How Does Aspirin Find a Headache?

by David Feldman

  Fred Lanting points out that the snake and staff symbolism continues in the New Testament and asserts that “the Greek myths were corruptions of the stories of Israel’s experiences with this Old Testament healing.

  While we’re on the subject of vehicles, readers are still trying to figure out where the old oil lurks in automobiles after oil changes. In Do Penguins Have Knees? we could account for much but not all of the disappearing oil. We heard from Dan Kiser of Elmira, New York, a student studying automotive technology. If you combine Dan’s account with our previous discussion, we think this Imponderable is finally nailed:

  Assuming that the engine is warm and that it does indeed have five quarts of oil, here is where the oil “lurks.” Most all engines are made out of cast iron and manufactured by a process where cast iron is poured into a sand mold. This process creates a rough texture on the surface of the engine block. Oil will cling to this surface because of the rough texture of the block. Oil will settle mainly in the lifter galley (located directly under the intake manifold). It will also accumulate on the top surfaces of the cylinder heads.

  The crankshaft and connecting rods in your engine ride on a thin film of oil between two bearing halves. If oil was not present here all of the time, your engine would self-destruct due to lack of lubrication. There is about.003 clearance between these bearing halves and the crank or rods. This oil will not drain out during an oil change.

  Oil will also stay inside the oil pump and oil pump pickup during an oil change. The lifters in an engine operate the pushrods, which in turn open the valves. These lifters (one for each valve, sixteen in a V-8 engine) are of the hydraulic type: They are filled with oil during their lifetime. This oil will not drain during an oil change, either.

  If you were to drain the oil out of your engine and then put the drain plug back in, you would have to wait several weeks before any of the oil in the aforementioned spots drained into the pan….

  I have had the opportunity to rebuild several engines. In each case, the oil was drained and the engine was allowed to sit for several weeks. By the time I started to disassemble the engine, residual oil had drained into the pan, resulting in about three-quarters of a quart of oil on my garage floor when I pulled the oil pan off.

  Oil wasn’t the only liquid on your minds over the past year. Many of you are concerned about water, in particular, bodies of water. In Do Penguins Do Knees? we discussed the difficulties in differentiating a lake from a pond. Several readers insisted there was a distinction. Typical was this letter from Bill O’Donnell of Eminence, Missouri:

  As an ecosystem, a pond is defined as a body of water of such a depth that light can penetrate all the way to the bottom, allowing rooted submergent vegetation to grow across the entire bottom. Lakes are deeper, so that rooted plants cannot draw at the deepest parts. They also have differences in temperature, called thermoclines, which ponds usually lack. Of course, many true ponds are called lakes and vice versa, but as you said, people can get away with calling most things anything they want.

  Exactly, Bill. We’re talking apples and oranges. We were discussing geographical definitions, and you are speaking of biological ones.

  More liquids? In When Did Wild Poodles Roam the Earth? we discussed what we are smelling when it “smells like rain.” Ron Smith of Winnipeg, Manitoba, wants to supplement our explanation:

  Just before a storm, the barometric pressure decreases. Rising air reduces surface pressure and produces condensation, quite often resulting in cloud formation and frequently precipitation. The reduced surface pressure causes slight gas release from the soil resulting in a fresh or “earthy” smell.

  A fellow Canadian, Gilles Fournier of Calgary, Alberta, wanted us to know that in local folklore, the “H” in the “C” of the Montreal Canadiens stands not for “hockey” but for “habitants”:

  In the English media, the Montreal Canadiens are often affectionately called “the Habs.” Most people believe that Habs is short for “habitants,” the French word often used to mean “farmer” in Quebec. What do farmers have to do with hockey? Many of the Canadiens wunderkinder came and still come from the rural areas of the Belle Province…so from Habitants, to Habs, to…the H in the C!

  In Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses?, we discussed why there is no channel 1 on televisions. Gilles wanted to add:

  the FCC (and its Canadian counterpart, the CRTC) gave it back to radio buffs because channel 1 was a poor TV performer, riddled with ghost images. That frequency was just too prone to interference from other radio frequencies.

  Most of your complaints this year have been about our discussions of technology. We can always count on a few correspondents to offer constructive criticisms about our explanations of gadgets and widgets. One of our more irrepressible contributors is William Sommerwerck of Bellevue, Washington:

  When Did Wild Poodles Roam the Earth? states that 9-volt “transistor” batteries are rectangular because they take the shape of six stacked cylindrical cells.

  This is absolutely, utterly, completely, and totally wrong, wrong, Wrong, Wrong, WRONG!!!

  The cells in a 9-volt battery are rectangular. They look like little sardine cans, but (as a friend said) without the key. If your so-called “expert” had ever bothered to open one, he or she would have seen this.

