Of course, units of measure like seconds, minutes, and hours are a mere arbitrary fiction. Days, years, seasons, and perhaps months (at least lunar months) correspond to easily observed natural phenomena, but any unit shorter than a day is a pure human invention. Had history unwound differently, a second might be shorter or longer than it is now, or we might have divided the day into, say, 537 bligrots. The specific choices our distant ancestors made are, in the grand scheme of things, not nearly as important as the mere fact that they figured out a way to quantify time, repeatably and fairly accurately. It is incalculably important that we be able to determine such things as how long a lawyer should be allowed to speak, whether the athlete who won the race today went faster than the athlete who won yesterday, or when lunch begins.

Fire and Water
The earliest clocks, which relied on the sun, proved problematic for a number of reasons—the sun was visible for a different amount of time from one day to the next; timekeeping could not take place indoors, at night, or when it was cloudy; and even with a sundial, it was quite difficult to determine the sun’s position accurately. The first attempts to keep time without the sun were water clocks—any of a large number of designs that have in common a dependence on the steady flow of water.

The simplest water clock design, known as an outflow water clock, was basically a stone or earthenware container with a small hole in the bottom and graduated markings on the inside. As water dripped out (at a more or less constant rate), the water level dropped, revealing successive hour markings. Inflow designs used two containers: one to dispense the water and another, into which the water dripped, to measure it (additively rather than subtractively).

Some sources credit the Chinese for inventing water clocks as early as 3000 B.C.; others say water clocks appeared much later in China and that it was the Egyptians, around 1500 B.C., who first came up with the idea. In any case, water clock designs certainly developed independently in more than one place. We do know that the Egyptian design had made its way to Greece by 325 B.C., where it was given the name clepsydra, which means “water thief.”

Good to the Last Drop
Although even primitive clepsydras were sometimes more accurate than watching the sun, they were still notoriously irregular, because the water had the annoying tendency to drip out more slowly as its level sank. To compensate for this, some Egyptian designs tapered the container in toward the bottom. A further refinement added by the Greeks was a float regulator—a valve that let more water into the tank only when it sank below a predetermined level, thus maintaining a constant water pressure and keeping the rate of flow quite regular. (This makes the water clock the forerunner of the water closet, if you think about it.) Later modifications included a second float—this one in the receiving container—which was attached to a pointer; this made reading the time, especially from a distance, much easier. More elaborate still were designs that used floats to strike a bell or make some visual signal at given water levels.

But even these designs pale in comparison to a clepsydra built in China by Su Sung in the early 11th century. Su Sung’s clock was over 30 feet (9m) high and used a primitive escapement mechanism, a bit like what would later appear in mechanical clocks and watches. But instead of being powered by a spring or weights, it was powered by water. This clock displayed not only the time but the positions of the planets, and included a number of animated figures ringing bells at various times.

No matter how many bells and whistles a water clock has, though, you still have a couple of problems. For one thing, the flow of water will never be truly precise over a long period of time. For another, you’re fighting evaporation. And the rate at which the clock runs can be influenced by temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, and many other variables. The best water clocks were accurate to within about 15 minutes per day—not too shabby for thousands of years ago, but a bit less than what we need today. Even so, the wonderful thing about a clepsydra is that even a child can make one out of scrap containers found in the recycling bin—it’s a refreshingly low-tech solution to one of humanity’s oldest problems —Joe Kissell

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More Information about Clepsydras...

Resources on clepsydras include:

• Earliest Clocks at the National Institute of Standards and Technology
• Clocks and Ctesibius by Michael Lahanas
• Clepsydra at Infoplease
• Water Clock or Clepsydras at Clock a History
• The Leicester Time Trails
• Medieval Clocks

The Age of Intelligent Machines: Chronology by Raymond Kurzweil provides a different set of dates for the development of water clocks in various locations than I’ve read elsewhere.

Related Articles from Interesting Thing of the Day

• Traveler’s Palms
• Measuring the Speed of Light
• Body-Based Units of Measurement
• Decimal Time
• The Equation of Time
• Revenge of the Analog Clock
• The Great Clock of Westminster
• Foucault’s Pendulum

℗ & © 2005, alt concepts. All rights reserved.

