by Marc Aronson
idea: Can you picture someone sneezing a mini factory out of their nose?
One thing you probably won’t see: teleportation. That’s the transmitting of objects and people from one place to another by disintegrating them on one end, sending their particles (or digital versions) to another place, and reintegrating them on that end. It’s a great science-fiction idea, but it isn’t going to happen anytime soon. It’s been estimated that it would take more computing power than has ever existed just to figure out how to encode the atoms of one single person before disintegrating them. That doesn’t count figuring out how to put them back together again, which we think is the most important part. Especially for the person being disintegrated.
GREAT MYSTERIES: FAKE
CROP CIRCLES ARE strange patterns visible above large fields. They have appeared for centuries. Some are caused by fields that have been planted over ancient stone buildings or fortresses. Irrigation patterns cause others. In the 1970s, very intricate patterns began appearing in England—with no explanation. Some people believed that either aliens were creating the designs with their spacecraft, or that bizarre wind patterns were cutting through the fields. Finally, several pranksters admitted to creating the patterns by tying planks to the back of their trucks and dragging them through the fields.
IN 1912, workmen in a quarry in Piltdown, England found skull fragments. The pieces were brought to the British Museum, which made a stunning announcement. The skull belonged to a long-sought-after “missing link,” the ancient being that marked the evolutionary transition from apes to humans. For 40 years, the skull of Piltdown Man was considered one of the most important fossils on Earth. Then in 1953, the British Museum determined through microscopic analysis that the Piltdown skull had been made from a human head and an orangutan’s jaw, and treated with special chemicals to make it appear old. To this day, no one has identified the perpetrator of this elaborate hoax that fooled scientists for half a century.
WHILE DIGGING A well in Cardiff, New York, during the autumn of 1869, workers came upon the petrified body of a 10-foot-tall giant. The discovery was widely reported, and the owner of the farm charged people to see it, believing it to be a huge, prehistoric man. The farmer eventually sold his Cardiff Giant to a nearby museum, where it became so popular that P.T. Barnum, the showman who founded what later became the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, made a copy of it to show in his own museum. A year later, however, the farmer and his cousin admitted that the giant was a hoax. They had created it out of stone simply to spite a neighbor who believed in giants.
IN ORDER TO GET FAMILIAR WITH THE different kinds of video games, you have to know the lingo. Here are some acronyms from the online video game world.
RPG—Role-Playing Game
MMOG—Massively Multiplayer Online Game
MMORPG-Massively Multiplayer Online
Role-Playing Game
BBMMORPG—Browser-Based Massive Mul-
tiplayer Online Role-Playing Game
MMOSG—Massively Multiplayer Online
Social Game
MMORTS—Massively Multiplayer Online
Real-Time Strategy
MMOFPS—Massively Multiplayer Online
First-Person Shooter
MMOTG—Massively Multiplayer Online
Tycoon Game
MOST POPULAR ONLINE GAMES IN THE WORLD
Video games are popular all over the world. They’re certainly more fun than homework and louder, too. If you’re playing them, you are one of millions and millions of others who are also battling it out online and on their computers and TV screens. Most of them require that you enter a strange universe where you get to choose your avatar (the on-screen version of you) as you prepare to battle evil and successfully complete lots of missions.
World of Warcraft has more than eight million subscribers, making it the biggest multiplayer online game in the world. RuneScape is the largest free online game with more than five million active players.
World of Warcraft—WoW is a fantasy world inhabited by everything from humans and gnomes to ogres and the undead. You select the kind of “being” you want to represent you, and then head off across a planet where you fight monsters and seek fame and fortune.
Lineage 1 and 2—Originally developed in Korea, Lineage is hugely popular in Asia. The different versions of Lineage take you back to a medieval world filled with knights, wizards, and elves.
RuneScape—Gielinor is your home in RuneScape, where you attempt to live a life just like on Earth, running a business and working with other people. You also have. to spend your days fighting beasts ranging from bears to dragons—which probably isn’t like your life on Earth.
Final Fantasy XI—This game has become so popular that there are now movies, TV shows, and books based on it. When you enter Final Fantasy, be prepared to spend your time saving the world from evil villains and nasty corporations who want to control everything.
Everquest I and II—You seek out treasure and learn to build your own weapons in Everquest. With more than 4,000 zones of play, there are lots of monsters to face before you’re finished—if you live that long.
Star Wars Galaxies—Enter this game as a Wookiee, a human smuggler, or any number of other species from the popular Star Wars movies. As you fly through the universe, you’re going to be spending a lot of time riding on landspeeders and meeting up with Ewoks.
City of Heroes/City of Villains—Deciding to become a superhero and choosing your costume is part of the CoH and CoV world, where you must stop criminals from ruining your day. The local newspaper alerts you to the location of bank robberies and prison breakouts and from there it’s up to you to save the day.
Eve—Cut off from the Earth after traveling to a distant galaxy, you need to help colonize an build new worlds. But there are lots of film, species that don’t want you to succeed, and are ready to fight you the moment you show up.
