Are Lobsters Ambidextrous?

by David Feldman

  Thomas M. Laronge, whose Thomas M. Laronge, Inc., consults on water treatment and other environmental issues, isn’t quite as sanguine. He points out that water usage tends to be lower in winter than in summer, especially in agricultural areas, and that evaporation consumption is much lower. If the demand is low enough so that water isn’t constantly flowing within the tower, the water can easily freeze.

  Many water towers are equipped with a cathodic protection system, designed to counteract corrosion. The natural corrosion tends to make the water inside the tower flow in one direction; the cathodic protection system acts as a bucking mechanism to send the current flow in the opposite direction. A byproduct of this system is the constant movement of water, and a cessation of any tendency toward freezing.

  Even the first caller wasn’t entirely wrong. Thomas Laronge says that in rare instances, in small water systems, water towers may be insulated and/or heated by a jacketing system, in which warm water flows on the outside of the jacket and cool water flows on the inside of the jacket to prevent freezing.

  Even if the water in the tower does freeze, service may continue without any problems at all. Laronge explains:

  The density of water is greater than the density of ice. Therefore, if an ice plug forms, it will tend to form on the top of the water surface. Water can still flow through the bottom of the tower. Only the volume is restricted.

  Another reason why water towers may not freeze completely is that sometimes an insulating layer of ice forms within the tower. The ice actually transfers heat slower than does the metal of the tower. Therefore, the ice barrier actually reduces the tendency for water towers to freeze.

  Submitted by an anonymous caller on the Mike Rosen Show, KOA-AM, in Denver, Colorado.

  Why do quarterbacks call the snap with the exclamation “hut”?

  Put men in a uniform. Give them a helmet. And they all start speaking alike. At least, that’s what all of our football sources claimed. Pat Harmon, historian at the College Football Hall of Fame, was typical:

  In Army drills, the drill sergeant counts off: “Hut-2-3-4.” He repeats “Hut-2-3-4” until the men get in right. Football language has copied the drill sergeant.

  We’ll have to believe our football authorities, since no evidence exists that the “hut” barked by quarterbacks has anything to do with little thatched houses.

  In fact, “hut” wasn’t always used as the signal. Joe Horrigan, of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, sent us a photocopy of a section of the 1921 Spalding’s How to Play Football manual that indicates that perhaps we aren’t as hip as our forbears:

  When shift formations are tried, the quarter-back should give his signal when the men are in their original places. Then after calling the signal [he] can use the word “hip” for the first shift and then repeat for the players to take up their new positions on the line of scrimmage.

  Our guess is that the only important virtue of “hut” is that it contains one syllable.

  Submitted by Paul Ruggiero of Blacksburg, Virginia.

  Why are elections in the United States held on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November rather than on the first Tuesday in November?

  We had almost given up trying to answer this Imponderable when we contacted Professor Robert J. Dinkin, of California State University, Fresno, who specializes in the history of U.S. elections. Although Dinkin says he has never seen anything written on this subject, he does have an interesting conjecture.

  Hallowmas, also known as All Saints’ Day, was celebrated in most locales on November 1. Although candy companies have now insured that Hallow’s Eve is the bigger holiday, All Saints’ Day was a major celebration in the past. Therefore, as Dinkin speculates: “By making elections on the first Tuesday after the first Monday, no such scheduling conflict could occur.” We could only find one other conjecture, from Megan Gillispie, of the League of Women Voters, who claims that the contorted “first Tuesday after the first Monday” language was simply an attempt to prevent elections from landing on the first day of the month “because merchants were busy closing their accounting books and courthouses were often busy with beginning of the month business.”

  No one seems able to find any primary sources to bolster their arguments. Can any of our enterprising readers?

  Submitted by Barry Gluck of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Thanks also to Lynda Frank of Omaha, Nebraska.

  How do dehumidifiers sense the humidity level in the air and “know” when to shut off automatically?

  Not all dehumidifiers shut off automatically. But most that do work like this: Ambient air is drawn into a chamber or pipe via a fan. The outside air passes over a sensor in the humidistat, the device that determines whether or not the air exceeds the humidity you’ve set as your standard. If the air meets with your requirements, the air will pass through. But if the air in the room exceeds your desired humidity level, the air is heated by a hot-air dryer (or, less frequently, a desiccant chamber) before it is sent back into the room.

  How does the humidistat determine the humidity of the ambient air? J. C. Laverick, technical director of dehumidifier manufacturer Ebac Ltd., explains:

  At the heart of the humidistat [behind the console] is a sensing element in the shape of an endless belt made from Nylon 6. This material has the characteristic of changing length in proportion to the amount of moisture it contains. At higher humidity levels its length expands, and it contracts at lower humidity levels. This change of length is converted into the force required to operate the [snap-action] microswitch and hence the dehumidifier.

  Submitted by Alan Wright of Mansfield Center, Connecticut.