I recognize that this is a problem. When I’m sleepy most of the time, I can’t think clearly, and I am much less effective at my work. I don’t like this situation, and I sense that it may be taking some toll on my physical and mental health. So my New Year’s resolution this year was to get plenty of sleep. I think I kept it for about a week, but hope springs eternal: maybe I’ll sleep next month or, if not, the one after that. Sooner or later, though, something’s got to give, because the effects of too little sleep are cumulative—what sleep researchers refer to as sleep debt.

Racking Up Debt
Sleep debt is defined as the difference between the amount of sleep you need and the amount you actually get. So if you need 8 hours of sleep per night and get 7, you accumulate 1 hour of sleep debt for that night. And if you get 7 hours of sleep every night for a week, you’ve accumulated 7 hours of sleep debt. Of course, the amount of sleep required per night varies from person to person—and for a particular person, it changes with age. Some people, like me, operate at peak efficiency with 9 or more hours of sleep; others function perfectly well with 5 or 6. But whatever that amount is, sleep debt accrues when you get too little.

Casually speaking, say experts, if you feel drowsy during the day, you probably have some sleep debt. This is more than a mere annoyance; besides making you grumpy, drowsiness can negatively affect your productivity, reduce reaction time, increase the risk of traffic accidents, and even contribute to weight gain. Various studies have suggested that anywhere from 50% to 90% of Americans experience, and suffer the consequences of, sleep debt. One major cause, according to some people at least, is the alarm clock—or, rather, rigidly defined schedules that demand its use. When you awaken every day before your body says it’s ready, you add to your sleep debt.

At Least There’s No Interest
Until recently, some sleep researchers claimed that sleep debt could be accumulated indefinitely—that, like financial debt, it simply never goes away until it is repaid. If this were the case, I would probably be in the red for about a year’s worth of sleep. Current research suggests that this notion is a mistake, and that the body’s maximum sleep debt is under 20 hours, no matter how many consecutive nights you’ve had too little sleep.

Be that as it may, the only way to “repay” sleep debt, so the experts say, is to sleep more—and there are limits, both practical and physiological, to how much one can sleep. If I had, say, a month off with absolutely no obligations or distractions whatsoever, a perfectly dark, quiet bedroom, a great deal of motivation to repay my debt, and some really boring reading materials—even then, with the optimal conditions, my body simply wouldn’t stay asleep 24 hours a day, or even 12. On those lazy weekends when I’ve had every hope of repaying a week’s worth of sleep debt, I still couldn’t stay asleep more than 10 or 11 hours at a time. So to the extent that sleep debt really is like a financial debt, my body appears to disallow anything other than a minimum payment of an hour or two at a time.

Of course, unlike financial debt, sleep debt isn’t rigorously tracked in a database somewhere. Sleep specialists can perform tests to determine one’s propensity to fall asleep, which gives a rough indication of sleep debt level. But there is no test that will tell you exactly how many hours or days of unpaid sleep debt you have, so the claim that it’s strictly cumulative is ultimately just an educated guess. Still, the claim that it exists is generally accepted, and certainly borne out by my own experience. In fact…(yawn)…I think I need to go make a deposit. —Joe Kissell

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More Information about Sleep Debt...

Other articles discussing sleep debt include:

• Sleep Debt (at SleepQuest) by William Dement, M.D., Ph.D., Stanford University Center of Excellencefor the Diagnosis and Treatment of Sleep Disorders; see also Sleepless at Stanford by the same author
• “Sleep Debts” Accrue When Nightly Sleep Totals Six Hours Or Fewer; Penn Study Find People Respond Poorly, While Feeling Only “Slightly” Tired at Science Daily
• U.S. Racking Up Huge “Sleep Debt” by Stefan Lovgren at National Geographic News (February 24, 2005)
• How Much Sleep Do You Really Need? by Michael Breus, Ph.D. at WebMD
• Sleep debt in the Wikipedia