  But how do you really feel about our discussion, Bill? You motivated us to call back several battery companies, and all we can tell you is that if the cells of 9-volt batteries are rectangular, the technical staffs at Eveready, Duracell, and Panasonic don’t know about it. Eveready’s 9-volt alkaline battery, for example, contains six quad-A cells, which are now being marketed separately as E-96 batteries and are used primarily in penlight flashlights and laser pointers. Perhaps, William, you are thinking about less popular carbon-zinc batteries, which often contain rectangular or “cake” cells stacked atop one another inside the case.

  Believe us, William Sommerwerck isn’t our only correspondent with a bee in his bonnet. By far the angriest and most vociferous mail we received this year came from the eight readers who violently objected to a letter we published in Poodles about why tape counters on audio and video tape players don’t seem to measure anything. We quoted an electronics engineer who claimed that tapes didn’t run at a constant speed. Thank you, Stan Sieger, Michael Javernick, Dallas Brozik, Nils J. Dahl, Jr., Charles Kluepfel, Jim Tanenbaum, and Bruce Hyman for setting us straight; but we’ll quote the letter from John B. Dinius, of West Hartford, Connecticut, because his explanation is simple enough for even us technoramuses:

  All audio tape recorders (with the possible exception of some really cheap models that would be considered toys) move the tape past the heads at a constant speed, by using a capstan and pinch roller. The function of the takeup reel is not to control the speed of the tape but merely to collect the tape after it passes the capstan/pinch roller device. This constant tape speed is evidenced by the fact that technical specifications for tape recorders always express the tape speed in terms of inches per second (e.g., cassette tapes play at 1-7/8 inches per second).

  Your correspondent suggests that the tape passes the read/write heads of a VCR faster towards the end of a movie because the effective diameter of the takeup reel has been increased by the tape that has been collected. In fact, you can observe (by noting the number on the counter every fifteen minutes while the tape is running) that the tape counter runs more and more slowly as the movie progresses. This indicates that the takeup reel has to turn more and more slowly in order to collect the tape, which is moving past the heads at a constant speed.

  As far as the original question is concerned, the reason [why tape counter numbers seem arbitrary] is that they measure revolutions of the takeup reel, which don’t bear a constant relationship to the things that people really care about (i.e., how many minutes into the tape they are, and how much time is left on the tape). Note that if the reel actually ran at a constant speed, as your correspondent suggested, then the number of revolutions wou
ld be proportional to the elapsed time of the tape, and people could use the counter numbers fairly well, by realizing that a certain number of revolutions represented one minute of tape.

  As Dinius mentions later in his letter, fortunately for us, most VCRs now use time counters, which measure information much more important to the average consumer. Our next angriest group of correspondents challenged the comments of a source in When Did Poodles Roam the Earth? who discussed why trees on a slope don’t grow perpendicular to the ground. Our first correspondent is Stanley Sieger of Pasadena, California:

  Hardly one of his sentences is without error or worse. He attributes “motivation” to trees, claims that light provides trees with food (rather than just the energy to “digest” the food they absorb), claims that in a forest the source of light is “up,” etc.

  But worse, oh so much worse, is his confusing geomagnetism with gravitation and claiming that there are places of “abnormal” gravity on this planet. Wrong!

  The original reference was to the Oregon Vortex in Gold Mill, Oregon, where our source said that “it is reported” that trees grow in a contorted fashion because of abnormal gravitational forces. Scot Morris joins Sieger in (justifiably) abusing us for allowing these statements to go uncriticized. Morris, a regular contributor to Games magazine, personally conducted an investigation of the Oregon Vortex, published in the December 1987 edition of Omni, and proved that this place where balls that appeared to roll uphill was clearly an illusion.

  Another reader, David A. Crowder of Miami, Florida, has a bone to pick with another one of our sources, who in Do Penguins Have Knees? claimed that surge protectors can protect your VCR from damage during lightning storms:

  A surge suppressor will only protect against minor power surges and spikes such as commonly occur in any electrical line…. Lightning, though, is far more powerful than anything any surge suppressor or line stabilizer is capable of handling. A lightning strike will simply blow the surge suppressor as it fries your VCR or computer.

  While we’re on the subject of things technological, Howard L. Helman of Manhattan Beach, California, rightfully comments that our discussion of “Where do computer files and programs go when they are erased?” was correct for MS-DOS machines but not necessarily for other operating systems:

  As far as I know, MS-DOS is the only system that uses the signa character to mark the deletion. Other systems usually have a flag in the directory to mark the entry free.

  While we’re speaking of computers, we heard from Harold Gaines of St. Louis, Missouri:

  I must comment on your response to the question, “Since computer paper is longer than it is wide, why are computer monitors wider than they are long?” Your answer is fine, except that an important fact was overlooked. The reason virtually all computer displays are eighty characters wide (especially terminals on multiuse systems) is because the first popular highspeed input devices for computers were card readers. The now almost obsolete IBM Hollerith card held exactly eighty characters. The first monitors were used as an adjunct to the card readers; the most obvious format was a width of eighty characters (one card per line)….

  As for the number of lines, I am sure that this was chosen for hardware reasons. However, the twenty-four-line standard is a multiple of eight, as is eighty, and computer people love eights.