  What do you call that little groove in the center of our upper lips?

  Sorry, we can’t answer this question. It is hardly an Imponderable, since it has been answered in scores of trivia books. Heck, this question has been posed by so many stand-up comedians on bad cable television shows, we refuse to answer on principle.

  Submitted by too many readers.

  What is the purpose of the little indentation in the center of our upper lips?

  If you rephrase your Imponderable in the form of a proper question, you can weasel just about anything out of us. How can we write about the indentation without mentioning its name? OK guys…it’s called the philtrum. You’ll be proud to know that we have a groove running down our upper lip for absolutely no good reason, as William P. Jollie, professor and chairman of anatomy at the Medical College of Virginia, explains:

  The indentation in the center of our upper lip is a groove, or raphe, that forms embryonically by merging paired right and left processes that make up our upper jaw. It has no function, just as many such midline merger marks, or raphes, have no function. We have quite a few merger-lines on our bodies: a raphe down the upper surface of our tongues; a grooved notch under the point of our chins; and a raphe in the midline of our palates. There are also several in the genital area, both male and female.

  Anatomically, the raphe on our upper lip is called the philtrum, an interesting word derived from the Greek word philter, which even in English means a love potion. I confess I don’t see a connection, but many anatomical terms are peculiar in origin, if not downright funny.

  Speaking of funny, it is our earnest hope that after the information in this chapter is disseminated, every stand-up comedian, standing before the inevitable brick wall, will stop doing routines about philtrums. Enough is enough.

  Submitted by Bruce Hyman of Short Hills, New Jersey. Thanks also to three-year-old Michael Joshua Lim of Livonia, Michigan.

  What happens to an ant that gets separated from its colony? Does it try to relocate the colony? Can it survive if it can’t find the colony?

  As we all learned in elementary school, ants are social animals, but their organization doesn’t just provide them with buddies—it furnishes them with the food and protection they need to survive in a hostile environment.

  All the experts we consulted indicated that an isolated work
er ant, left to its own devices, would likely die a week or two before its normal three-week lifespan. And it would probably spend that foreshortened time wandering around, confused, looking for its colony.

  Ants help each other trace the path between food sources and the colony by laying down chemical trails called pheromones. Our hypothetical solitary ant might try following pheromone trails it encounters, hoping they will lead it back home. Worker ants in a given colony are all the daughters of the original queen and can’t simply apply for admission to a new colony.

  Three dangers, in particular, imperil a lost ant. The first, and most obvious, is a lack of food. Ants are natural foragers but are used to receiving cues from other ants about where to search for food. A single ant would not have the capacity to store enough food to survive for long. Furthermore, ants don’t always eat substances in the form they are gathered. Cincinnati naturalist Kathy Biel-Morgan provided us with the example of the leaf-cutter ant. The leaf-cutter ant finds plants and brings leaves back to the nest, where the material is ground up and used in the colony’s fungus garden. The ants then eat the fruiting body of the fungus. Without the organizational assistance of the colony, a leaf does nothing to sate the appetite of a leaf-cutter ant.

  The second danger is cold. Ants are ectotherms, animals that need heat but are unable to generate it themselves. When it is cold, ants in colonies will seek the protective covering of the nest. If left to its own devices, a deserted ant would probably try to find a rock or the crack of a sidewalk to use as cover, which may or may not be enough protection to keep it from freezing.

  The third problem our lonesome ant would encounter is nasty creatures that think of the ant as their dinner fare. Collectively, ants help protect one another. Alone, an ant must fend off a variety of predators, including other ants. Biel-Morgan compared the vulnerability of the ant, on its own, to a single tourist in New York City. And that is vulnerable, indeed.

  Submitted by Cary Hillman of Kokomo, Indiana.

  Why is the color purple associated with royalty?

  Although pagans once believed that purple dye was the creation of Satan, we actually have the Phoenicians to thank for the association of purple with royalty. Somehow, and we always wonder how anyone ever stumbles upon this sort of stuff, an anonymous Phoenician discovered that the spiny shell of the murex sea snail yielded a purple substance perfectly suited as a dye base. Phoenicians, the greatest traders and businessmen of the ancient world, soon developed purple cloth as one of their most lucrative trading commodities.

  Since purple cloth was more expensive than other hues, only aristocrats could afford to wear it. But the Romans codified the practice, turning the color of clothing into a status symbol. Only the royal family itself could wear all-purple garments. Lesser aristocrats wore togas with purple stripes or borders to designate their rank—the more purple on the clothing, the higher the status.

  The original “royal purple” was a different color than what we call purple today. It was a dark wine-red, with more red than blue. Many written accounts liken the color to blood. Indeed, the Phoenician dye was prized because it symbolized the unity, strength, and bonding of blood ties, and the continuity of royal families based on bloodlines. The spiritual quality supposedly imparted by the purple color is suggested by its Roman root, purpureus (“very, very holy”).