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• Dream Groups
• Lucid Dreams
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• Falling Back
• Daylight Saving Time

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I first became aware of Zeno and his ideas while working on my undergraduate degree in philosophy. I was reading Douglas Hofstadter’s Pulitzer-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, in which philosophical issues are frequently presented in hypothetical dialogs between Achilles, the Greek warrior legendary for his swiftness, and a Tortoise. Lewis Carroll had used the same pair of characters, but it was Zeno who first put them together—in the fifth century B.C. In Hofstadter’s retelling of the story, Zeno himself makes a guest appearance in order to explain to Achilles and the Tortoise that motion is not merely impossible, it “unexists.” The story is based on one of Zeno’s eight so-called paradoxes, of which only three or four are usually mentioned. Allow me to give you a very brief taste.

Achilles and the Tortoise: Imagine that Achilles meets a Tortoise, who challenges him to a foot race. Achilles is amused when the Tortoise asks merely for a modest head start. But then the Tortoise explains that by agreeing to this demand, Achilles has already lost! The logic, says the Tortoise, is that if he starts ahead of Achilles at point A, Achilles will have to run to point A before he can overtake the Tortoise (which is, of course, obvious enough). Meanwhile, the Tortoise will have moved ahead slightly to point B. Again, Achilles must advance to point B before he can push ahead, by which time the Tortoise will have traveled farther (if only by inches), to point C. And so on. Although with each successive point in the race the Tortoise moves smaller and smaller distances, Achilles never quite catches up, always remaining one segment behind. And thus, says Zeno, the faster can never overtake the slower.

The Dichotomy: Another variation on the same theme is called the “dichotomy paradox” (or sometimes the “bisection paradox” or “race course paradox”). Suppose you want to cross a room. In order to get to the other side, you must first get to the halfway point, which will take you some finite amount of time. And before you can get halfway, you have to cross half of that distance, at which point you’d be a quarter of the way across. And before that, you’d have to cross half of a quarter, and so on infinitely. Each of these steps must take a finite amount of time. And yet, you have to cross an infinite number of distances to walk across the room—or indeed any distance at all. And since one cannot travel an infinite number of distances in a finite period of time, motion itself is impossible.

The Arrow: Just when you think motion is completely done for, Zeno makes matters even worse. Think of an arrow in motion, he says. At any particular instant during its flight, the arrow occupies just one position in space, which is how we define an object that’s at rest. So the arrow must, at that point, be at rest. At the next instant, whatever position the arrow is in, it’s also in just one spot, and thus, still at rest. Therefore, by definition, anything in motion is actually at rest!

Now, I know what you’re thinking: this is all very silly. A logical “proof” does not mean that motion is impossible, and whatever Zeno may have conjectured about such things at the office, he still certainly walked home at the end of the day. That is true. And yet, at some level, you have to admit that he does have a point, of sorts. Trying to tease apart Zeno’s logic from common sense has occupied a great many philosophers and mathematicians over the centuries. And if you’re willing to wrap your head around a bit of calculus, you can find some rather definitive mathematical explanations for why we can move after all. But that, say some people, is missing the whole point.

In the first place, there are philosophers who deny that these little stories are truly paradoxes. For example, it’s true that one can, in principle, divide a finite distance into an infinite number of points, but so what? They still add up to a finite distance. Meanwhile, the same is true of time: you can subdivide hours, minutes, seconds, and so on as much as you want, but that doesn’t make time grind to a halt. Both motion and time are, in reality, continuous. So if you don’t believe in the fiction that motion must occur in discrete steps of both distance and time, there’s no paradox at all. That, say critics, takes care of at least the first two statements; as for the arrow…you can define motion as a state that exists over successive points in time, which would mean Zeno’s idea of “rest” is fundamentally mistaken.

