If you look up the term water clock in a certain online dictionary (which will remain nameless, though you can find it easily enough), you will find that the definition, in its entirety, is “A clepsydra.” (And you thought lexicographers didn’t have a sense of humor.) I’d like to be at least slightly more helpful here by telling you a bit about one of the oldest devices for measuring time.

Of course, units of measure like seconds, minutes, and hours are a mere arbitrary fiction. Days, years, seasons, and perhaps months (at least lunar months) correspond to easily observed natural phenomena, but any unit shorter than a day is a pure human invention. Had history unwound differently, a second might be shorter or longer than it is now, or we might have divided the day into, say, 537 bligrots. The specific choices our distant ancestors made are, in the grand scheme of things, not nearly as important as the mere fact that they figured out a way to quantify time, repeatably and fairly accurately. It is incalculably important that we be able to determine such things as how long a lawyer should be allowed to speak, whether the athlete who won the race today went faster than the athlete who won yesterday, or when lunch begins. [Article Continues…]

My life is full of contradictions, as is true for many of us. For example, if you asked me what my top five favorite things in life are, sleep would certainly be high on that list. I love to sleep—it’s not merely a necessity, it’s a joy. Circumstances permitting, I’d sleep 12 hours a day if I were physically able to. On the other hand, my actions don’t bear out this enthusiasm for sleep. I drink outrageous amounts of caffeinated beverages. I’m usually still awake and working at 2 or 3 a.m. And frankly, I prefer a lifestyle that’s at least partly nocturnal—stay up late, wake up late. This in itself doesn’t result in a contradiction; if I went to bed every morning at 3 and woke up at noon, I could enjoy a nice long stretch of sleep and still maintain my desired schedule. But it generally doesn’t work that way. There are too many things to do—deadlines to meet, appointments to keep—and the rest of the world doesn’t conform to my schedule. So I end up getting out of bed after only six or seven hours of sleep (which is far too little for me) and feeling tired most of the day.

I recognize that this is a problem. When I’m sleepy most of the time, I can’t think clearly, and I am much less effective at my work. I don’t like this situation, and I sense that it may be taking some toll on my physical and mental health. So my New Year’s resolution this year was to get plenty of sleep. I think I kept it for about a week, but hope springs eternal: maybe I’ll sleep next month or, if not, the one after that. Sooner or later, though, something’s got to give, because the effects of too little sleep are cumulative—what sleep researchers refer to as sleep debt. [Article Continues…]

Do you ever have one of those days when you just can’t seem to get yourself moving? Or maybe, no matter how hard you try to get caught up, you always seem to lag behind? I have those kinds of days all the time—and so, apparently, did ancient Greek philosophers. One of them, Zeno of Elea, devised an ingenious set of philosophical statements that amount to “proof” that motion is impossible, despite all evidence to the contrary. These statements are known as Zeno’s Paradoxes (or sometimes, collectively, as Zeno’s Paradox), and they continue to vex philosophers to this day.

I first became aware of Zeno and his ideas while working on my undergraduate degree in philosophy. I was reading Douglas Hofstadter’s Pulitzer-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, in which philosophical issues are frequently presented in hypothetical dialogs between Achilles, the Greek warrior legendary for his swiftness, and a Tortoise. Lewis Carroll had used the same pair of characters, but it was Zeno who first put them together—in the fifth century B.C. In Hofstadter’s retelling of the story, Zeno himself makes a guest appearance in order to explain to Achilles and the Tortoise that motion is not merely impossible, it “unexists.” The story is based on one of Zeno’s eight so-called paradoxes, of which only three or four are usually mentioned. Allow me to give you a very brief taste. [Article Continues…]

Among the many urban myths circulating on the internet is a document called “Life in the 1500s” that began as an anonymous email message and has since found its way onto countless Web sites that took it as legitimate history. Among other things, this list of alleged facts about Renaissance life purports to give the origins of numerous English expressions, such as “raining cats and dogs,” “chew the fat,” and “dead ringer.” Unfortunately, although there are a few kernels of truth in the message, most of it is completely false. Whether it was an intentional hoax or merely the product of someone with a good imagination and poor research skills, it has misled a lot of people into mistaken etymological beliefs.

