steeper and steeper. The vehicle should be equipped with spoilers--like
upside-down airfoils--shaped not for lift but for downpressure, to lend
added frictional force against the roadway-runway.
Given sufficient power train and speed, the right road curve and
spoiler aerodynamics, the dragster just might be driveable vertically
heavenward! Heavens to old rocketin' Betsy!
P.S. To take this really over the top, says Charnas, a 2001
Bentley EXP Speed 8 at 150 mph develops a reported 3094 pounds downforce.
Since the car weighs only 2020 pounds, "there would be no problem driving
it upside down!"
Q. You're in love with a beautiful mathematician, but she won't marry you until you pass the "card shuffle ordeal": You must shuffle and reshuffle a 52-card deck back to its original order. Will your love be requited? A. Forget ever tasting that first connubial kiss, for as Isaac Asimov
calculated in his "Book of Facts," the number of theoretical sequences in a
randomly shuffled deck is about 80 followed by 66 zeroes. Shuffling once
per second, you would reach a 50-50 chance of success in 2 trillion
trillion trillion trillion trillion years!
So better shuffle on to your next romance prospect.
The calculating lady loves you not.
Q. What's the toughest thing to do in all of sports? A. "In terms of physical difficulty, I've heard persuasive arguments that
the biathlon--cross country skiing/shooting--is the toughest because it
requires the body to do two very different and contradictory things at the
same time," says Penn State sports historian Mark Dyreson.
First, one skis intensely, raising the heart and respiration rates and
creating other physiological manifestations of dynamic aerobic exercise.
Then one has to quickly quiet the heart and breathing in order to shoot
effectively--no easy feat.
From a historian's viewpoint, the toughest thing to do in all of
sports was to be a member of the losing team in a MesoAmerican ball game.
This game was played for thousands of years in ancient Mexico and Central
America, and spread in various forms into much of North America. The game
had deep religious and political significance among the Maya, Aztec, and
other MesoAmerican civilizations. It was a brutal and violent game and
injuries were common.
"Captains of losing squads, and sometimes the entire losing team,
were sacrificed to the gods--giving a new meaning to the old cliche that
winning isn't everything, it's the only thing."
Q. A woman lived to be over 80 but never celebrated a single birthday. When and where was she born? A. February 30, 1712, in Sweden, says Central Michigan University
mathematician Sidney Graham. She fell through the birthday cracks during
the historic switchover from the old Julian calendar to the new (and
current) Gregorian one.
Beginning 45 BCE, the old calendar had added a leap day every 4th year,
making for a calendar year of 365.25 days to keep better in sync with the
actual sun year of 365.242 days. But even this small discrepancy amounted
to nearly a day a century, or 11 full days by the late 1500s!
Following Pope Gregory XIII's 1582 proclamation, a new calendar
was proposed--every 4th century year now NOT a leap year, etc.--and
countries such as Italy, Spain, Portugal and Poland switched over outright,
leapfrogging the 11 days from Oct. 4, 1582 to Oct. 15, 1582.
Others delayed, including Sweden which stalled until 1700 when it "skipped
February 29, reconsidered and went back to Julian dates by adding an extra
leap day (February 30) in 1712, then re-reconsidered and converted to
Gregorian in 1753," said University of Ottawa's Edward Cohen in "Math
Horizons."
Thus any Swede born on that extra leap day February 30 fell into a
no-one's land of official birthdaylessness.
Q. Imagine an amusement park where they excavated an 8000-mile tunnel all the way down through the center of the Earth and out the other side, then had "riders" jump in. Detail this novel thrill. A. Get ready for the most amazing ride, says University of Calgary Earth
scientist Brian Moorman. You'll need a space suit because air must be
evacuated or friction would stop you and trap you inside. You'll need your
own cooling system too, to ward off core temperatures of over 6000 degrees
Celsius.
So between the heat and the 15-tons-
per-square-meter pressure, some incredible new material is required for
constructing the tunnel walls.
In you go now, accelerating under gravity to hundreds, then
thousands of miles per hour--18, 000 mph by the Earth's center, Mach
23--only to reverse this on the other side as the majority of the mass is
now behind, slowing you gradually to a stop 42 minutes later at the
opposite end.
But since no vacuum is total, you'd stop a little shy of the surface, and
unless some precaution was taken to grab riders, they'd drop back into the
hole.
Due to Earth density variations and even the shifting positions of
the sun, moon and planets, small bends in the tunnel would be required.
"If one little error occurred, you'd get pulled too far to one side and hit
the wall. At 18,000 mph, you'd make a really long smear!"
Q. Could a very daring and knowledgeable person hypnotize an alligator? DON'T TRY THIS! A. More than 200 years ago, the Seminole Indians in the swamps of Florida
discovered a peculiarity of gator behavior that is daily demonstrated today
in parks such as Busch Gardens in Florida, says psychologist Jacob Empson in "Sleep &
Dreaming." Called "tonic immobility," when the creature is caught in a
noose and turned on its back, mouth held shut and tail held still, a few
slow strokes to its belly will most often put it into a "trance."
Then when released it will remain completely motionless until touched
again, when it "springs into writhing activity."
The key to holding fast such formidable jaws is that their opening
muscles are not formidable at all, and can be restrained with one hand,
even for a fully-grown gator, says Empson. Just don't be around for the
downward chomp!
Q. English and French dogs sound the same in Nature, as do English and French birds, cows, bees. But do they sound the same in English and French? A. The same dog that goes "bow wow," "arf," "woof" or "ruff ruff" in English will go "ouah ouah" in French, "woef" in Dutch, "hau hau" in Finnish, "wau wau" in German, "wang wang" in Chinese (Mandarin), "wanwan" in Japanese, "guau guau" in Spanish (Spain) and "vov vov" in Swedish, says linguist Catherine N. Ball of Georgetown University.
In English, birds call out "tweet tweet," in Arabic (Algeria)
"twit twit," in Finnish "tsirp tsirp," in Korean "ji-ji-bae-bae," in
Spanish (Argentina) "pi pi."
Cows "moo" in English, Turkish, Arabic, Greek or Hebrew; "muuuu"
in Portuguese, Italian, Ukrainian, Swedish
or Spanish (Spain, Argentina); "mu mu" in Chinese; "maw maw" in Thai,
"booooo" in Hungarian, "boeh" in Dutch.
And busy bees "bzzzz" in English, French, Finnish, Dutch, Hebrew
or Spanish (Spain, Argentina); "bzz bzz" in Swedish; "bezzzz" in Arabic;
"dzzz" in Ukrainian; vzzzz" in Turkish; "zzzzzz" in Italian; "bunbun" in
Japanese; "boong- boong" in Korean; "summ summ" in German. (Send STRANGE questions to brothers Bill and Rich at strangetrue@compuserve.com) BILL SONES is a freelance journalist and for four years coauthored the weekly column "The Numbers Game." His writings have appeared also in Reader's Digest, Discover, Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, Boys' Life and many others. Some of his work has been distributed by the New York Times Syndicate and the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. RICH SONES, Bill's brother, holds a doctorate in physics (1994) from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. His writings have been published in professional journals and in the popular press. He is holder or co- holder of a dozen patents. |
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