As a card-carrying, Star Trek-watching computer geek, I have naturally known about a project called SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, for as long as I can remember. I’ve run the SETI@home screen saver on all my computers. I bought the video of the 1997 Jodie Foster film Contact, based on the novel of the same name by Carl Sagan, which was, in turn, loosely based on SETI. I’ve noticed countless SETI references in TV shows, books, newspapers, and magazines. It’s old news, one of those things everyone has at least a basic understanding of, however little knowledge they may have of the specifics, right? Well, as my wife pointed out to me today, SETI is the type of thing that simply wouldn’t impinge on the awareness of a great many intelligent, educated people, having been automatically and unconsciously filtered out by the same sort of mechanism that keeps us all from being overwhelmed by the tragedies of the daily news. And yet, whatever opinions you may have (or come to have) about this rather controversial project, I think it’s something fascinating enough—for so many reasons—that it should be part of everyone’s cultural lexicon.

A Needle in a Galaxy of Haystacks
First, the short version. SETI is a cooperative effort by a great many astronomers, engineers, mathematicians, and other scientists to find evidence of the existence of intelligent life in outer space. Their best-known tactic is using powerful radio telescopes, pointed at very specific regions of space, to listen for any radio signal that stands out from all the background noise and exhibits non-random patterns that may suggest an intelligent source. They’ve been at this for decades, and as yet have found no reliable evidence of what they’re looking for. But then, space, as Douglas Adams pointed out, is really big. If there is anyone out there, it’s bound to take some time to find them. [Article Continues…]

For several years, I’ve been in dire need of some new gadgets. My PDA is so old it died of shame. My TV is an old hand-me-down donated by a friend when my previous TV, which I’d purchased for US$10 at a garage sale eight years ago, went kaput. My home stereo, if you can call it that, is a 13-year-old boom box that was outdated when I got it. And so on. What’s keeping me from updating my tech is not desire, knowledge, or even money—it’s fear of early obsolescence. Long ago, I went through the process of replacing all my 8-track tapes with cassettes, and then my cassettes with CDs, and then my CDs with MP3 files, which now seem quaint compared to some newer digital audio formats. The same is true of all those videocassettes, floppy disks, and many other assorted media that used to seem so valuable to me but are now unwanted trash. So if I buy a new PDA or digital camera today, will the memory cards or computer interface it uses be obsolete tomorrow? If I buy a new TV, will it support next year’s higher-definition video standard? I know that all gadgets, and all media, have a finite lifespan, but I’m tired of having to convert massive amounts of information into new formats every few years. And so I keep putting off purchases, thinking that maybe the next generation of devices will give me confidence that the standards they support will stick around for a while.

It’s Dead, Jim
When a type of media can no longer be decoded, displayed, or presented readily, it’s said to be “dead.” So 8-track tapes, for example, have been dead for a long time. Even though you can, with some effort, still locate a working player, new media is not being created in that format, and the existing media is deteriorating—sooner or later it will be completely unusable, even if you have the necessary equipment. This process is not unique to modern times. Media formats have come and gone regularly for as long as humans have had the ability to communicate. But although technology must march on, we still lose something valuable every time media dies: the words, images, sounds, or ideas it contained. [Article Continues…]

Allow me to open a very large can of worms. English spelling, as virtually everyone will admit, is absurdly complicated—and much more so than that of most other modern languages. While this situation may be good for editors and those who make dictionaries and spelling checkers, it’s bad for nearly everyone else. People learning English—whether as a first language or later in life—struggle to memorize innumerable exceptions to an already long list of spelling rules. But those of us who have known the language all our lives also struggle constantly to write it correctly, lest we embarrass ourselves or betray a lack of attention to detail. Why do we all endure such pain? It seems pointless. And so, as many language authorities have proposed over a period of more than 200 years, why not simply fix it? Why not simplify English spelling so that it looks the way it sounds, and make the entire problem go away? Spelling reform has occurred in other languages, with dramatic results in improved literacy rates and easier communication for everyone. Isn’t it about time we did the same thing for English?

At first blush, this seems like a no-brainer, a long-overdue exercise—one that we might as well get out of the way now, because it will only be harder later on. And yet, beneath the surface of this noble idea lurk extraordinarily pesky issues. As annoyed as I get when I read misspelled words, and as sympathetic as I am to the plight of those trying to learn the language, I find myself very torn over whether I could actually support an official reform of English spelling. [Article Continues…]

Twenty-odd years ago, a friend of mine named Eddie spent about 10 minutes creating a simple substitution cipher, and handed me a little key to memorize—each letter of the alphabet represented by some other letter, number or symbol. I still remember most of that cipher, which we used to pass each other countless notes during boring classes, and if I happened upon one of those notes today, I have no doubt that I could read it easily. We weren’t planning a conspiracy or pondering the mysteries of the universe, we just wanted to be sure that if one of our messages fell into the wrong hands, we wouldn’t get in trouble for making fun of the teacher or admitting we hadn’t done our homework.