  The association of purple with royalty crossed many cultures and centuries. Greek legend explained royal purple as the color of Athena’s goatskin dyed red. Kings in Babylonia wore a “lanbussu” robe of the same color. Mark’s Gospel says that Jesus’ robe was purple (although Matthew describes it as scarlet). In many churches, purple became the liturgical color during Lent, except for Good Friday. Consistently, in the succeeding centuries, the color purple was always identified with blood, as late as the time of Shakespeare, for the Bard himself referred to the “purpled hands” of Caesar’s assassins, “stained with the most noble blood of all the world.”

  Curiously, marketing research indicates that today, purple is one of the least popular colors, which helps explain why it is so seldom used in packaging. Is the current aversion to purple stirred by a rejection of the patrician origins of the color, its close approximation to the color of blood, or a rejection of our contemporary purple royalty, Prince?

  Submitted by Raymond Graunke of Huntersville, North Carolina. Thanks also to Sharon M. Burke of Los Altos, California; and Brian Dunne of Indianapolis, Indiana.

  Was Ben Gay?

  We don’t have the slightest idea. But we do know how the product got its name.

  Ben-Gay was created by a French pharmacist, whose name was, conveniently enough, Dr. Ben Gué. He introduced his product in France in 1898, and called it Baume Gué (baume means “balm” en français).

  When the analgesic was launched in the United States, it was decided that the unwashed masses of North America couldn’t contend with a French word like baume or pronounce one of those nasty accent acutes. So marketers settled on naming their product after an Anglicization of its creator’s name.

  Submitted by Linda Atwell of Matthews, North Carolina.

  Why are haystacks increasingly round rather than rectangular?

  Everything old is new again. Round stacks were the fashion in the early twentieth century, as Oakley M. Ray, president of the American Feed Industry Association, explains:

  Fifty to one hundred years ago, it was the usual practice for the wheat farmer to “thresh” wheat (separate the grain from the straw). The threshing machine discharges the straw in one location for a given field so that the result was normally a round stack of straw.

  Some years later, the hay baler was invented, which compressed either hay or straw into a much smaller space, much as a household trash compactor does in many houses today. The bales were commonly three feet or so in length, perhaps eighteen inches wide, and perhaps eighteen inches high. They were held together by two wires or two strong pieces of twine. Each bale would weigh fifty to one hundred pounds, with the baler set in such a manner that all of the bales in a given field were essentially the same size.

  Obviously, the uniform, rectangular shape made it easier to stack rectangular bales neatly and efficiently, first lengthwise in the wagons used to pick up the stacks, and then later in boxlike fashion in warehouses or barns.

  But in the last fifteen to twenty years, “swathers” have gained popularity. These machines feature a sickle in front that cuts the hay and a belt that dumps the fodder in nice neat rows—a separate machine rolls it up—where it is left out in the sun to dry. The swather produces “wind-rowed” hay, which rarely blows away, a great advantage, considering the fact that wet hay gets moldy if moist. The ability to allow hay to cure before baling reduces spoilage.

  Round bales are much larger than square ones, often about a thousand pounds, ten to twenty times heavier than rectangular bales, so they must be picked up by machine. Still, there are economies of scale achieved by assembling larger units of hay, and mechanically, there are fewer technical problems—there are fewer moving parts in the machinery that produces round bales. Kendell Keith, of the National Grain and Feed Association, told Imponderables that the wire and twine used to secure each bale of rectangular hay and the labor involved in packing and securing it were costlier than those for producing round haystacks.

  Perhaps the most important advantage of “round hay” is that it weathers better than its compressed rectangular counterpart, as Gary Smith, of the University of Maryland’s Agricultural Engineering department explains:

  The round bales shed the weather better. They reduce the need for storage space indoors, depending on what part of the country you are in, they can be left outdoors with minimum loss. Out West there is virtually no loss. In Maryland, there is about a 15% loss. This is cheaper than having to build storage for rectangular bales.

  Submitted by Rosemary Arseneault of Halifax, Nova Scotia.

  What are the little white particles found on the bottom half of English muffins
?

  The particles are farina. Farina helps add to the taste of the product, but the main function of farina particles, and the reason why they are placed only on the bottom half of the muffin, is to prevent the ball of dough from sticking to the oven plate during cooking.

  Submitted by Jessica Ahearne of Madawaska, Maine.

  How do they assemble tall cranes without using another crane?

  George O. Headrick, director of public relations and administrative services at the Construction Industry Manufacturers Association, was kind enough to direct us to several manufacturers of cranes. While they were uniformly generous in sharing their knowledge of how cranes are erected, they tended to provide us not with more than we wanted to know but a great deal more than we were capable of understanding. So we are indebted for the following explanation to the former secretary-treasurer of the Construction Writers Association, E.E. Halmos, Jr., who is now majordomo of Information Research Group, an editorial consulting group in Poolesville, Maryland: