by A. J. Jacobs
mechanics, fluid
An insight! A potentially life-altering insight. Gasoline should be purchased on very cold days. The colder the gas, the lower the volume, the less expensive the gas itself. So go to Exxon when you're wearing your fleece and gloves; or if that's not possible, at least go in the morning, when it's cooler.
Does everyone know this?
I had my epiphany while looking at all the equations and diagrams for fluids and their expansion. I knew gases expanded, but had forgotten fluids did as well. I thought of the various fluids in my life--orange juice, water, gasoline--and then I made that nimble mental leap. I took my science and applied it hard.
I wonder how many other hints and secrets and insights are lurking in the encyclopedia, waiting for me to unlock them. It makes me nervous that I haven't been thinking enough.
memory
In a Sherlock Holmes story I read a long time ago, Watson is shocked to discover that his detective friend doesn't know the planets of the solar system--or even that the earth orbits around the sun. Holmes could distinguish 140 types of tobacco by their ashes, but he doesn't know the planets. Holmes explains to the baffled Watson that his mind is like an attic. There's room for only so much lumber up there. So he stores the lumber that he'll find useful in the catching of thieves--information about the coloration of different tobacco types, for instance. Planets are of no use to him. In fact, he's annoyed at Watson for telling him about the planets, and he promises to do his best to forget them.
I've remembered this story for years. Naturally, I forget the name of the story--but the anecdote has stayed with me.
I've thought about Sherlock a lot recently, since I'm trying to cram a lot of lumber into my own mental attic. What's the capacity of memory? Is it really an attic? Or can it stretch indefinitely like a nice pair of sweat-pants? And perhaps more important, how can I make sure whatever I stuff in there stays in there.
Hoping for help, I read what the Britannica says about memory, and though I do learn that the opposite of deja vu is called jamais vu (a false unfamiliarity with a situation, as when you walk into your apartment and feel like you've never been there before), I still feel I could use more instruction in memory techniques. But where? As you may recall, my first brush with adult education was not a pleasant one. It was the speed-reading seminar from Hel (a Norse version of hell where it is eternally cold, a temperature that seems more hellish to me). So I'm not eager to jump back in. That said, I did pick up a Learning Annex catalogue that advertised a course called "Gain a Photographic Memory in 1 Night," from world-renowned expert Dave Farrow. Farrow's write-up says that he's in the Guinness Book of World Records for memorizing the order of fifty-two decks of cards shuffled together randomly. Fifty-two decks. Not fifty-two cards. That's 2,704 cards. It can't be argued; that is an astounding feat. I need to meet this man, so I give adult education another chance.
When I arrive at the community college cafeteria a couple of weeks later, Dave is decked out in his blue suit and blue tie, pacing at the front of the class and nodding his head at students as they trickle in.
A bearded man cracks the door open. He's wearing a red beret and plaid pants. "Is this the memory class?" he asks.
"You remembered!" says Dave jovially.
"Huh," says the man. "You looked better in the catalogue picture."
I feel bad for Dave. Having a stranger insult your personal appearance is a hard thing to forget, even for nonexperts like me. I want to tell Dave that he looks just fine--he kind of resembles TV's James Van Der Beek--and besides, he shouldn't take criticism on his physical appearance from a guy in a red beret and plaid pants.
Maybe because I sympathize with Dave, I decide I like him from the start. He's Canadian, for one thing. Canadians are hard to hate (though there was talk of annexing their country after the Civil War). Dave ends most of his sentences in exclamation points and he reminds us repeatedly that we're going to have a lot of fun. To inspire us, he tells us his hard-luck tale of battling three learning disabilities (ADD, dyslexia, and another I'd never heard of). And now look at him!
"If you know how to use your gray matter, you can remember phone books of information!" His techniques will give us memory power we never dreamed about! We can do it! Amen!