About four centuries earlier, someone developed a rather more sophisticated code and hand-wrote approximately 240 pages of it using a quill pen on vellum—complete with colorful illustrations of plants, stars, naked women, and other assorted figures. Whatever this book is, it clearly required an extraordinary amount of time, effort, and care. It also, very likely, made its author quite wealthy. And yet, to this day, no one knows for sure who wrote it, what it says, what language it’s in, or whether it really says anything at all. Linguists, historians, and cryptographers have spent many decades poring over it and subjecting it to every conceivable form of analysis, only to reveal that there are more questions than answers. This text, known as the Voynich manuscript, is one of the last great unsolved cryptographic puzzles. [Article Continues…]

One of my favorite classes in high school was Chemistry. I remember on one occasion, our teacher gave us all a very strange and difficult assignment. It was a list of “real-world” questions to which chemistry could presumably provide the answers, and we were given several days to figure them out, with complete freedom to consult libraries or any other available sources to get the information. One of these questions had to do with the freezing point of water. I no longer remember the exact wording, but the gist of it was that if you had two wooden buckets of a given size, one containing hot water and the other containing cold water (with precise temperatures specified in each case), and if you exposed said buckets to an air temperature of such-and-such, which one would freeze first? The obvious answer, of course, would have been the one with colder water, which led us to believe that this must be the wrong answer. However, it was not sufficient to provide the correct response; we had to justify the answer based on our knowledge of chemistry. Well, despite a great deal of research—and bear in mind, this was back when research meant looking at books rather than searching the Web—I came up empty-handed. I left that one blank, and I even missed class on the day the assignment was discussed, so I never found out the solution to this mystery.

Years later, I was to discover that there are a number of urban myths about the boiling point and freezing point of water, with “hot water freezes faster” being just one of them. I scoured a bunch of Web sites, and came up with contradictory information. But this is not, after all, rocket science—there’s no reason I should have to live with uncertainty about something so easily demonstrated. So I decided to conduct my own experiments and find out for myself. Although I didn’t have a wooden bucket handy, I did have a freezer, a stove, some water, and a digital thermometer. I’ll tell you the results of my experiments in just a moment. But first, here are some of the interesting claims about water I found. [Article Continues…]

I have never had the pleasure (or displeasure) of ingesting castor oil. As a kid, though, I remember watching reruns of The Little Rascals, in which castor oil was used from time to time, and I have a vague recollection that my grandmother may have had an old bottle sitting around somewhere. Whenever I heard castor oil mentioned, comedically or otherwise, it seemed to have a threat attached to it: “If you’re not good, I’ll give you a spoonful of castor oil.” Oddly enough, this threat even seemed to be present when a child was apparently sick: “If you don’t get better, we’re going to have to give you some castor oil.” In other words, this stuff was seemingly so awful it could scare you into recovery, though I never quite grasped why that was. Presumably it tasted bad, but then, so did cough syrup. How terrible could a spoonful of anything be? And apart from tasting bad, what exactly was castor oil supposed to do?

In-N-Out
The short answer is that castor oil is a strong laxative—and presumably, cleansing the bowels in such a forceful manner could serve either a beneficial or a punitive purpose. But then, if it’s a laxative you’re after, there are less obnoxious potions, such as prune juice or even oatmeal. The taste itself, apparently, was supposed to build character. Castor oil is also known to induce vomiting—again, occasionally a medically useful thing, though more often, a symptom one would wish to be cured of. [Article Continues…]

When guests come to our home, we offer them something to drink. We typically have a rather wide range of beverages available—water, milk, coffee, tea, fruit juices, soft drinks, wine, spirits, and perhaps even some Tang—in other words, something for pretty much everyone. I used to tell people, “Whatever you might want to drink, we probably have it,” but this invariably resulted in requests for either beer, which we seldom have in the house, or decaffeinated coffee, which we never, ever have. (We do have to maintain some standards, after all.) It’s not that we have anything against beer, it’s just that we habitually think of it as the type of thing one enjoys in a restaurant or pub rather than at home. I do, however, believe that if you’re going to drink beer, it ought to be a good beer, one made with some care and exhibiting a bit of character. Insipid, generic beers that are consumed by the six-pack with no more thought than cola are not, in my humble opinion, worth drinking.