However, it may be that all the effort to debunk the paradoxes is misguided; by themselves, they’re nothing more than intellectual exercises that Zeno himself may not even have believed. Zeno, who lived from roughly 490 B.C. to 430 B.C., was a student of Parmenides, founder of a group of thinkers known as the Eleatics. Parmenides believed that the universe is fundamentally unchanging. Since everything is ultimately one, any motion or change must be merely an illusion. Although Zeno’s statements can be taken as defending Parmenides at face value, their intention was to do so in a more subtle way, using a logical technique known as reductio ad absurdum—reduction to the absurd—also known as proof by contradiction. In other words, if a logical argument yields an absurd conclusion, one of its premises must be wrong. So it’s not that Zeno believed motion in the everyday sense was impossible; he was trying to demonstrate, by way of these absurd stories, that time and distance are in fact not divisible—and in that way, support the claim that the universe is an unchanging whole.

Ultimately, though, no one will ever know for sure exactly what Zeno was getting at, because none of his writings survived. We know about Zeno only because later philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, mentioned his writings in their own works—and not, I should point out, in a very complimentary way. Although some philosophers still aren’t convinced that the paradoxes are resolved, most people believe now, as in Aristotle’s time, that Zeno was too clever for his own good. And personally, I just don’t find his stories moving. —Joe Kissell

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More Information about Zeno's Paradoxes...

This article was featured in Philosophers’ Carnival XXXI.

The Wikipedia has extensive articles on Zeno’s paradoxes, Zeno of Elea, and Eleatics.

Other discussions of Zeno’s paradoxes include:

• Zeno’s Paradox of the Tortoise and Achilles at Platonic Realms
• Zeno and the Paradox of Motion in Reflections on Relativity
• Zeno’s Paradoxes by Jim Loy
• Zeno’s Paradox at Math Lair
• Zeno’s Paradoxes: A Timely Solution (PDF) by Peter Lynds

Read the earliest recorded versions of Zeno’s paradoxes in Plato’s Parmenides and Aristotle’s Physics. Also check out Douglas Hofstadter’s wonderful Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

Related Articles from Interesting Thing of the Day

• Phenomenology
• Revenge of the Analog Clock
• Perpetual Motion Machines
• Tagmemics

℗ & © 2005, alt concepts. All rights reserved.

Take, for example, the claim that in the 1500s, people were often unintentionally buried alive—as evidenced by scratch marks on the insides of coffins that were later exhumed for some reason. On hearing such stories, public fear of being buried alive allegedly resulted in a new method of burial, in which a string was tied to the wrist of the departed and fed through a hole in the coffin all the way to the surface, where it attached to a bell. Were the person to awaken, the slightest arm movement would ring the bell, alerting someone to dig them up. Hence—so the tale goes—the origin of the expressions “saved by the bell” and “dead ringer.”

That’s a lovely and plausible-sounding story, but it happens to be untrue. The expressions “saved by the bell” and “dead ringer” had entirely different origins (about which more in a moment). And the whole business of coffins being designed with warning bells? That was certainly not part of life in the 1500s. Not at all. Not even close. It didn’t happen until the 1800s.

The Living Dead
Even today, the criteria for determining that someone is dead are not entirely unambiguous. If someone is missing a heart or brain, the diagnosis is relatively straightforward. But there are any number of circumstances under which someone’s pulse and breathing may be indiscernible—or even entirely absent—and yet death has not occurred. Even the absence of brain waves is not always an uncontroversial sign of death. A variety of medical conditions, or perhaps even a deep trance, can render someone cold, motionless, and unresponsive for some period of time. Occasionally you may see stories in the news about people who wake up in a body bag, a morgue, or even a funeral parlor, having been incorrectly pronounced dead. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens.

A few centuries ago, when medical science was much less advanced than it is today, this sort of thing happened considerably more often. History is littered with stories of such occurrences—sometimes with happy endings, but usually not. There have even been cases where coffins were found to have scratch marks inside, and though this is not necessarily proof that the person was buried alive, that surely did happen from time to time, especially considering that in the days before embalming became common, burials tended to happen quite soon after death.

During the Victorian age (roughly the second half of the 19th century), there was, for whatever reason, an unusual amount of public anxiety about the possibility of being buried alive—in England, continental Europe, and even the United States. Edgar Allan Poe tapped into (and exacerbated) this anxiety with a few of his short stories: “The Black Cat” in 1843, “The Cask of Amontillado” in 1846, and “The Premature Burial” in 1850.