Oh, and by the way, we really should buy the home study course, which he happens to have on sale right here for $129. Yes, adult education strikes again--another infomercial disguised as a class. The home study course pops up every couple of minutes, sort of like a salesman's version of Tourette's. He could be talking about anything--food, books, Ireland--and all of a sudden, there it is, the home study course, back to say hi. I made a game of counting its recurrences.
The other game--and I wasn't alone in this one--is busting the man who memorized 2,704 cards for every tiny memory lapse. It's a petty thing to do, and a nice Canadian like Dave shouldn't be subjected to such small-minded nitpicking, but it sure feels good. At one point, Dave mentions how he was talking to one of the students on the way up in the elevator, and--
"Stairs!" shouts a man from the back.
Dave stops. "Excuse me?" The guy is leaning back in his chair, his hands locked behind his head.
"Stairs," he says.
"Oh yes, that's right, we took the stairs. The elevator's broken." The class snickers.
Dave's class actually covers some of the same territory as the god awful speed reading class. But since I like Dave better, I pay attention when he sings the praises of visualization. To remember a fact, he says, you create a little picture in your head. For instance, to remember my name--A.J.--the class comes up with Ajax, and visualizes me washing with Ajax soap. It was vaguely disconcerting having the whole class imagine me doing the dishes or washing my tub. I hope they imagined me with my pants on.
Regardless, Dave's system seems to work. We memorize the class names, a string of random words, and the properties of various types of glue, giving ourselves a hand after every victory.
At the break, I tell Dave about my project. "I'm reading the encyclopedia from A to Z and trying to learn everything in the world. You think I can remember everything?"
"Absolutely. With the techniques in the home study course, you can definitely do it!"
"But the encyclopedia's 65,000 entries--"
"You can do it! I memorized 2,700 playing cards in two days. In fact, after you do it, you can give me a testimonial!"
On the one hand, I'm heartened. But on the other hand--a much bigger hand--I'm a little annoyed. I wanted Dave to say, "Wow, not even I--world-renowned memory expert--could attempt such a feat. You are the king! There's just not enough room in my attic!" But the home study course it is. I give Dave my credit card, which kind of makes me nervous, seeing as he can probably memorize the digits without effort.
Back in my living room, I listen to CD number two of Dave's Memory Wiz system, the one where he explains how to memorize definitions. "Let's have fun with this," he says. The fun definition we are going to memorize involves the properties of the anti-neutrino particle. The anti-neutrino sounds sort of like "ant" and "newt", so Dave urges us to visualize an ant carrying a newt on its back. Okay. Now we learn the anti-neutrino is defined as a subatomic particle (now picture the ant and newt driving an atomic submarine). It also has no mass (visualize a priest on the submarine waving his arms to indicate that there will be no communion today) and is emitted during beta decay (the priest also happens to be holding a Betamax that is in desperate need of repair). Voila! Simple as that.
It's a fun little picture. And it makes me want to take a nap. This memorizing thing is going to be harder than I thought. Still, I figure I should give it a whirl, and not just because I paid $129 for the home study course. I flip back a couple of pages. Here's a good one to try: melee. Melee was the precursor to soccer and was played with inflated bladders or, by the British, with the head of an enemy Dane; by the 11th century, many melees were played on Shrove Tuesday.
Okay. Here goes: "melee" s
ounds sort of like "melon." I'm picturing a melon in the shape of a soccer ball, and this melon really has to go to the bathroom (that's the bladder). And now it's stuffing a raspberry Danish into its head (Dane's head). Now it's carrying a shovel with two dates (Shrove Tuesday).
Dave's system is no doubt a good one. But the thought of creating fun little pictures for each of the 65,000 entries makes my head feel like it's been kicked by an 11th-century Englishman. I'll probably return to my current system--which consists of squinting my eyes and looking really hard at the page and hoping a bunch of facts stick to my cerebral cortex.