MOST POPULAR KIDS VIDEO GAME SERIES OF ALL TIME
There have been nearly 200 million Super Mario Bros. games sold, with Pokemon coming in at close to 160 million. Odds are you’ve played one or more of them and have you own favorite.
Super Mario Bros.—Mario is the most recognized video game character in the world, a lot like Mickey Mouse is for cartoons. He was called Jumpman when he originally appeared in Donkey Kong, but was given the name Mario to honor Mario Segale, the man who provided office space for Nintendo’s American headquarters.
Pokemon—The name Pokemon is a short-ned combination of “pocket monsters.” There are nearly 500 different Pokemon creatures.
Final Fantasy—This video game was given its name because the man who designed it was planning on retiring after he created it, making it his “final” game. People clamored for more after it was released, and there are now at least 12 Final Fantasy games.
Donkey Kong—Players will notice that there is no donkey in Donkey Kong. The original name was Stubborn Gorilla, which sounded kind of lame. The designers then chose Kong to identify the gorilla character, and the word “donkey” was added because the ape was “stubborn like a donkey.”
Sonic the Hedgehog—When Sega decided to find a new mascot, they settled on a drawing for an animal who was code-named “Mr. Needlemouse.” This cartoon character would
eventually evolve into a hedgehog who turned blue from the shock waves he encountered by running at supersonic speed.
Gran Turismo—This game is named for “grand tours,” the long-distance auto races that sometimes can last for several days. We’re especially fond of Gran Turismo and its high-speed racing and the variety of courses. Sure beats sitting in a real car stuck in a traffic jam.
DO NOT TRADE OR THROW OUT!
• 1999 First Edition Black Star Pikachu card—$30—$80
• Extremely Limited Edition Ultra-Rare Shrink SJC-EN003 (Yu-Gi-Oh)—$3,500 (Reader, help us out here. We can’t find the year for this card. When was it first issued?)
• 1997 First Edition of H
arry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Published in England (the name was changed to Sorcerer’s Stone in America), there were only about 500 of these hardcover first British editions of the book.—$20,000
• 1936 World Wide Howie Morenz #18 [Hockey card]—$50,000
• 1935 Bronko Nagurski #24 Chicle [Football card]—$240,000
• 1910 Honus Wagner T-206 Baseball Card—Over $2,000,000
BILLIONS
BILLIONAIRES HAVE A LOT OF MONEY. More money than you probably know. To show you just how big a billion is, let’s make a billion dollars equal to a billion seconds. Guess how much a billion seconds is. Seems like it might be a year or two, right? Uh-uh. A billion seconds is almost 32 years. That translates to a lot of dollar bills.
How about a billion minutes? That equals 19 centuries, almost 2,000 years. A billion minutes from now it will be the year 3908.
RICH
WHO ARE THE WORLD’S RICHEST people, and how did they get that way? Basically, you have to be smart, focused, and being born rich doesn’t hurt.
Bill Gates ($50 billion) created Microsoft, whose software, odds on, you’ve used. He started out as a teenager who spent every free moment learning early computers. His home is designed to modify the light, temperature, and sound in each room to the preferences each visitor has encoded on a microchip. The house and the land it stands on are valued at $113 million.
Warren Buffett ($42 billion) is a smart investor. His license plate reads THRIFTY, and he is, still living in the house he bought in 1958 for $31,500.
Gates and Buffett give away a good deal of their money, focusing in particular on improving education, just as Andrew Carnegie did. He made his pile as the toughest of the steel men in the 1800s, then paid for a good many of the public libraries around the country.
Carlos Slim Helu ($30 billion), the richest man in Latin America, lives in Mexico, and used inherited money to make smart investments in communications. His father was born in Lebanon and arrived in Mexico in 1902. Carlos made his fortune in the Internet age, but says he is more comfortable writing on paper than on a laptop.
Ingvar Kamprad ($28 billion) has been selling stuff ever since he was a teenager growing up in Sweden. He is responsible for Ikea stores—makers and sellers of inexpensive furniture someone you know has in their home. He lives modestly, owning a 1993 car and riding buses whenever possible. But he is not timid, saying, “Only those who are asleep make no mistakes.”
Lakshmi Mittal ($23.5 billion) was born in India and now lives in England. He used money he inherited to create the world’s largest steel company. His London home cost $127 million, just twice the $60 million he spent on his daughter’s wedding.
Paul Allen ($22 billion) helped found Microsoft, and owns the Seattle Seahawks and SpaceShipOne—which is going to sell rides into space to the wealthy and curious. He has founded museums devoted to things he is interested in, such as music from Jimi Hendrix, World War II aircraft, and science fiction.
GREAT MYSTERIES: SPOOKY
AREA 51
THERE IS A SECTION OF land near Groom Lake, Nevada, over which no planes are allowed to fly and which people without special clearance are forbidden to enter. It is owned by the U.S. government and is known as Area 51. The government tests secret weapons and technology here. And because it is off-limits to just about everyone, it is rumored that it also serves as a storage facility for things the government doesn’t want anyone to see. This includes the remains of dead aliens whose bodies were allegedly recovered from a crash site in Roswell, New Mexico.
