Why Do Pirates Love Parrots?
Page 23
Why Did They Take Away Red M&M’s? Why Have They Put Them Back Recently?
The answer to this Imponderable from Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise? is as dated as the clothing on That ’70s Show. Only geezers probably remember that originally all M&M’s were brown—it wasn’t until 1960 that red, green, and yellow M&M’s were added. The red M&M’s were pulled in 1976 because of a scare about the safety of Red Dye No. 2, even though the dye was never used in the candy. In Clocks, we mentioned the color distribution of M&M’s twenty years ago:
Color
Percent in Plain M&M’s
Percent in Peanut M&M’s
Brown
30
30
Yellow
20
20
Red
20
20
Orange
10
10
Green
10
20
Tan
10
0
Ten years later, we chronicled the introduction of blue M&M’s in How Do Astronauts Scratch an Itch? and the resultant reshuffling of the color proportions in both plain and peanut M&M’s.
But those days seem downright antediluvian. Since we last wrote about M&M’s, almond, peanut butter, crispy, and baking bits have been introduced. And the Ph.D.’s in mathematics seem to have taken over the asylum at M&M’s Brand. Forget the days of color percentages ending in zeros—that’s for peasants! Here are the current color distributions for the different candies:
Color
Plain
Peanut
Almond
Peanut Butter
Crispy
Baking Bits
Brown
13
12
10
10
17
13
Yellow
14
15
20
20
17
13
Red
13
12
10
10
17
12
Blue
24
23
20
20
17
25
Orange
20
23
20
20
16
25
Green
16
15
20
20
16
12
The upstarts have taken over! Twenty years ago, brown was the most popular color in the flagship brands, plain and peanut. Now they are tied for lowest in both. And if you add up the color combinations for all six varieties, brown escapes coming in dead last by a measly one percent (red achieves this dubious distinction). Orange and green, formerly the runts of the litter, now dwarf the number of brown and red. But look at blue—it’s now the most popular color, or tied for it, in all varieties. And if brown has seen better days, look what happened to tan? It has disappeared from the M&M landscape.
Tan’s disappearance is all the more startling since M&M has spread its palette even more by offering unpackaged Colorworks Chocolate Candies, M&M’s in twenty-one different colors with messages that can be customized on one side (the famous “m” appears on the other side). The Colorworks colors are: white, black, silver, gold, brown, red, green, orange, yellow, blue, light blue, pink, dark green, teal, aqua green, dark blue, purple, light purple, dark pink, cream, and maroon. No tan!
Why Do Horses Sleep Standing Up?
In Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise?, we might have overstated how universal this phenomenon is. Yes, horses have the physiological equipment to sleep standing up, and in the wild, sleeping on all fours could provide for a quick getaway in case they were threatened by a predator.
But new research indicates that horses lie down more often than we suggested. Most horse owners and researchers have observed their horses standing while sleeping, a relaxed, passive posture for them because of the ligament and tendon structure that we detailed. But when horses enter REM (rapid eye movement) deep sleep, their legs often buckle. In the middle of the night, horses usually catch their REM sleep and lie down on their sides for two to four hours at a stretch. If they cannot spread out completely to sleep, a common affliction in stables, horses often lean against a wall or any sturdy object nearby.
The New York Times Q&A column tackled this Imponderable several years ago and quoted Dr. Katherine A. Houpt, a physiologist at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine. Although conceding that horses sleep less in the wild, she’s not so sure that they stand for defensive purposes, proposing that it
is more likely due to the fact that they eat day and night at times of year when less feed is available.
In summer [when food is more abundant] they lie down a fair amount…
According to Houpt, when wild horses do lie down, a single horse stays on all fours as a sentry, allowing its compatriots to catch REM zzz’s.
When Do Fish Sleep?
Speaking of sleep and REMs, it turns out that some mammals are joining fish in the burning-the-candle-at-both-ends game. A team led by Jerome Siegel, head of the Siegel Lab at the Center for Sleep Research at UCLA, reported in 2005 that newborn bottlenose dolphins and killer whales don’t get any shuteye in their first month of life. Perhaps in exasperation, their mothers also forgo sleep during this period.
This finding astounded sleep specialists because the prevailing theory has been that REM sleep is necessary for brain development in mammals, and that hormones crucial for growth are released during sleep. While human babies sleep like, well, babies, and their mothers take every opportunity to catch some sleep, Siegel speculates that whales and dolphins might have developed this mechanism so that the babies can evade predators when they are most at risk. But wouldn’t the same be true of any animal? Siegel proposes that “in the water, there’s no safe place to curl up.”
When older dolphins and whales do sleep, they usually float on the surface of the water or lie on the floor. But these newborns swim continuously, and don’t start sleeping as much as adults until they are four or five months old.