Take, for example, the claim that in the 1500s, people were often unintentionally buried alive—as evidenced by scratch marks on the insides of coffins that were later exhumed for some reason. On hearing such stories, public fear of being buried alive allegedly resulted in a new method of burial, in which a string was tied to the wrist of the departed and fed through a hole in the coffin all the way to the surface, where it attached to a bell. Were the person to awaken, the slightest arm movement would ring the bell, alerting someone to dig them up. Hence—so the tale goes—the origin of the expressions “saved by the bell” and “dead ringer.” [Article Continues…]

Let’s say you’re besieged by a bunch of Orcs and Nazgûl in some fictional city in the realm of Gondor. And let’s say your ancient allies from far away in the land of Rohan are your only faint hope for rescue. How might you call out for help over such a great distance, especially with a bunch of mountains between you and Rohan? You would ignite a large pile of firewood that has been waiting ready at the top of a tower for just such a purpose. And many miles away, on the top of the nearest mountain, a beacon-warden would notice this fire and light one of his own. And then the warden on the next mountain over would do the same thing, and so on, until seven mountains later, your friends saw the fire nearest them and got the message.

Tolkien mentioned this event only in passing on the opening page of his book The Return of the King, but Peter Jackson made it into a dramatic scene in his Oscar-winning 2003 film version of the story. It was a moving and visually stunning portrayal of a desperate plea for aid that, given the circumstances and technological resources available, could not have been conveyed in any other way. And if you understand this long-distance visual method of relaying information, you’ve grasped the basics of the optical telegraph, which predated the more commonly known electric telegraph by decades. [Article Continues…]

Mail used to be one of my favorite things in the world. I was always excited to see what might be in the mailbox today: a letter from one of my many correspondents, a magazine, a check, photos I’d sent out for processing, a gift from a friend or relative, a catalog full of interesting things, or a package containing one of the interesting things I’d ordered from the catalog. Some days I got nothing, and many days I got only bills or junk mail. But the tiny thrill of finding something interesting in my mailbox was always something to look forward to.

Times have changed. Although the U.S. Postal Service is still doing brisk business and is in no imminent danger of disappearing due to lack of interest, my own personal love affair with mail has faded. I still have lots of correspondents, but we communicate electronically. I receive and pay most of my bills online too. Photos, of course, go straight from my camera to a Web site or printer. And the whole notion of “mail order” seems quaintly anachronistic, even though the mail carrier is sometimes the person who delivers the stuff I order online. Yes, I do still subscribe to some paper magazines and get the occasional check or letter in the mail, but for the most part, the spark is gone. [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…]

If you look up the term water clock in a certain online dictionary (which will remain nameless, though you can find it easily enough), you will find that the definition, in its entirety, is “A clepsydra.” (And you thought lexicographers didn’t have a sense of humor.) I’d like to be at least slightly more helpful here by telling you a bit about one of the oldest devices for measuring time.

Of course, units of measure like seconds, minutes, and hours are a mere arbitrary fiction. Days, years, seasons, and perhaps months (at least lunar months) correspond to easily observed natural phenomena, but any unit shorter than a day is a pure human invention. Had history unwound differently, a second might be shorter or longer than it is now, or we might have divided the day into, say, 537 bligrots. The specific choices our distant ancestors made are, in the grand scheme of things, not nearly as important as the mere fact that they figured out a way to quantify time, repeatably and fairly accurately. It is incalculably important that we be able to determine such things as how long a lawyer should be allowed to speak, whether the athlete who won the race today went faster than the athlete who won yesterday, or when lunch begins. [Article Continues…]

My life is full of contradictions, as is true for many of us. For example, if you asked me what my top five favorite things in life are, sleep would certainly be high on that list. I love to sleep—it’s not merely a necessity, it’s a joy. Circumstances permitting, I’d sleep 12 hours a day if I were physically able to. On the other hand, my actions don’t bear out this enthusiasm for sleep. I drink outrageous amounts of caffeinated beverages. I’m usually still awake and working at 2 or 3 a.m. And frankly, I prefer a lifestyle that’s at least partly nocturnal—stay up late, wake up late. This in itself doesn’t result in a contradiction; if I went to bed every morning at 3 and woke up at noon, I could enjoy a nice long stretch of sleep and still maintain my desired schedule. But it generally doesn’t work that way. There are too many things to do—deadlines to meet, appointments to keep—and the rest of the world doesn’t conform to my schedule. So I end up getting out of bed after only six or seven hours of sleep (which is far too little for me) and feeling tired most of the day.