Several years ago, Morgen and I visited Germany—more specifically, the region in southeastern Germany known as Bavaria. Although Germany ranks third in per-capita beer consumption (after the Czech Republic and Ireland), it is clearly a place where people take their beer very seriously. Bavaria, in particular, is home to the oldest (non-religious) legal standard of food production still in force: The legendary Bavarian Purity Law of 1516, known in German as the Reinheitsgebot. [Article Continues…]

As a San Francisco resident, I like to brag that my city is where Important Things were invented. The television. The jukebox. Bay windows. Denim jeans. The slot machine. Cable cars. The fortune cookie. Chop Suey. And yes, Rice-a-Roni. It’s also reputedly the birthplace of quite a few alcoholic beverages, including Irish Coffee, the Mimosa, the Mai Tai, and the Martini.

Although the martini is apparently less than 150 years old, records of its invention are sketchy at best, and several other municipalities would like to take credit for it. A great many widely divergent stories about the drink’s origin are in circulation, each one as plausible as the next. But since this is a question that cannot be answered definitively, I choose to believe the story I like best. That story says that in the mid-1800s, a miner about to board a ferry in San Francisco for the trip across the bay to his home town of Martinez asked a bartender to whip up an interesting drink for him. The resulting mixture was named after the traveler’s destination, and years later, when the drink had become more popular, the name was shortened to “martini.” This story, I hasten to admit, may be entirely apocryphal, but it does at least seem likely that the name “martini” is in fact derived in some fashion from “Martinez.” [Article Continues…]

I remember what a revelation it was to discover, many years ago, that green olives and black olives come from the same plant; the difference is that green olives are harvested (and cured) before they ripen, whereas black olives are left on the tree longer. Later, I learned that black pepper comes from the same plant as white pepper; in the latter case, the dark outer hull of the peppercorn is removed. Still later, and even more surprising, was the discovery that black tea, green tea, and even oolong tea (in all their many varieties) come from a single plant, a shrub known as Camellia sinensis. These teas vary not only in color but in chemical composition—everything from the taste to the nutritional properties is extremely different from one type to another. The latest rage in designer tea, white tea, once again comes from the same plant. But it’s still full of surprises.

How Dry I Am
The differences in teas are not primarily a matter of ripeness, but of oxidation (sometimes known, rather inaccurately in the case of tea, as fermentation). After tea leaves are harvested, they immediately begin to dry, and in the process, chemical changes occur that greatly affect the tea’s flavor. In addition, the longer the leaves are left to dry on their own, the darker they become. The leaves are usually rolled to break them down somewhat and release juices that will contribute to their flavor and facilitate oxidation. At a certain point, the oxidation process is brought to an abrupt halt by heating (or sometimes steaming) the tea leaves. Green tea is dried for only a day or two, while black tea may be left to oxidize for as long as a month. (Oolong is somewhere in between.) [Article Continues…]

I don’t see what the big deal is about UFOs. Arguing about whether they exist is entirely different from arguing about the existence of unicorns, Bigfoot, or even God. One may justifiably doubt the existence of entities in the latter group for want of convincing evidence, but however certain one may be that they are imaginary, it does at least make logical sense to say they could exist. And I think that if someone actually dug up a unicorn skeleton somewhere and it passed scientific scrutiny, we’d all say, “Well, I guess we were mistaken in the belief that they didn’t exist,” and that would be that. But it does not make any more sense to claim that UFOs don’t exist than to claim that uncertainty doesn’t exist. Have you ever looked up and seen anything in the sky you couldn’t identify? Guess what: that was a UFO, an unidentified flying object. Get over it. Someone else may have been able to identify it, in which case—for that person—it would be an FO.

But of course, what most people mean when they say “UFO” is “alien spacecraft.” That, of course, is in the unicorn category. You can’t prove such a thing doesn’t exist, but until someone produces the goods and it passes muster with the world’s experts, most people are going to remain agnostic, at best. [Article Continues…]

Several years ago, on our first trip to Europe, Morgen and I tried very hard to visit as many sites as possible on our “must-see” list, which meant very short stops and lots of travel time. Venice was one of those obligatory stops, and we were both very sad to leave after only a few days, during which we had managed to see just a tiny sliver of the city. I was impressed by the canals, the architecture, the churches, the museums, and the omnipresent music (everywhere we turned, some little chamber orchestra was playing Vivaldi)—as well as the friendly and accommodating locals. We had no real plan other than to wander around and see what there was to see—which was a shame, because with a bit more foresight we might have planned a visit to nearby Murano, the suburb responsible for keeping Venice’s finest gift shops stocked.