No disrespect to Dave, but I figure it'd be nice to consult another memory expert, maybe one from a school that doesn't have its catalogues on street corners. I force my pride deep into the pit of my stomach and ask my brother-in-law Eric. He's currently a psychology grad student at Columbia University, after having mastered and gotten bored with, successively, foreign diplomacy, computer programming, and investment banking. He allows me to accompany him to a class, though he does make me sit in the back and ask that I stay silent. Afterward, I spend a few minutes talking to his cognition professor, David Krantz, a man with a flower-print shirt and serious glasses.
My main question is, how much can one man remember? And for this, Krantz doesn't have a precise answer. He won't say, "Humans can store two-point-three million facts," or, "You can memorize everything in A to Q, but then you won't be able to squeeze another fact in." Apparently, annoyingly enough, human memory can't be quantified that way.
Instead, Krantz tells me that "memorization is a business where the rich get richer."
Meaning?
"The more you know about a topic, the more you'll be able to remember."
In other words, I'll get richer and richer in history, pop culture, literature--but my quantum physics and chemistry knowledge, which were at poverty levels at the start, will barely climb to the lower middle class by the end. I guess after reading thousands of pages I'd sort of figured this out, but still, it's a little sad to hear it from an expert. I can fill in some holes in my education--but only the shallow ones. The deeper ones I can only sprinkle dirt on.
metric system
I'm a convert to the metric system. I feel un-American even typing those words. I feel like I just admitted that I prefer a nice Linzer torte to apple pie or that I'm too busy to go to Shea Stadium because I have to watch Manchester United on the telly. But I've come to the realization that, kilogram for kilogram, it's just a better measurement system.
I knew very little about the metric system. All I knew was that I resented it creeping into my life--with its liters of Pepsi and ten-kilometer races. Not that I did ten-kilometer races, or bought grams of cocaine, but I did drink the occasional Pepsi, and I didn't like it coming in foreign amounts. Now I say, bring on the metric system. I'm ready for it.
The thing that got me was the exhausting variety of weights and measures out there. Every few pages I'd run into another one--the chaldron, the chain, the link, the wine gallon, the ale gallon, the corn gallon, the Queen Anne's gallon, the gill, the cubit, the avoirdupois ounce, the troy ounce, the cord, the Old London mile, the Irish mile, the Scottish mile, the libra (from which the abbreviation lb. comes), and on and on. And that's not to mention the ways people cooked up these measurements--no doubt after a few gills of whiskey. Like the rod: "The 'rod' was once defined as the length of the left feet of 16 men lined up heel to toe as they emerged from church." What? What's a church got to do with it? Do men's feet change size when they leave a good sermon? And there's the inch. One of the first definitions was the breadth of a man's thumb at the base of the nail. Scientists, however, refined that to the breadth of three men's thumbs--one small, one medium, one large--divided by three. Later, it became the length of three grains of barley. But you might prefer the competing definition of twelve poppyseeds. Exhausting.
Diversity is good in ecosystems and stock portfolios, but in weights and measurements, uniformity is kind of nice. I've come to see the metric system as the Starbucks of measurement systems. Yes, Starbucks is annoyingly ubiquitous--but there's a reason for that. The Frappuccinos are delicious. So stop trying to fight it.
There's plenty to like about the much-despised metric system. It was born during the French Revolution, which automatically makes it cooler. And I knew it was rational--but I didn't know quite how rational. The French scientists defined the meter as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator. And the kilogram was designed to be the weight of one thousand cubic centimeters of water. Then there are those prefixes. I was familiar with the "kilo" and "cento" and "nano," but I was happy to learn about the outer reaches, the "peta" and the "exa" and the "tera." I started dropping them into conversation. I'd pop my head into my boss's office. "I just want a picosecond of your time. Maybe just a femtosecond."
Of course, as with everything lovable, the metric system has its flaws. It turned out the weight of a cube of water was too hard to measure. So that's no longer the definition of a kilogram. No, a kilogram is now defined as the weight of a hunk of metal sitting in this building outside of Paris. This was shocking to me. There's an actual kilogram--a master kilogram, they call it--a platinum-iridium cylinder in a town called Sevres. I had read about how the ancient Egyptians kept a master cubit of black granite against which all cubit sticks were measured. Apparently, we haven't moved past that.