I recognize that this is a problem. When I’m sleepy most of the time, I can’t think clearly, and I am much less effective at my work. I don’t like this situation, and I sense that it may be taking some toll on my physical and mental health. So my New Year’s resolution this year was to get plenty of sleep. I think I kept it for about a week, but hope springs eternal: maybe I’ll sleep next month or, if not, the one after that. Sooner or later, though, something’s got to give, because the effects of too little sleep are cumulative—what sleep researchers refer to as sleep debt. [Article Continues…]

Do you ever have one of those days when you just can’t seem to get yourself moving? Or maybe, no matter how hard you try to get caught up, you always seem to lag behind? I have those kinds of days all the time—and so, apparently, did ancient Greek philosophers. One of them, Zeno of Elea, devised an ingenious set of philosophical statements that amount to “proof” that motion is impossible, despite all evidence to the contrary. These statements are known as Zeno’s Paradoxes (or sometimes, collectively, as Zeno’s Paradox), and they continue to vex philosophers to this day.

I first became aware of Zeno and his ideas while working on my undergraduate degree in philosophy. I was reading Douglas Hofstadter’s Pulitzer-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, in which philosophical issues are frequently presented in hypothetical dialogs between Achilles, the Greek warrior legendary for his swiftness, and a Tortoise. Lewis Carroll had used the same pair of characters, but it was Zeno who first put them together—in the fifth century B.C. In Hofstadter’s retelling of the story, Zeno himself makes a guest appearance in order to explain to Achilles and the Tortoise that motion is not merely impossible, it “unexists.” The story is based on one of Zeno’s eight so-called paradoxes, of which only three or four are usually mentioned. Allow me to give you a very brief taste. [Article Continues…]

Among the many urban myths circulating on the internet is a document called “Life in the 1500s” that began as an anonymous email message and has since found its way onto countless Web sites that took it as legitimate history. Among other things, this list of alleged facts about Renaissance life purports to give the origins of numerous English expressions, such as “raining cats and dogs,” “chew the fat,” and “dead ringer.” Unfortunately, although there are a few kernels of truth in the message, most of it is completely false. Whether it was an intentional hoax or merely the product of someone with a good imagination and poor research skills, it has misled a lot of people into mistaken etymological beliefs.

Take, for example, the claim that in the 1500s, people were often unintentionally buried alive—as evidenced by scratch marks on the insides of coffins that were later exhumed for some reason. On hearing such stories, public fear of being buried alive allegedly resulted in a new method of burial, in which a string was tied to the wrist of the departed and fed through a hole in the coffin all the way to the surface, where it attached to a bell. Were the person to awaken, the slightest arm movement would ring the bell, alerting someone to dig them up. Hence—so the tale goes—the origin of the expressions “saved by the bell” and “dead ringer.” [Article Continues…]

Let’s say you’re besieged by a bunch of Orcs and Nazgûl in some fictional city in the realm of Gondor. And let’s say your ancient allies from far away in the land of Rohan are your only faint hope for rescue. How might you call out for help over such a great distance, especially with a bunch of mountains between you and Rohan? You would ignite a large pile of firewood that has been waiting ready at the top of a tower for just such a purpose. And many miles away, on the top of the nearest mountain, a beacon-warden would notice this fire and light one of his own. And then the warden on the next mountain over would do the same thing, and so on, until seven mountains later, your friends saw the fire nearest them and got the message.

Tolkien mentioned this event only in passing on the opening page of his book The Return of the King, but Peter Jackson made it into a dramatic scene in his Oscar-winning 2003 film version of the story. It was a moving and visually stunning portrayal of a desperate plea for aid that, given the circumstances and technological resources available, could not have been conveyed in any other way. And if you understand this long-distance visual method of relaying information, you’ve grasped the basics of the optical telegraph, which predated the more commonly known electric telegraph by decades. [Article Continues…]

Mail used to be one of my favorite things in the world. I was always excited to see what might be in the mailbox today: a letter from one of my many correspondents, a magazine, a check, photos I’d sent out for processing, a gift from a friend or relative, a catalog full of interesting things, or a package containing one of the interesting things I’d ordered from the catalog. Some days I got nothing, and many days I got only bills or junk mail. But the tiny thrill of finding something interesting in my mailbox was always something to look forward to.

Times have changed. Although the U.S. Postal Service is still doing brisk business and is in no imminent danger of disappearing due to lack of interest, my own personal love affair with mail has faded. I still have lots of correspondents, but we communicate electronically. I receive and pay most of my bills online too. Photos, of course, go straight from my camera to a Web site or printer. And the whole notion of “mail order” seems quaintly anachronistic, even though the mail carrier is sometimes the person who delivers the stuff I order online. Yes, I do still subscribe to some paper magazines and get the occasional check or letter in the mail, but for the most part, the spark is gone. [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…]