Give Me a Sign
Such anxiety is not unique to that time period, but that was when a flurry of inventors set out to solve the problem. Patent records from the period show many designs for so-called safety coffins. Some designs merely contained a signaling apparatus of some kind—and yes, a few of them actually did use a bell with a string fed through a tube into the coffin. Other designs were more elaborate, with motion from the body raising a flag, sending a telegraphic signal, or even shooting off fireworks. There were also some coffins with escape hatches or spring-loaded release mechanisms, though the latter would have been useful only before burial.

A few of the later designs included air inlets that would open if, and only if, the alarm was actually triggered. This was—excuse the expression—a fatal flaw. A full coffin holds very little air; without even taking into account the exertion of calling out for help or pushing on the lid, an average (healthy) person would pass out within an hour or two after a coffin was sealed, and expire shortly thereafter. However, that detail was apparently a moot point. Although some of the safety coffins were in fact manufactured and sold, there is no record from that time period of anyone having been buried in one. And thus, there are also no records of one of these inventions actually saving someone’s life. But still the meme persists. Even within the last decade, there have been several news stories about high-tech safety coffins offered for sale—some of which even include a bottle of oxygen, just in case.

So what about the aforementioned phrases? Well, “saved by the bell” is easy enough: it’s a boxing term, first used in the 1930s. It refers to a boxer who gets a (sometimes temporary) break from being pummeled when the bell rings to signal the end of the round. “Dead ringer” is a bit trickier—though a moment’s reflection will show that it has nothing to do with being buried alive; it refers to a “double,” someone or something that looks just like someone or something else. The “dead” part gives an expression a sense of exactness or completeness, as in “dead even” or “dead wrong.” As for “ringer,” it’s a slang term for a fake or an illicit substitute (as in a sporting competition). My dictionary says this meaning goes back to the 15th century. I’ve read elsewhere that it derives from “ring the changes,” which originally meant to ring a set of church bells in a variety of different sequences, and later took on a metaphorical meaning of varying the way one performs any action. In any case, it clearly predates the use of safety coffins. As for that story about life in the 1500s…some bad ideas just refuse to die. —Joe Kissell

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More Information about Safety Coffins...

The best discussion of safety coffins I’ve found is Just Dying to Get Out by Barbara Mikkelson at the Urban Legends Reference Pages. The same site has a copy (along with a thorough debunking) of the Life in the 1500s story. Other outstanding discussions include Signals from the Grave by Richard Van Vleck at American Artifacts and Safety Coffins in “Death: The Last Taboo” at The Australian Museum Online.

Two sites that discuss the origin of “dead ringer” are The Mavens’ Word of the Day and Word Detective by Evan Morris.

You can read the entire text of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat,” “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Premature Burial” online.

Related Articles from Interesting Thing of the Day

• Paris Catacombs
• Modern Mummies
• Freeze Drying
• New Orleans Cemeteries
• Père-Lachaise Cemetery

℗ & © 2005, alt concepts. All rights reserved.

Tolkien mentioned this event only in passing on the opening page of his book The Return of the King, but Peter Jackson made it into a dramatic scene in his Oscar-winning 2003 film version of the story. It was a moving and visually stunning portrayal of a desperate plea for aid that, given the circumstances and technological resources available, could not have been conveyed in any other way. And if you understand this long-distance visual method of relaying information, you’ve grasped the basics of the optical telegraph, which predated the more commonly known electric telegraph by decades.

Better Than Shouting!
In the early 1790s, French inventor Claude Chappe and his brother Ignace were trying to develop a reliable means of high-speed, long-distance communication. Their first attempt was clever but misguided. Each station had a large mechanism based on a pendulum clock, but in place of a regular clock face was a dial with 10 sections, corresponding to the 10 numerals. The clocks were carefully synchronized, being set in motion at the same time by way of a prearranged signal. The sender waited until his clock was pointing at a specific numeral and then made a sound; the receiver, whose clock would at that moment be pointing at the same symbol, thus knew what number was being signaled. Sequences of numbers corresponded to letters and words—and so, after a fashion, any message could be transmitted. But it was slow, noisy, and limited by the range of hearing, wind direction, and so on—clearly in need of an upgrade or two.