It gave me Movie Idea Number Five: The Great Metric Caper. A bunch of professional thieves--perhaps with Donald Sutherland as the old guy in for one last big job--swipe the master kilogram and plunge the world's weights and measurement system into chaos. Maybe they hold the master kilogram for ransom. And there's got to be a good scene where the Asian thief played by B. D. Wong uses the master kilogram as a jujitsu stick.
Regardless, the master kilogram seems to teach like a profound lesson. In the end, the world hinges on physical things. You can theorize all you want, make abstract arguments for days on end, but eventually you just have to roll up your sleeves and carve yourself a hunk of metal.
Michelson-Morley experiment
Julie wants to see the Einstein exhibit at the Natural History Museum. I agree to go, though I trudge over there with a bad attitude. Maybe it's a rebellion against my father--who has reverence for all things Einsteinian--but I've always been a little skeptical of Einstein. Yes, he was smart. But was he that smart? Was he really a thousand light-years ahead of Dirac and Bohr and all those other neglected shlubs who will never have their faces on T-shirts or children's videos? Was he so smart that he should be synonymous with intelligence itself? I remember being annoyed when a book came out a couple of years ago by a guy who drove cross-country with Einstein's brain. Einstein's legendary brain. Enough already. "I'm going to write a book about driving across the country with Darwin's pancreas," I told Julie at the time. "And after that, I'm taking the bus with Newton's lower intestines."
"You gotta do what you gotta do," she replied, her all-purpose response for when she thinks I'm engaging in crazy talk.
Since embarking on my quest to smarten up, I've gotten even more jealous of Einstein and his unceasing good publicity. Will anyone ever say that I'm as smart as Albert Einstein? Probably not. What about someone saying I'm as smart as Alfred Einstein, his cousin, a noted music historian who also gets a nice write-up in the Britannica? Maybe not even that. So I walk into the museum's exhibit with a grudge.
The first room in the exhibit is filled with domestic relics of the man himself. A couple of pipes that Einstein puffed upon, a compass he fiddled with, a little puzzle he figured out as a kid. In a glass case, I find a letter he wrote to his wife in an attempt to save his doomed marriage. It read: "You will make sure that I get my three meals a day in my room. You are neither to expect intimacy nor to reproach me in any way."
Ha! That's not so smart. That's not so smart at all. I may not have a Nobel Prize on my mantle, but I know you don't write an ultimatum like that to a woman and expect
it to work. That's about as likely to work as aeromancy (predicting the future based on atmospheric phenomena).
I wander over to another little plaque. This one says Einstein refused to celebrate birthdays. As he explained: "It is a known fact that I was born, and that is enough." This is good. I go fetch Julie, knowing she'll disapprove. Julie loves birthdays. She manages to stretch her own birthday into a series of celebrations she calls a birth week, and which she's threatening to expand to a birth month.
"Einstein hated birthdays," I say. "Pretty dumb, huh?"
"Wouldn't be my choice," she says. "But then again, I'm not busy solving the mysteries of the universe."
Not quite the outrage I was hoping for.
The next room in the exhibit is devoted to Einstein's physics. I decide it's time I understood them once and for all. How hard can they be? Over the years, I've had sporadic flashes of comprehension. When I was about ten, my dad explained to me that, under the special theory of relativity, those people who reside on the highest floors of apartment buildings live longer than those who make their homes on the lower floors. This is because the earth's rotation makes the higher floors move through space faster than the lower floors, just as the tip of the Ferris wheel is going faster than the hub. Relativity says time slows down as you go faster. So odd as it may seem, you actually age less if you live in the penthouse. About a trillionth of a second less, but still, it's something. This always made me envious of my friends who lived in penthouses. The lucky bastards. As a kid, I remember spending many afternoons at Jonathan Green's twenty-ninth-floor apartment, and not just because we enjoyed tossing cantaloupes off the balcony and watching the splatter patterns. No, I was actually lengthening my life.