On July 1947, a rancher in Roswell found a strange object, composed of what looked like damaged aluminum foil and rubber, on his property. The U.S. Army claimed it was the remains of a weather balloon, but in the years since, the rancher’s family and various military people involved in analyzing the material claimed that it wasn’t a weather balloon at all: It was the remains of a crashed UFO and, even more important, that alien bodies were found at the ranch. There are those who think that the real work going on at Area 51 is an attempt to rebuild the UFO from that crash.
MA: There are those who think that monsters live under their beds, too. What about the idea that the Earth is flat? Some people still believe that; and there are a whole bunch of folks who claim we never went to the moon. Some people will believe anything.
HPN: The government has kept people away from Area 51 for decades. There are no public roads leading to it, and the base is surrounded by guard dogs, fences, and soldiers. Something’s going on that regular people aren’t supposed to see … .
THE GHOST SHIP
ON DECEMBER 4, 1872, a sailing ship named the Mary Celeste was found floating off the coast of Portugal. When sailors from a passing ship boarded the Mary Celeste, they found no people on it. Everything was in place onboard, from the food to the cargo to the sailors’ belongings. If it had been attacked by pirates, all those things would have been taken. If there had been a violent storm, the boat would have suffered some damage. None of the sailors who sailed on the Mary Celeste were ever heard from, and no one knows where they went.
THE TUNGUSKA EVENT
IN A REMOTE AREA OF Russia known as Tunguska, on the morning of June 30, 1908, a tremendous explosion destroyed an entire forest, blasted buildings, and broke windows for hundreds of miles in every direction. Witnesses claimed to see a strange light in the sky as the blast occurred. Some said that it resembled a flying saucer. Scientists didn’t investigate for more than a decade, due in part to how isolated Tunguska was and Russia’s involvement in World War I. But when they did finally test for chemicals and elements in Tunguska’s soil, they claimed that a comet or asteroid had probably exploded just before it hit the Earth. These objects should have left a crater in the ground, yet there was no crater from the blast—only miles of flattened trees and scorched earth. Could something stranger have blown up in that forest—something like a UFO? We still don’t know for sure … .
MA: Could it have been a UFO? Sure, except for the minor fact that there is not the slightest evidence that it was.
HPN: Ah, but the beauty of it is that there’s also no evidence that it wasn’t a UFO. And even today, a century later, scientists can’t say exactly what it was. We live in a universe with billions of galaxies and more planets than we can count. I’ll bet there’s probably some really interesting stuff out there, and it would be cool to think that maybe—just maybe—some of it has actually found its way here.
BERMUDA TRIANGLE
THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE is an area that is located between Florida, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda. Over the past century, more than 1,000 boats and planes have disappeared in this area, some for unknown reasons. As far back as 1492, Christopher Columbus reported strange lights in the area. From that point on, things got really weird. Five U.S. Navy aircraft disappeared there without a trace in 1945, followed by airliners, yachts, sailboats, and large ships.
The U.S. Coast Guard has published documents stating that it “does not recognize the existence of the so-called Bermuda Triangle as a geographic area of specific hazard to ships or planes. In a review of many aircraft and vessel losses in the area over the years, there has been nothing discovered that would indicate that casualties were the result of anything other than physical causes. No extraordinary factors have ever been identified.” Whatever the explanation, vessels keep disappearing there. Some authors have proposed that the area, also called the Devil’s Triangle, is home to a time warp that transports the missing craft to alternate universes or other dimensions.
AMELIA EARHART
A PIONEERING PILOT, Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean and the first to fly nonstop across the United States. She was one of the country’s biggest celebrities when she announced plans in 1937 to fly all the way around the world accompanied by just one navigator, Fred Noonan. Media reports followed their progress all over the world.
The two were flying the last 7,000 miles of their flight from New Guinea to
Howland Island (about 1,600 miles from Hawaii) when radio communications became garbled. Then contact was lost. Earhart and Noonan did not arrive at Howland Island, yet distress signals were picked up from their plane by radio operators around the Pacific Ocean for the next several days. Despite the most extensive search effort by the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard up to that time—nine ships and 66 planes at a cost of more than $4 million—neither Earhart, Noonan, nor their plane were ever found.
D.B. COOPER
ON THE NIGHT BEFORE Thanksgiving in 1971, one of the first hijackers of an American plane threatened to blow up an airliner over Washington State if he was not given $200,000. He was dressed in a business suit and his ticket identified him as Dan Cooper. The pilot agreed to his demands and landed the plane. Cooper allowed the other passengers to get off, and was given the money along with four parachutes. The pilot took off again, and sometime during the flight, Cooper jumped out the rear door with the money and a parachute. He has never been found, but in 1980, $5,800 of the ransom money was found in the Columbia River by a family on a picnic.
