The Book Of General Ignorance Part 11

A small group of protesters picketed the pageant with provocative slogans such as 'Let's Judge Ourselves as People' and 'Ain't she sweet; making profits off her meat'.

They produced a live sheep which they crowned 'Miss America' and then proceeded to toss their high-heeled shoes, bras, curlers and tweezers into a 'Freedom Trash Can'.

What they didn't do was burn their bras. They wanted to, but the police advised that it would be dangerous while standing on a wooden boardwalk.

The myth of the bra-burning began with an article by a young New York New York Post Post journalist called Lindsay Van Gelder. journalist called Lindsay Van Gelder.

In 1992, she told Ms. magazine: 'I mentioned high in the story that the protesters were planning to burn bras, girdles and other items in a freedom trash can... The headline writer took it a step further and called them "bra-burners".'

The headline was enough. Journalists across America seized on it without bothering to even read the story. Van Gelder had created a media frenzy.

Even scrupulous publications such as the Washington Post Washington Post were caught out. were caught out.

They identified members of the National Women's Liberation Group as the same women who 'burned undergarments during a demonstration at the Miss America contest in Atlantic City recently.'

The incident is now used as a textbook case in the study of how contemporary myths originate.

What colour is the universe?

a) Black with silvery bits Black with silvery bits b) Silver with black bits Silver with black bits c) Pale green Pale green d) Beige Beige It's officially beige.

In 2002, after a.n.a.lysing the light from 200,000 galaxies collected by the Australian Galaxy Redshift Survey, American scientists from Johns Hopkins University concluded that the universe was pale green. Not black with silvery bits, as it appears. Taking the Dulux paint range as a standard, it was somewhere between Mexican Mint, Jade Cl.u.s.ter and Shangri-La Silk.

A few weeks after the announcement to the American Astronomical Society, however, they had to admit they'd made a mistake in their calculations, and that the universe was, in fact, more a sort of dreary shade of taupe.

Since the seventeenth century, some of the greatest and most curious minds have wondered why it is that the night sky is black. If the universe is infinite and contains an infinite number of uniformly distributed stars, there should be a star everywhere we look, and the night sky should be as bright as day.

This is known as...o...b..rs' Paradox, after the German astronomer Heinrich Olbers who described the problem (not for the first time) in 1826.

n.o.body has yet come up with a really good answer to the problem. Maybe there is a finite number of stars, maybe the light from the furthest ones hasn't reached us yet. Olbers' solution was that, at some time in the past, not all the stars had been shining and that something had switched them on.

It was Edgar Allan Poe, in his prophetic prose poem Eureka Eureka (1848), who first suggested that the light from the most distant stars is still on its way. (1848), who first suggested that the light from the most distant stars is still on its way.

In 2003, the Ultra Deep Field Camera of the Hubble s.p.a.ce Telescope was pointed at what appeared to be the emptiest piece of the night sky and the film exposed for a million seconds (about eleven days).

The resulting picture showed tens of thousands of hitherto unknown galaxies, each consisting of hundreds of millions of stars, stretching away into the dim edges of the universe.

JEREMY HARDY It's deceptive, the universe, 'cause from the outside, if you're G.o.d, it looks quite small. But when you're in there, it's really quite s.p.a.cious, with plenty of storage. It's deceptive, the universe, 'cause from the outside, if you're G.o.d, it looks quite small. But when you're in there, it's really quite s.p.a.cious, with plenty of storage.

What colour is Mars?

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b.u.t.terscotch.

Or brown. Or orange. Maybe khaki with pale pink patches.

One of the most familiar features of the planet Mars is its red appearance in the night sky. This redness, however, is due to the dust in the planet's atmosphere. The surface of Mars tells a different story.

The first pictures from Mars were sent back from Viking I, seven years to the day after Neil Armstrong's famous moon landing. They showed a desolate red land strewn with dark rocks, exactly what we had expected.

This made the conspiracy theorists suspicious: they claimed that NASA had deliberately doctored the pictures to make them seem more familiar.

The cameras on the two Viking rovers that reached Mars in 1976 didn't take colour pictures. The digital images were captured in grey-scale (the technical term for black and white) and then pa.s.sed through three colour filters.

Adjusting these filters to give a 'true' colour image is extremely tricky and as much an art as a science. Since no one has ever been to Mars, we have no idea what its 'true' colour is.

In 2004, the New York Times New York Times stated that the early colour pictures from Mars were published slightly 'over-pinked', but that later adjustments showed the surface to be more like the colour of b.u.t.terscotch. stated that the early colour pictures from Mars were published slightly 'over-pinked', but that later adjustments showed the surface to be more like the colour of b.u.t.terscotch.

NASA's Spirit rover has been operating on Mars for the past two years. The latest published pictures show a greeny-brown, mud-coloured landscape with grey-blue rocks and patches of salmon-coloured sand.

We probably won't know the 'real' colour of Mars until someone goes there.