Their next attempt, which continued to rely on the synchronized clock mechanism, replaced the sound with a movable panel painted white on one side and black on the other side. This gave them much greater range (with the help of a telescope) and, of course, quiet operation. But it then dawned on them that they could send much more information in a shorter period of time if they ditched the clock and instead constructed a mechanism capable of displaying a variety of visual signals directly. So they created a large apparatus with five panels; each combination of black and white panels stood for a different character. That worked better, but more innovations were soon to come.

Up In Arms
After another year or so of experimentation, the Chappe brothers determined that long wooden beams placed at various angles could be seen more clearly over long distances than black and white rectangles. So they created a simple mechanical device that could reposition two large arms (each with two segments—a main bar and a crossbar) into any of nearly 200 configurations; anyone with a code book could translate those signals into words and numbers. They dubbed their invention the “telegraph,” though nowadays all the early visual transmission systems are referred to as optical telegraphs, and this particular version is called a semaphore telegraph.

(An aside…At almost exactly the same time the Chappe brothers abandoned their panel-based system, a Swedish inventor named A.N. Edelcrantz, who was working on a remarkably similar project of his own—apparently without any knowledge of what was happening in France—decided against the semaphore arms he had been using and switched to a panel design. Edelcrantz’s system, which used a 3x3 grid of movable panels plus a tenth, larger one on top, could produce a wider range of characters with a single configuration (and thus send more information in less time). However, it never caught on outside Sweden, and as far as I know, was never given a head-to-head comparison with the Chappe telegraph.)

Gimme an A
The first major semaphore line, which stretched between Paris and Lille, 120 miles (about 190km) north, near the border of Belgium, began operation in 1794. It consisted of 15 stations, each of which could receive and relay a single character in well under a minute. I can just imagine a guy sitting there in a tower, patiently peering through a telescope, and then, suddenly: “Yo, François, it looks like an A!” And François would go orient the mechanism to display an A to the next station while his buddy watched for the next letter. A single character could be passed all the way down the line in this manner in as little as 9 minutes, and an entire (very brief) message in about a half hour.

Before long, optical telegraph lines were installed all over France. When Napoleon came to power in 1799, he immediately began using the semaphore telegraph to relay tactical information to and from his troops. This system remained the primary means of telecommunication in the country for several decades. In fact, around 1840, after Samuel Morse had successfully proven his electric telegraph design, the French government initially declined to replace their semaphore telegraphs with the new technology. Despite its reduced need for human labor and its availability in poor weather or after dark, the electric telegraph was thought to be easily sabotaged—someone could simply cut the wire. The naysayers finally came to their senses and agreed to electric telegraphs in 1846, though some optical telegraphs were still in operation as late as 1881.

The use of the word “semaphore” to refer to signals made with hand-held flags, typically for naval communications, came well after (and was inspired by) the semaphore telegraph. Thus, in a manner of speaking, the technology developed by Chappe and Edelcrantz is still in use—at least occasionally. Your wireless internet connection may be faster, but it doesn’t provide nearly as much exercise. —Joe Kissell

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More Information about Optical Telegraphs...

Read more about the Optical telegraph, the semaphore, and Claude Chappe in the Wikipedia.

There are numerous other histories of the optical telegraph, which differ in a variety of details. See, for example:

• Napoleon’s Secret Weapon by Randy H. Katz at the University of California, Berkeley
• Chappe Telegraph System by R. Victor Jones at Harvard University
• The Optical Telegraph by Maria P. Bakardjieva at the University of Calgary
• Carmarthen’s Connection with the Optical Telegraph at Friends of Carmarthen County Museum
• The Early History of Data Networks by Gerard J. Holzmann
• Semaphore Flag Signalling System at the Australian National Botanic Gardens

For more on Edelcrantz’s version of the optical telegraph, see The Edelcrantz Telegraph Systems by R. Victor Jones at Harvard University.

You can get The Return of the King (DVD or book) from Amazon.com.

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℗ & © 2005, alt concepts. All rights reserved.

Times have changed. Although the U.S. Postal Service is still doing brisk business and is in no imminent danger of disappearing due to lack of interest, my own personal love affair with mail has faded. I still have lots of correspondents, but we communicate electronically. I receive and pay most of my bills online too. Photos, of course, go straight from my camera to a Web site or printer. And the whole notion of “mail order” seems quaintly anachronistic, even though the mail carrier is sometimes the person who delivers the stuff I order online. Yes, I do still subscribe to some paper magazines and get the occasional check or letter in the mail, but for the most part, the spark is gone.

Addressing Concerns
The other day, though, I was in a library looking at a book from the early 1900s in which there happened to be an extensive discussion of the Dead Letter Office. All at once, childhood memories came racing back: stern warnings from teachers to address mail properly, always include a return address, and, when sending a package, put an extra copy of the address inside. Were we not to do these things, the grown-ups cautioned us, our mail may end up in this mysterious and spooky room where it would, so we were led to believe, be unrecoverable for all eternity. And I remembered fantasizing about visiting that sacred vault, wherever it may be, wondering what incredible treasures I might find among its misaddressed envelopes and parcels. The century-old book provided a rather more prosaic description of how the Dead Letter Office had functioned at that time. And that got me thinking: is there still such a thing today? Where do letters really go when they die?

The answer, surprisingly enough, is St. Paul, Minnesota. Or Atlanta. In these two cities, the U.S. Postal Service operates large facilities called Mail Recovery Centers (MRCs), as “dead letter offices” have been known officially since 1992. (Formerly, there was also an MRC here in San Francisco.) The Post Office established the first dead letter office in 1825; from then until 1917, all undeliverable mail was sent to a single, central location in Washington, D.C.. But given the staggering number of such items—now on the order of 80 million per year—it made more sense to decentralize the effort somewhat.

Bring Out Your Dead (Letters)
Items arrive at the nearest MRC when they can be neither delivered nor returned—meaning both the recipient’s address and the sender’s address are incorrect, illegible, or missing. There, the pieces follow one of two paths—one for letters, one for parcels. Letters are scanned by machine for currency, checks, or other items of obvious value. If such enclosures are discovered, the envelopes are opened and examined. (Incidentally, Mail Recovery Center clerks are the only people who can legally open someone else’s mail—for everyone else, it would be a federal offense.) The Post Office makes an effort to locate either the sender or the recipient, using any clues available in the letter itself; if successful, they return the valuables. The rest of the letters are unceremoniously shredded—love letters, poems, manifestos, everything.

Packages are a bit different: every one must be opened and inspected by hand. Again, postal workers look for an enclosed address or some other kind of clue—a name, a phone number, or anything they can use to discover the item’s rightful owner. If they do find the owner, which happens about a quarter of the time, they normally forward the item without charge. If not, the contents of the package are stored for at least 90 days, in case someone files a claim. Unclaimed items left longer than that are either given away to charities or sold at auction. At these auctions, which take place in either St. Paul or Atlanta every few weeks, bargain-hunters can bid on large lots of merchandise—the quantity is simply too great to auction each item individually. Income from the auctions pays for just a portion of the MRCs’ operating expenses, which are considerable: the facilities employ more than 200 full-time staff people in all.

Although a great many of the items that arrive in MRCs are truly dead, the purpose of the facilities is in fact to resurrect as many as possible—they’re really undead letter offices. MRC employees have found an astonishing variety of items—not only common items like books and CDs but jewelry, computers, live animals, drugs, guns, human remains, and everything else imaginable. And, from all accounts, they find it quite rewarding to reunite lost belongings with their owners. It sounds like the perfect job for someone who still loves getting surprises in the mail. —Joe Kissell

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More Information about Mail Recovery Centers...