Unlike fish, dolphins have eyelids, so they can close their eyes when they sleep. But dolphins sleep with one eye closed. Sleep researchers have never found any proof that they experience REM sleep at all, and the best evidence is that only one hemisphere of the dolphin brain is experiencing the restfulness associated with sleep.
Just as some have suggested that fish might actually be sleeping (with their eyes open), perhaps whale and dolphin babies might be enjoying some form of sleep that we haven’t identified yet. And just as fish seem to go into a trance when the water is dark, maybe these marine mammals indulge in some brief periods of sleep in the midst of swimming. Unlikely, but possible.
Why Don’t Crickets Get Chapped from Rubbing Their Wings Together?
We solved this Imponderable in When Do Fish Sleep?, but almost twenty years later, scientists have just discovered why crickets aren’t going deaf. If you think cricket chirping is loud, you are right—their singing can reach 100 decibels (louder than an idling bulldozer, slightly quieter than a leaf blower at full blast), enough to cause hearing damage to humans. How can the tiny cricket’s nervous system hold up to the barrage?
Humans are not deafened by their own screaming because of a phenomenon known as “corollary discharge signaling.” Neurobiologists have long maintained that when your brain signals to the muscles in your mouth and throat to speak (or scream), a copy of that signal is sent to your auditory system, so it can prepare to withstand the noise.
Two zoologists from the University of Cambridge in England, James A. Poulet and Berthold Hedwig have identified the two neurons in crickets that carry corollary signals to the auditory center. They discovered that at exactly the moment at which crickets move their forewings to chirp, their auditory neurons are inhibited
, so the crickets do not respond as sensitively to the noise.
In a New York Times article about the discovery, reporter Henry Fountain asks Poulet what implications the study might have for humans:
In people, corollary discharges might do more than prevent sensory overload; they might help provide a sense of self. “They might help us to distinguish when I moved my arm, as opposed to when you moved my arm for me,” Dr. Poulet said. The pathway is no doubt more complex than in crickets, he said, “but it’s likely that there’s things like that going on—it’s just that nobody’s seen it.
For a short but more technical explanation of Poulet and Hedwig’s work, see http://www.zoo.cam.ac.uk/zoostaff/hedwig/discharge. html.
Why Does Looking Up at the Sun Cause Many People To Sneeze?
We answered this Frustable in When Do Fish Sleep? The consensus almost twenty years ago was that this “photic sneeze response” was likely a hereditary condition, caused by the sun (or other bright lights, such as from lamps) irritating the nerves that control sneezing. At the time, we contacted Winnipeg, Manitoba optometrist Steven Mintz, who had been a valuable source to us in the past. He couldn’t help us with an answer then, but ever vigilant, he has since mailed us an article called “The Photic Sneeze Response: A Descriptive Report of a Clinic Population,” published in the Journal of the American Optometric Association.
Much to our shock, the article cites the first report of PSR in an English book by W. S. Watson in 1875! But very little hard research has been done on PSR. The three authors of this article conducted the second-largest study ever. They received 367 completed surveys, and 122 ( just under one-third) were from “self-recognized photic sneezers” (at the high range of 25 to 33 percent that we estimated in When Do Fish Sleep?). Most of the people did not sneeze every time when looking at the sun. Nearly two-thirds estimated that they sneezed very rarely or, more commonly, only once in a while, when exposed to sunlight. Only 15 percent reported sneezing “almost every time.”
The survey of Doctors Semes, Amos, and Waterbor also confirmed another much-asked Imponderable that we mentioned in our write-up—many PSRs are serial sneezers. When asked how many successive sneezes were caused by sunlight, only 39 percent reported one sneeze. Forty percent claimed two sneezes and 28 percent answered three. Two percent of the respondents bragged that they typically sneezed nine or more times in a row! The vast majority of the serial sneezers took zero to twenty seconds in between sneezes, but a few claimed that there was usually at least a minute between sneezes.
While most PSR subjects started “sunlight sneezing” at a young age, only 13.6 percent reported sneezing before the age of ten. Ten to fourteen was the most common starting point, and more than 10 percent said that PSR didn’t start for them until after the age of thirty. These findings indicate that while there still seems to be a hereditary predisposition to PSR, it may also be an acquired trait. Smokers seem to have a slightly elevated chance of acquiring PSR, but the most likely candidates of all: folks who have a deviated septum.
Inbox
We’ve got mail. Lots and lots of mail. Most of it comes in the form of e-mail, and most of the e-mail comes in the form of questions. But we also receive our share of comments about what we’ve written, most of which are complimentary. Nothing is more boring than reading a letters section full of bouquets, so we’ve reserved this space for readers who would prefer to give us a thorn sandwich instead of a long-stemmed rose.
We don’t have space to publish all the worthy corrections and disagreements, ranging from spotting typos to arguing the aesthetic merits of high-heeled shoes. But please keep sending in your objections to anything that you find lacking—they not only lead to corrections in future printings, but keep our egos from swelling. Let’s proceed to your mail, and hope we can cling to a vestige of self-respect!