The Spittin’ Image
Murano is a cluster of five small, closely spaced islands in the Venetian lagoon, less than 2 miles (about 3km) north of the city of Venice. Murano’s islands, like those of Venice, are linked by bridges and separated by canals; in fact, nearly everything about the town seems to be an extension of its much larger neighbor nearby. That in itself makes Murano an interesting and picturesque place, but it’s best known for its legendary glass craftsmen. [Article Continues…]

As is clear from the many email messages I receive, readers of Interesting Thing of the Day are, on the whole, intelligent, educated, and clear-thinking individuals. You are not prone to careless or reckless behavior, and you have more than a fair measure of common sense. So I felt it unnecessary to point out, for example, when writing about coffee, that it is a hot beverage that could burn you if you are not careful. I did not have to mention that if you enter a wife-carrying contest you should lift with your legs, not with your back. And I felt no need to caution you against saying “My, how lovely you look today” when speaking Klingon. You are smart enough to figure all these things out on your own.

And yet, after reading many Web sites about fire breathing—each of which begins with a stern warning and disclaimer in large bold letters—I feel strangely compelled to point out that actually attempting to breathe fire is an incredibly bad idea. However impressive it may appear, and however many circus performers may have done it all their lives, I must urge you in the strongest possible terms to resist any temptation to bring fire, or indeed flammable substances generally, into proximity with your mouth. If you fail to heed this warning and in so doing suffer disfiguring burns, cancer, loss of important body parts, or death, well, don’t say I didn’t warn you. [Article Continues…]

I understand coffee. I know where it comes from, how it’s processed, how to prepare it in numerous ways, and how much I enjoy drinking it. When it comes to tea, though, I’m out of my element. It’s not that I’m unfamiliar with tea—I’ve got probably a dozen varieties in my kitchen, and I have at least learned how to brew it in a way that wouldn’t cause my British friends to scowl. But beyond the basic concept of using hot water to extract flavor from dried leaves are many subtleties that utterly confound me. On a couple of occasions, for instance, I’ve enjoyed sharing tea with a friend who’s a Buddhist monk. He can discern those infinitesimal hints of flavor and ineffable variations in character that separate one tea from another, in much the same way a wine connoisseur distinguishes a note of vanilla here, a slight whiff of cherry there.

Then there’s the tea ritual. For me, tea has always been a mere beverage, but in many parts of the world, tea must be prepared and consumed according to a strict set of protocols and using just the right implements. Perhaps the best known custom is the Japanese tea ceremony, a ritual that in its most elaborate form can last hours. Japanese tea rituals were heavily influenced by Zen, which accounts for the simplicity, deliberateness, and mindfulness that customarily accompany ceremonial tea drinking, making it more of a meditative practice than an act of hydration. Every element of the ceremony, from the cloth used to clean the tea scoop to the ladle used to transfer the water must be made, used, and cared for in just the right way. [Article Continues…]

Fuel cells have a very high buzz factor these days. These seemingly magical devices create electricity from hydrogen and oxygen—producing pure water as their only byproduct. Several major cities already have fleets of buses that use fuel cells. Auto manufacturers promise us that within a few years, we’ll be able to buy fuel cell-powered cars that create no pollution at all—thus enabling us to reduce our dependence on oil and slow global warming while saving money with inexpensive hydrogen fuel. Spacecraft have used fuel cells for decades to produce electricity, since the hydrogen and oxygen they need are both conveniently available in onboard tanks. And in the near future, fuel cells may even be put to more prosaic uses, powering notebook computers, cell phones, and other personal electronic devices.

Ship of Fuels
But although fuel cell technology is by no means new, it has yet to achieve large-scale commercial success. One of the main reasons is that hydrogen, the most common fuel, is surprisingly difficult to obtain. Even though hydrogen is present in water, air, and organic matter of all sorts, pure hydrogen is harder to come by. If you use electrolysis to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen so that you can use the hydrogen as fuel to produce electricity, you get into a sort of vicious cycle of energy consumption—it takes almost as much energy to produce the hydrogen in the first place as the hydrogen will later provide when used as fuel. Once you have the pure hydrogen, it’s a pain to store and deliver it safely. So the net cost is fairly high, and the net efficiency is fairly low. If only there were a handier way to obtain hydrogen—or better yet, a fuel cell design that used a more conveniently obtained fuel. Both of these hopes may be met by microbial fuel cells (MFCs), which use bacteria to process virtually any organic matter and turn it into electricity. [Article Continues…]

As a card-carrying, Star Trek-watching computer geek, I have naturally known about a project called SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, for as long as I can remember. I’ve run the SETI@home screen saver on all my computers. I bought the video of the 1997 Jodie Foster film Contact, based on the novel of the same name by Carl Sagan, which was, in turn, loosely based on SETI. I’ve noticed countless SETI references in TV shows, books, newspapers, and magazines. It’s old news, one of those things everyone has at least a basic understanding of, however little knowledge they may have of the specifics, right? Well, as my wife pointed out to me today, SETI is the type of thing that simply wouldn’t impinge on the awareness of a great many intelligent, educated people, having been automatically and unconsciously filtered out by the same sort of mechanism that keeps us all from being overwhelmed by the tragedies of the daily news. And yet, whatever opinions you may have (or come to have) about this rather controversial project, I think it’s something fascinating enough—for so many reasons—that it should be part of everyone’s cultural lexicon.

A Needle in a Galaxy of Haystacks
First, the short version. SETI is a cooperative effort by a great many astronomers, engineers, mathematicians, and other scientists to find evidence of the existence of intelligent life in outer space. Their best-known tactic is using powerful radio telescopes, pointed at very specific regions of space, to listen for any radio signal that stands out from all the background noise and exhibits non-random patterns that may suggest an intelligent source. They’ve been at this for decades, and as yet have found no reliable evidence of what they’re looking for. But then, space, as Douglas Adams pointed out, is really big. If there is anyone out there, it’s bound to take some time to find them. [Article Continues…]

For several years, I’ve been in dire need of some new gadgets. My PDA is so old it died of shame. My TV is an old hand-me-down donated by a friend when my previous TV, which I’d purchased for US$10 at a garage sale eight years ago, went kaput. My home stereo, if you can call it that, is a 13-year-old boom box that was outdated when I got it. And so on. What’s keeping me from updating my tech is not desire, knowledge, or even money—it’s fear of early obsolescence. Long ago, I went through the process of replacing all my 8-track tapes with cassettes, and then my cassettes with CDs, and then my CDs with MP3 files, which now seem quaint compared to some newer digital audio formats. The same is true of all those videocassettes, floppy disks, and many other assorted media that used to seem so valuable to me but are now unwanted trash. So if I buy a new PDA or digital camera today, will the memory cards or computer interface it uses be obsolete tomorrow? If I buy a new TV, will it support next year’s higher-definition video standard? I know that all gadgets, and all media, have a finite lifespan, but I’m tired of having to convert massive amounts of information into new formats every few years. And so I keep putting off purchases, thinking that maybe the next generation of devices will give me confidence that the standards they support will stick around for a while.

It’s Dead, Jim
When a type of media can no longer be decoded, displayed, or presented readily, it’s said to be “dead.” So 8-track tapes, for example, have been dead for a long time. Even though you can, with some effort, still locate a working player, new media is not being created in that format, and the existing media is deteriorating—sooner or later it will be completely unusable, even if you have the necessary equipment. This process is not unique to modern times. Media formats have come and gone regularly for as long as humans have had the ability to communicate. But although technology must march on, we still lose something valuable every time media dies: the words, images, sounds, or ideas it contained. [Article Continues…]

Allow me to open a very large can of worms. English spelling, as virtually everyone will admit, is absurdly complicated—and much more so than that of most other modern languages. While this situation may be good for editors and those who make dictionaries and spelling checkers, it’s bad for nearly everyone else. People learning English—whether as a first language or later in life—struggle to memorize innumerable exceptions to an already long list of spelling rules. But those of us who have known the language all our lives also struggle constantly to write it correctly, lest we embarrass ourselves or betray a lack of attention to detail. Why do we all endure such pain? It seems pointless. And so, as many language authorities have proposed over a period of more than 200 years, why not simply fix it? Why not simplify English spelling so that it looks the way it sounds, and make the entire problem go away? Spelling reform has occurred in other languages, with dramatic results in improved literacy rates and easier communication for everyone. Isn’t it about time we did the same thing for English?

At first blush, this seems like a no-brainer, a long-overdue exercise—one that we might as well get out of the way now, because it will only be harder later on. And yet, beneath the surface of this noble idea lurk extraordinarily pesky issues. As annoyed as I get when I read misspelled words, and as sympathetic as I am to the plight of those trying to learn the language, I find myself very torn over whether I could actually support an official reform of English spelling. [Article Continues…]

Twenty-odd years ago, a friend of mine named Eddie spent about 10 minutes creating a simple substitution cipher, and handed me a little key to memorize—each letter of the alphabet represented by some other letter, number or symbol. I still remember most of that cipher, which we used to pass each other countless notes during boring classes, and if I happened upon one of those notes today, I have no doubt that I could read it easily. We weren’t planning a conspiracy or pondering the mysteries of the universe, we just wanted to be sure that if one of our messages fell into the wrong hands, we wouldn’t get in trouble for making fun of the teacher or admitting we hadn’t done our homework.

About four centuries earlier, someone developed a rather more sophisticated code and hand-wrote approximately 240 pages of it using a quill pen on vellum—complete with colorful illustrations of plants, stars, naked women, and other assorted figures. Whatever this book is, it clearly required an extraordinary amount of time, effort, and care. It also, very likely, made its author quite wealthy. And yet, to this day, no one knows for sure who wrote it, what it says, what language it’s in, or whether it really says anything at all. Linguists, historians, and cryptographers have spent many decades poring over it and subjecting it to every conceivable form of analysis, only to reveal that there are more questions than answers. This text, known as the Voynich manuscript, is one of the last great unsolved cryptographic puzzles. [Article Continues…]

One of my favorite classes in high school was Chemistry. I remember on one occasion, our teacher gave us all a very strange and difficult assignment. It was a list of “real-world” questions to which chemistry could presumably provide the answers, and we were given several days to figure them out, with complete freedom to consult libraries or any other available sources to get the information. One of these questions had to do with the freezing point of water. I no longer remember the exact wording, but the gist of it was that if you had two wooden buckets of a given size, one containing hot water and the other containing cold water (with precise temperatures specified in each case), and if you exposed said buckets to an air temperature of such-and-such, which one would freeze first? The obvious answer, of course, would have been the one with colder water, which led us to believe that this must be the wrong answer. However, it was not sufficient to provide the correct response; we had to justify the answer based on our knowledge of chemistry. Well, despite a great deal of research—and bear in mind, this was back when research meant looking at books rather than searching the Web—I came up empty-handed. I left that one blank, and I even missed class on the day the assignment was discussed, so I never found out the solution to this mystery.

Years later, I was to discover that there are a number of urban myths about the boiling point and freezing point of water, with “hot water freezes faster” being just one of them. I scoured a bunch of Web sites, and came up with contradictory information. But this is not, after all, rocket science—there’s no reason I should have to live with uncertainty about something so easily demonstrated. So I decided to conduct my own experiments and find out for myself. Although I didn’t have a wooden bucket handy, I did have a freezer, a stove, some water, and a digital thermometer. I’ll tell you the results of my experiments in just a moment. But first, here are some of the interesting claims about water I found. [Article Continues…]

I have never had the pleasure (or displeasure) of ingesting castor oil. As a kid, though, I remember watching reruns of The Little Rascals, in which castor oil was used from time to time, and I have a vague recollection that my grandmother may have had an old bottle sitting around somewhere. Whenever I heard castor oil mentioned, comedically or otherwise, it seemed to have a threat attached to it: “If you’re not good, I’ll give you a spoonful of castor oil.” Oddly enough, this threat even seemed to be present when a child was apparently sick: “If you don’t get better, we’re going to have to give you some castor oil.” In other words, this stuff was seemingly so awful it could scare you into recovery, though I never quite grasped why that was. Presumably it tasted bad, but then, so did cough syrup. How terrible could a spoonful of anything be? And apart from tasting bad, what exactly was castor oil supposed to do?

In-N-Out
The short answer is that castor oil is a strong laxative—and presumably, cleansing the bowels in such a forceful manner could serve either a beneficial or a punitive purpose. But then, if it’s a laxative you’re after, there are less obnoxious potions, such as prune juice or even oatmeal. The taste itself, apparently, was supposed to build character. Castor oil is also known to induce vomiting—again, occasionally a medically useful thing, though more often, a symptom one would wish to be cured of. [Article Continues…]

When guests come to our home, we offer them something to drink. We typically have a rather wide range of beverages available—water, milk, coffee, tea, fruit juices, soft drinks, wine, spirits, and perhaps even some Tang—in other words, something for pretty much everyone. I used to tell people, “Whatever you might want to drink, we probably have it,” but this invariably resulted in requests for either beer, which we seldom have in the house, or decaffeinated coffee, which we never, ever have. (We do have to maintain some standards, after all.) It’s not that we have anything against beer, it’s just that we habitually think of it as the type of thing one enjoys in a restaurant or pub rather than at home. I do, however, believe that if you’re going to drink beer, it ought to be a good beer, one made with some care and exhibiting a bit of character. Insipid, generic beers that are consumed by the six-pack with no more thought than cola are not, in my humble opinion, worth drinking.