In 1887, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli reported seeing long straight lines on Mars which he called ca.n.a.li ca.n.a.li, or 'channels'. This was mistranslated as 'ca.n.a.ls', starting rumours of a lost civilisation on Mars.

Water is thought to exist on Mars in the form of vapour, and as ice in the polar ice caps, but since more powerful telescopes have been developed, no evidence of Schiaparelli's 'ca.n.a.ls' has ever been found.

Cairo, or al-Qhirah, is Arabic for Mars.

What colour is water?

The usual answer it that it isn't any colour; it's 'clear' or 'transparent' and the sea only appears blue because of the reflection of the sky.

Wrong. Water really is blue. It's an incredibly faint shade, but it is blue. You can see this in nature when you look into a deep hole in the snow, or through the thick ice of a frozen waterfall. If you took a very large, very deep white pool, filled it with water and looked straight down through it, the water would be blue.

This faint blue tinge doesn't explain why water sometimes takes on a strikingly blue appearance when we look at at it rather than it rather than through through it. Reflected colour from the sky obviously plays an important part. The sea doesn't look particularly blue on an overcast day. it. Reflected colour from the sky obviously plays an important part. The sea doesn't look particularly blue on an overcast day.

But not all the light we see is reflected from the surface of the water; some of it is coming from under the surface. The more impure the water, the more colour it will reflect.

In large bodies of water like seas and lakes the water will usually contain a high concentration of microscopic plants and algae. Rivers and ponds will have a high concentration of soil and other solids in suspension.

All these particles reflect and scatter the light as it returns to the surface, creating huge variation in the colours we see. It explains why you sometimes see a brilliant green Mediterranean sea under a bright blue sky.

What colour was the sky in ancient Greece?

Bronze. There is no word for 'blue' in ancient Greek.

The nearest words glaukos glaukos and and kyanos kyanos are more like expressions of the relative intensity of light and darkness than attempts to describe the colour. are more like expressions of the relative intensity of light and darkness than attempts to describe the colour.

The ancient Greek poet Homer mentions only four actual colours in the whole of the Iliad Iliad and the and the Odyssey Odyssey, roughly translated as black, white, greenish yellow (applied to honey, sap and blood) and purply red.

When Homer calls the sky 'bronze', he means that it is dazzlingly bright, like the sheen of a shield, rather than 'bronze-coloured'. In a similar spirit, he regarded wine, the sea and sheep as all being the same colour purply red.

Aristotle identified seven shades of colour, all of which he thought derived from black and white, but these were really grades of brightness, not colour.

It's interesting that an ancient Greek from almost 2,500 years ago and NASA's Mars rovers of 2006 both approach colour in the same way.

In the wake of Darwin, the theory was advanced that the early Greeks' retinas had not evolved the ability to perceive colours, but it is now thought they grouped objects in terms of qualities other than colour, so that a word which seems to indicate 'yellow' or 'light green' really meant fluid, fresh and living, and so was appropriately used to describe blood, the human sap.

This is not as rare as you might expect. There are more languages in Papua New Guinea than anywhere else in the world but, apart from distinguishing between light and dark, many of them have no other words for colour at all.

Cla.s.sical Welsh has no words for 'brown', 'grey', 'blue' or 'green'. The colour spectrum is divided in a completely different way. One word (glas) covered part of green; another the rest of green, the whole of blue and part of grey; a third dealt with the rest of grey and most, or part, of brown.

Modern Welsh uses the word glas glas to mean blue, but Russian has no single word for 'blue'. It has two to mean blue, but Russian has no single word for 'blue'. It has two goluboi goluboi and and sinii sinii usually translated 'light blue' and 'dark blue', but, to Russians, they are distinct, different colours, not different shades of the same colour. usually translated 'light blue' and 'dark blue', but, to Russians, they are distinct, different colours, not different shades of the same colour.

All languages develop their colour terms in the same way. After black and white, the third colour to be named is always red, the fourth and fifth are green and yellow (in either order), the sixth is blue and the seventh brown. Welsh still doesn't have a word for brown.

ALAN I've got no time for these Greeks. I've got no time for these Greeks.

STEPHEN And yet without them, you wouldn't be here. And yet without them, you wouldn't be here.

ALAN Oh, that's so rubbish! [hitting desk with palm of hand] You say this every week! Oh, that's so rubbish! [hitting desk with palm of hand] You say this every week!

How much of the Earth is water?

Seven-tenths of the Earth's surface area may be covered in water, but water accounts for less than a fiftieth of one per cent of the planet's ma.s.s.

The Earth is big it weighs about 6 million, billion, billion kg. Half of this is contained in the lower mantle, the ma.s.sive semi-molten layer that begins 660 km (410 miles) below the crust. Even on the apparently watery crust, the ma.s.s of the land is forty times greater than that of the oceans.

A j.a.panese experiment reported in Science Science in 2002 suggests that there may be five times as much water dissolved in the lower mantle than sloshing around on the Earth's surface. in 2002 suggests that there may be five times as much water dissolved in the lower mantle than sloshing around on the Earth's surface.

Using pressures of 200,000 kg per cm and temperatures of 1,600 C, the researchers created four mineral compounds similar to those found in the lower mantle. They then added water and measured how much of it was absorbed.

If the j.a.panese are right, the proportion of the world that is water will have to be revised upwards to 0.1 per cent.

Which way does the bathwater go down the plughole?

a) Clockwise b) Anti-clockwise c) Straight down d) It depends It depends. The widely held belief that it is the Coriolis force, created by the Earth's spin, that drives bathwater into a spiral is untrue.

Although it does influence large, long-lasting weather patterns such as hurricanes and ocean currents, it is by orders of magnitude too weak to have an effect on domestic plumbing. The direction of drainage is determined by the shape of the basin, the direction from which it was filled and the vortices introduced into it by washing or when the plug is removed.

If a perfectly symmetrical pan, with a tiny plughole and a plug which could be removed without disturbing the water, were filled and left for a week or so, so that all the motion settled completely, then it might in principle be possible to detect a small Coriolis effect, which would be anti-clockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the south.

This myth was lent some credence by inclusion in Michael Palin's Pole-to-Pole Pole-to-Pole series. They showed film of a showman in Nanyuki, Kenya, who purports to demonstrate the effect on either side of the equator, but even supposing the effect existed, though, this particular demonstration got the direction of circulation the wrong way round. series. They showed film of a showman in Nanyuki, Kenya, who purports to demonstrate the effect on either side of the equator, but even supposing the effect existed, though, this particular demonstration got the direction of circulation the wrong way round.

PHILL 'Stephen, what are you doing in that bathroom?' [as Stephen] 'I'm pushing it to go one way; I'm pushing it to go the other ... I'm the master of the bathroom! Haha-haha!' 'Stephen, what are you doing in that bathroom?' [as Stephen] 'I'm pushing it to go one way; I'm pushing it to go the other ... I'm the master of the bathroom! Haha-haha!'

What do camels store in their humps?

Fat.

Camels' humps don't store water, but fat, which is used as an energy reserve. Water is stored throughout their bodies, particularly in the bloodstream, which makes them very good at avoiding dehydration.

Camels can lose 40 per cent of their body-weight before they are affected by it, and can go up to seven days without drinking. When they do drink, they really go for it up to 225 litres (around 50 gallons) at a time.

Here are a few quite interesting facts about camels, which have nothing to do with their humps.

Before elephants acquired their reputation for long memories, the ancient Greeks believed it was camels that didn't forget.

Persian hunting hounds Salukis hunted on camels. They lay on the camel's neck watching for deer, and then leapt off in pursuit when they saw one. A Saluki can jump up to 6 metres (20 feet) from a standing start.

In 1977 in Zoo Vet Zoo Vet, David Taylor observed that 'camels may build up a pressure cooker of resentment toward human beings until the lid suddenly blows off and they go berserk.' The camel handler calms it down by handing the beast his coat. 'The camel gives the garment h.e.l.l jumping on it, biting it, tearing it to pieces. When the camel feels it has blown its top enough, man and animal can live together in harmony again.'

Camel-racing in the United Arab Emirates has started to use robot riders in place of the traditional child jockeys. The remotely operated riders were developed following a ban on the use of jockeys under sixteen years of age, imposed by the UAE Camel Racing a.s.sociation in March 2004.

These laws are regularly flouted and there is a brisk child-slave trade, with children as young as four being kidnapped in Pakistan and kept in Arab camel camps. The only qualifications needed to become a jockey are not to weigh much and be able to scream in terror (this encourages the camels).

The famous line from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, 'it is easier for a camel to pa.s.s through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of G.o.d', is possibly a mistranslation, where the original Aramaic word gamta gamta, 'st.u.r.dy rope', was confused with gamla gamla, 'camel'.

This makes more sense, and is a comforting thought for the well-off.

STEPHEN What do you get if you cross a camel with a leopard? What do you get if you cross a camel with a leopard?

JO A fireside rug you can have a good hump on sorry. A fireside rug you can have a good hump on sorry.

SEAN You get sacked from the zoo. You get sacked from the zoo.

Where do camels come from?

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North America.

The icons of the African and Arabian deserts are American in origin.

Like horses and dogs, camels evolved in the gra.s.slands of America, 20 million years ago. In those days they were more like giraffes or gazelles than the humped beasts of burden we know and love. It wasn't until four million years ago that they crossed the Bering land-bridge into Asia.

They became extinct in North America during the last Ice Age and, unlike horses and dogs, haven't made it back.

It is not clear why the North American camel species died out. Climate change is the obvious culprit. More specifically it may have been due to a change in the silica content of gra.s.s. As the North American climate got cooler and drier, silica levels in gra.s.s tripled. This new super-tough gra.s.s wore out the teeth of even the longest-toothed grazers and the horses and camels gradually died of starvation, as a result of being unable to chew.

There is also some evidence that these already weakened species, their escape-route to Asia blocked by the disappearance of the Bering land bridge 10,000 years ago, were 'finished off' by human hunters.