  In When Did Wild Poodles Roam the Earth? we quoted an official of the American Banking Association who stated that the little pieces of white paper attached to the bottom of our checks were inserted when a typist made a mistake, and that these MICR numbers cannot be erased. The answer was correct as far as it goes, but reader Jeff Reese of Mosinee, Wisconsin, works for a company that sells a solvent that does erase those little numbers on the bottom of the check. He also adds that some banks use small stickers in lieu of a strip that runs along the bottom of the entire check.

  We told you in Poodles that many drivers in cold climates wire cardboard to their grills to keep cold air from entering the engine. But one reader, Bruce Hyman of Short Hills, New Jersey, added some “lore” on the subject:

  Years ago, cars did not have thermostats in the radiator system, and the only way to keep the coolant warm enough (an oxymoron, of sorts) was to restrict the air flow to the radiator. Early cars sometimes had a pullchain from the radiator grill (which at that time was a set of venetian blind-type slats) into the passenger compartment, letting the driver control the amount of air to the radiator, and hence the engine water temperature.

  At this point, these [makeshift equivalents of] “radiator blinds” are totally useless as long as the car has a functioning 180 degree Fahrenheit or hotter thermostat, because the thermostat controls the water temperature. Thermostats are placed in a housing with three hose connections: from the engine; to the radiator; and back to the engine. If the radiator gets too much cooling air, the thermostat simply closes down, and the water recirculates back to the engine through the “bypass” hose.

  In When Do Fish Sleep? we analyzed why most cameras are black. Freelance photographer Grace B. Weinstein of Los Angeles, California, adds two more reasons:

  Most cameras are black, with chrome trim, the chrome trim giving it a “classier” appearance. As a camera with chrome trim gets older and used more often, the chrome tends to wear off, while the black part stays black. It would take a pretty penny to have the worn chrome rechromed, but the black part can be refinished easily with matte paint. Another reason for a camera being all black is that chrome parts would catch the light and bring attention to the camera. A photographer who is working under cover would not like to bring attention to his camera because of the reflective catch lights in the chrome, which would act as a mirror that catches the light.

  But not all our readers were concerned with technological Imponderables. Scott McDougall of Boise, Idaho, wanted to add another reason why dance studios are so often located on the second floor, a weighty question we tangled with in Do Penguins Have Knees?

  As you noted in your answer, dance studios are most often located in commercial buildings, which usually have a concrete floor on the main level. Concrete is hard and nonresilient. Older commercial buildings of the type that typically house dance studios will have wood joists supporting a wood or wood composite floor beginning on the second level; this type of floor is gentler on the legs and provides more spring. That’s the reason given when a dance company once rented space from me.

  Speaking of movement, we received a long letter from Rick Ballard of East Lansing, Michigan, who says that he logs about 35,000 miles per year. He wanted to add to our discussion of why traffic on highways tends to clump together in bunches, which we discussed in Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses?

  You correctly point out that bunching behavior on interstates is partly explained by slower cars in the passing lane, but you don’t offer any reasons why they stay there. Several factors in rural interstate bunching need to be mentioned:

  • Once you have a bunch, it tends to stay a bunch because passing is physically more difficult for the faster cars behind. Some drivers would rather tailgate than pass. Truck convoys are the prime example. They effectively change two lanes into one, and inevitably increase bunching. The faster cars have to be in the passing lane longer just to get around….

  • Cruise control is a mixed factor. It definitely contributes to extended time in the passing lane. Many cars will c-r-e-e-p around the slower car because they are unwilling to speed up slightly to complete their pass. Likewise, they are hesitant to go back into the right lane when passing a spaced string of traffic, because they may have to tap the brakes to wait for a faster car before they can pass the next car ahead. So instead, they continue passing a 63-mph string of traffic at 64 mph, blissfully ignoring the bunch growing behind them. But cruise control may also reduce bunching, by creating a disincentive to tailgate.

  • Drivers with radar detectors, and other fast drivers, contribute to bunching. Cars will frequently speed up to tag behind faster cars (especially with r
adar detectors) because they assume that if there is a speed trap, the driver ahead will either slow down or will be the one ticketed.

  The psychology of drivers is an elusive one, indeed, but few humans are as fragile as the expectant father. Sandra Stout of Colonial Heights, Virginia, felt that we missed the boat in our discussion in When Did Poodles Roam the Earth? of why you see folks boiling water during home deliveries in movies and television.

  Your answer was way off the mark. It has nothing to do with sterilizing things. I noticed that both of the experts you quoted were males, and you being male, the “sterilization theory” made sense. That is because the true purpose of the water boiling is for your gender.

  When a baby is delivered at home, the husband, under normal conditions, becomes concerned about the amount of pain his wife is in and wants to help as much as possible. What he ends up doing is getting underfoot. So the midwife or female in charge will send the male, or in some cases the other children in the family, to boil some water so that he is out of the way but feels as if he is being helpful. That is why you never see the water—it never is used for anything.