Several years ago, Morgen and I visited Germany—more specifically, the region in southeastern Germany known as Bavaria. Although Germany ranks third in per-capita beer consumption (after the Czech Republic and Ireland), it is clearly a place where people take their beer very seriously. Bavaria, in particular, is home to the oldest (non-religious) legal standard of food production still in force: The legendary Bavarian Purity Law of 1516, known in German as the Reinheitsgebot. [Article Continues…]

As a San Francisco resident, I like to brag that my city is where Important Things were invented. The television. The jukebox. Bay windows. Denim jeans. The slot machine. Cable cars. The fortune cookie. Chop Suey. And yes, Rice-a-Roni. It’s also reputedly the birthplace of quite a few alcoholic beverages, including Irish Coffee, the Mimosa, the Mai Tai, and the Martini.

Although the martini is apparently less than 150 years old, records of its invention are sketchy at best, and several other municipalities would like to take credit for it. A great many widely divergent stories about the drink’s origin are in circulation, each one as plausible as the next. But since this is a question that cannot be answered definitively, I choose to believe the story I like best. That story says that in the mid-1800s, a miner about to board a ferry in San Francisco for the trip across the bay to his home town of Martinez asked a bartender to whip up an interesting drink for him. The resulting mixture was named after the traveler’s destination, and years later, when the drink had become more popular, the name was shortened to “martini.” This story, I hasten to admit, may be entirely apocryphal, but it does at least seem likely that the name “martini” is in fact derived in some fashion from “Martinez.” [Article Continues…]

I remember what a revelation it was to discover, many years ago, that green olives and black olives come from the same plant; the difference is that green olives are harvested (and cured) before they ripen, whereas black olives are left on the tree longer. Later, I learned that black pepper comes from the same plant as white pepper; in the latter case, the dark outer hull of the peppercorn is removed. Still later, and even more surprising, was the discovery that black tea, green tea, and even oolong tea (in all their many varieties) come from a single plant, a shrub known as Camellia sinensis. These teas vary not only in color but in chemical composition—everything from the taste to the nutritional properties is extremely different from one type to another. The latest rage in designer tea, white tea, once again comes from the same plant. But it’s still full of surprises.

How Dry I Am
The differences in teas are not primarily a matter of ripeness, but of oxidation (sometimes known, rather inaccurately in the case of tea, as fermentation). After tea leaves are harvested, they immediately begin to dry, and in the process, chemical changes occur that greatly affect the tea’s flavor. In addition, the longer the leaves are left to dry on their own, the darker they become. The leaves are usually rolled to break them down somewhat and release juices that will contribute to their flavor and facilitate oxidation. At a certain point, the oxidation process is brought to an abrupt halt by heating (or sometimes steaming) the tea leaves. Green tea is dried for only a day or two, while black tea may be left to oxidize for as long as a month. (Oolong is somewhere in between.) [Article Continues…]

I don’t see what the big deal is about UFOs. Arguing about whether they exist is entirely different from arguing about the existence of unicorns, Bigfoot, or even God. One may justifiably doubt the existence of entities in the latter group for want of convincing evidence, but however certain one may be that they are imaginary, it does at least make logical sense to say they could exist. And I think that if someone actually dug up a unicorn skeleton somewhere and it passed scientific scrutiny, we’d all say, “Well, I guess we were mistaken in the belief that they didn’t exist,” and that would be that. But it does not make any more sense to claim that UFOs don’t exist than to claim that uncertainty doesn’t exist. Have you ever looked up and seen anything in the sky you couldn’t identify? Guess what: that was a UFO, an unidentified flying object. Get over it. Someone else may have been able to identify it, in which case—for that person—it would be an FO.

But of course, what most people mean when they say “UFO” is “alien spacecraft.” That, of course, is in the unicorn category. You can’t prove such a thing doesn’t exist, but until someone produces the goods and it passes muster with the world’s experts, most people are going to remain agnostic, at best. [Article Continues…]

Several years ago, on our first trip to Europe, Morgen and I tried very hard to visit as many sites as possible on our “must-see” list, which meant very short stops and lots of travel time. Venice was one of those obligatory stops, and we were both very sad to leave after only a few days, during which we had managed to see just a tiny sliver of the city. I was impressed by the canals, the architecture, the churches, the museums, and the omnipresent music (everywhere we turned, some little chamber orchestra was playing Vivaldi)—as well as the friendly and accommodating locals. We had no real plan other than to wander around and see what there was to see—which was a shame, because with a bit more foresight we might have planned a visit to nearby Murano, the suburb responsible for keeping Venice’s finest gift shops stocked.

The Spittin’ Image
Murano is a cluster of five small, closely spaced islands in the Venetian lagoon, less than 2 miles (about 3km) north of the city of Venice. Murano’s islands, like those of Venice, are linked by bridges and separated by canals; in fact, nearly everything about the town seems to be an extension of its much larger neighbor nearby. That in itself makes Murano an interesting and picturesque place, but it’s best known for its legendary glass craftsmen. [Article Continues…]

As is clear from the many email messages I receive, readers of Interesting Thing of the Day are, on the whole, intelligent, educated, and clear-thinking individuals. You are not prone to careless or reckless behavior, and you have more than a fair measure of common sense. So I felt it unnecessary to point out, for example, when writing about coffee, that it is a hot beverage that could burn you if you are not careful. I did not have to mention that if you enter a wife-carrying contest you should lift with your legs, not with your back. And I felt no need to caution you against saying “My, how lovely you look today” when speaking Klingon. You are smart enough to figure all these things out on your own.

And yet, after reading many Web sites about fire breathing—each of which begins with a stern warning and disclaimer in large bold letters—I feel strangely compelled to point out that actually attempting to breathe fire is an incredibly bad idea. However impressive it may appear, and however many circus performers may have done it all their lives, I must urge you in the strongest possible terms to resist any temptation to bring fire, or indeed flammable substances generally, into proximity with your mouth. If you fail to heed this warning and in so doing suffer disfiguring burns, cancer, loss of important body parts, or death, well, don’t say I didn’t warn you. [Article Continues…]

I understand coffee. I know where it comes from, how it’s processed, how to prepare it in numerous ways, and how much I enjoy drinking it. When it comes to tea, though, I’m out of my element. It’s not that I’m unfamiliar with tea—I’ve got probably a dozen varieties in my kitchen, and I have at least learned how to brew it in a way that wouldn’t cause my British friends to scowl. But beyond the basic concept of using hot water to extract flavor from dried leaves are many subtleties that utterly confound me. On a couple of occasions, for instance, I’ve enjoyed sharing tea with a friend who’s a Buddhist monk. He can discern those infinitesimal hints of flavor and ineffable variations in character that separate one tea from another, in much the same way a wine connoisseur distinguishes a note of vanilla here, a slight whiff of cherry there.

Then there’s the tea ritual. For me, tea has always been a mere beverage, but in many parts of the world, tea must be prepared and consumed according to a strict set of protocols and using just the right implements. Perhaps the best known custom is the Japanese tea ceremony, a ritual that in its most elaborate form can last hours. Japanese tea rituals were heavily influenced by Zen, which accounts for the simplicity, deliberateness, and mindfulness that customarily accompany ceremonial tea drinking, making it more of a meditative practice than an act of hydration. Every element of the ceremony, from the cloth used to clean the tea scoop to the ladle used to transfer the water must be made, used, and cared for in just the right way. [Article Continues…]

Fuel cells have a very high buzz factor these days. These seemingly magical devices create electricity from hydrogen and oxygen—producing pure water as their only byproduct. Several major cities already have fleets of buses that use fuel cells. Auto manufacturers promise us that within a few years, we’ll be able to buy fuel cell-powered cars that create no pollution at all—thus enabling us to reduce our dependence on oil and slow global warming while saving money with inexpensive hydrogen fuel. Spacecraft have used fuel cells for decades to produce electricity, since the hydrogen and oxygen they need are both conveniently available in onboard tanks. And in the near future, fuel cells may even be put to more prosaic uses, powering notebook computers, cell phones, and other personal electronic devices.

Ship of Fuels
But although fuel cell technology is by no means new, it has yet to achieve large-scale commercial success. One of the main reasons is that hydrogen, the most common fuel, is surprisingly difficult to obtain. Even though hydrogen is present in water, air, and organic matter of all sorts, pure hydrogen is harder to come by. If you use electrolysis to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen so that you can use the hydrogen as fuel to produce electricity, you get into a sort of vicious cycle of energy consumption—it takes almost as much energy to produce the hydrogen in the first place as the hydrogen will later provide when used as fuel. Once you have the pure hydrogen, it’s a pain to store and deliver it safely. So the net cost is fairly high, and the net efficiency is fairly low. If only there were a handier way to obtain hydrogen—or better yet, a fuel cell design that used a more conveniently obtained fuel. Both of these hopes may be met by microbial fuel cells (MFCs), which use bacteria to process virtually any organic matter and turn it into electricity. [Article Continues…]