There’s good news and bad news about the response to our last book, Do Elephants Jump? The good news is that for the most part you agreed with our explanations and arguments. Yay! Oh, but then there’s the annoying bad news. We’ve mentioned that we always make at least one incredibly dumb mistake in every book. Sharp-eyed readers proved, however, that at times we can exceed this quota. Heck, we couldn’t even get past an aside in the introduction to the letters section of Elephants without making a mistake. Here is what we wrote:
Some things you can count on. The swallows will return to San Juan Capistrano. Every summer we will be bombarded with crummy sequels to movies we didn’t care about in the first place. And the Red Sox will field a promising team that will wilt in the clutch.
Are we unlucky or what? The last sentence would have worked perfectly fine for eighty-six years. But of course our gratuitous joke about the Red Sox just happened to be published in November 2004. Very quickly after publication, we heard from Hal Roberts of Bellingham, Washington:
Just finished reading Do Elephants Jump? Another fun read. How many responses have you received from Red Sox fans regarding your statement in the introduction to the letters section? I would imagine you would get a pretty good idea of how many readers you have in the Boston area.
Readership in the Boston area seems to be just fine, Hal, but we can gain some satisfaction in printing the correction from a Seattle Mariners fan.
We got into trouble with another aside. In a chapter on “Why Do We See Stars When We Bump Our Head?” we committed perhaps our most egregious mistake ever. We wrote: “As Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller so eloquently phrased it in their song, ‘On Broadway,’ ‘At night the stars put on a show for free.’” Shortly after the hardbound edition was published, Jo Ann Lawlor of San Jose, California, wrote:
“At night the stars put on a show for free” is a very nice line, and you even got part of the song title right: “On.” However the song it is from is not “On Broadway” (Hey, when did that kind of star ever put on a show for free, except maybe when s/he is throwing a tantrum in some restaurant or nightclub?), but “Up on the Roof.” No idea whether that one was written by the same two guys or not.
Agggh. Here’s a case where we made a mistake because we love the music so much, we didn’t fact-check properly. Jo Ann is right, of course. “On Broadway” is the masterpiece popularized by the Drifters and written by Leiber and Stoller. “Up on the Roof” was also a big hit for the Drifters and was covered by Laura Nyro, James Taylor, and many others, but it was written by two other geniuses from the Brill Building: Carole King and Gerry Goffin. Luckily, Jo Ann was quick enough to alert us to this mistake so that we could change it in the paperback edition of Elephants.
And Lawlor nailed us on another inaccuracy, a first as far as we can remember in Imponderables history: we didn’t understand the meaning of a word. We were discussing why loons have a problem getting airborne from either land or the water. We wrote that the common loon “cannot alight vertically from a standstill on the water.” Lawlor comments wryly:
Tell ya what: anything that is in the air and stops applying forward power will alight real vertically, real fast. In the rest of the paragraph you refer, correctly, to the fact that the loon cannot take off vertically as most birds do.
We cannot tell a lie. We thought that “alight” did mean “taking off.” Call it temporary insanity. Call it permanent insanity. Or just call it dumb.
Regular readers of our Inbox section will be surprised that we’ve made it this far without any mention of boots or shoes. Worry not. Although fewer people are writing about why ranchers hang boots on fence posts, we did receive about fifteen letters on the subject. To recap, here are the theories in hand: to shield the post from rotting during rain; to discourage coyotes and other predators; to keep foul-smelling boots out of the house; to display pride; to mark where repair work on a fence is required; to amuse themselves; to signal that someone is home; to point toward a rancher’s home (in case of heavy snowfall); to keep horses from impaling themselves on posts; to point toward the nearest graveyard; to shield posts from adverse reactions to the sun; to do somethi
ng with single shoes lying on the road; and to offer the boots to a less fortunate cowboy. To our vast body of wisdom, we add the theory of Joanne M. Schrader of Hannibal, Missouri:
I was told that farmers and ranchers put old cowboy boots, cans, or other stuff on fence posts to signify that it is an electrified fence. Thus it is supposed to serve as a warning not to touch the fence.
Has there been any news on the single shoe front? Have you any doubts? We’ve been trying to solve why you so often find exactly one shoe on the side of the road since Why Don’t Clocks Run Clockwise? The time for theories is over! We need empirical research, which is why we were excited when, on a Friday evening, we received an e-mail from Anita Trout, a librarian at the University of Wyoming:
I have just discovered your books, having read Are Lobsters Ambidextrous? last night. I was delighted to come across the question of the single shoe. The issue hasn’t disappeared at all! At this very moment, in the Cooper parking lot at the University of Wyoming, there is a single, gray, man’s slipper. It has been there since at least Wednesday morning.