For more on the Mail Recovery Centers and their predecessors, see:

• Mail Recovery Centers in the U.S. Post Office’s 2004 Comprehensive Statement on Postal Operations, Chapter 2(A)(3)(i)
• Dead letter office in the Wikipedia
• No Return Address by Sue Allison in Smithsonian Magazine
• Point of No Return by Kathleen A. Ervin in Failure Magazine
• Postal Auction of Damaged and Unclaimed Goods in Wired
• Handling Fees for Dead Letter Services at Stampsjoann
• Auctions at the U.S. Postal Service—a listing of upcoming auctions of undeliverable items at the St. Paul and Atlanta MRCs

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• Giving Away the Razor, Selling the Blades
• ___-of-the-Month Clubs
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• Online Lost-and-Found Services

℗ & © 2005, alt concepts. All rights reserved.

A Needle in a Galaxy of Haystacks
First, the short version. SETI is a cooperative effort by a great many astronomers, engineers, mathematicians, and other scientists to find evidence of the existence of intelligent life in outer space. Their best-known tactic is using powerful radio telescopes, pointed at very specific regions of space, to listen for any radio signal that stands out from all the background noise and exhibits non-random patterns that may suggest an intelligent source. They’ve been at this for decades, and as yet have found no reliable evidence of what they’re looking for. But then, space, as Douglas Adams pointed out, is really big. If there is anyone out there, it’s bound to take some time to find them.

But isn’t that whole belief-in-aliens thing beneath the dignity of respectable scientists? What would drive people to spend their careers—and millions of dollars—on such a quixotic project? The why and how constitute a longer story.

The idea for SETI goes back to the early 1960s, when an astronomer named Frank Drake devised a mathematical way to estimate how many other intelligent civilizations there may be in our galaxy with whom we could conceivably communicate. The Drake Equation basically says that if you take the number of stars in the galaxy (hundreds of billions) and estimate the fraction of those that could have a planet circling them with the conditions necessary to support life, the fraction of those on which intelligent life could plausibly exist, and the average amount of time a civilization could expect to survive, then you can predict the likely number of intelligent alien races we might actually be able to encounter. And that number is…heavily disputed. Because all the variables that comprise the Drake Equation are ultimately based on nothing more than educated guesses, different people have calculated wildly different results. Some say the equation suggests there are at least 5,000 other intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. Others say the number is far smaller than 1, despite the fact that we have at least anecdotal evidence of one somewhat intelligent civilization—namely, our own.

The privately funded, non-profit SETI Institute, founded in 1984, favors the more optimistic estimates. And Drake, by the way, who conducted the first SETI-like experiments in 1960, is currently the Institute’s Chairman of the Board.

Needless to say, even if there are thousands of other planets inhabited by intelligent beings, they’re inconveniently far away, so going to visit them is pretty much out of the question. We could, however, at least discover whether they exist by listening for their radio broadcasts. Actually decoding or understanding an alien broadcast is entirely outside the scope of SETI; the point of the project is simply to search for signals that could only have been generated artificially. To do this, astronomers use gigantic radio telescopes, such as the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, to scan millions of frequencies coming from the vicinity of some of the stars deemed most likely to support planets with life. All this data is crunched by computers—a truly gargantuan task, given the amount of data being gathered. So thanks to a project sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley, the general public can participate in the SETI program. Millions of ordinary home and office computers around the world run the free SETI@home software to help process data from the radio telescopes during the spare cycles when the computers are not being used to do ordinary work.

Can You Hear Me Now?
Of course, there are some difficulties with the whole notion of listening for radio broadcasts from space. What if an intelligent civilization doesn’t happen to use radio broadcasts? Or what if they do, but the broadcasts are just not powerful enough to reach us? As even the SETI Institute admits, if another planet many light-years away pointed radio telescopes at Earth similar to the ones we’re pointing at them, they’d probably pick up nothing—with only a few exceptions, the strongest radio signals generated on our planet are far too weak to be sorted out from background noise over that sort of distance. So what SETI is really listening for right now is signals far more powerful than we ourselves could generate—or, and this is a long shot to say the least, a directional signal aimed straight at Earth. In the future, the SETI Institute hopes to make use of receivers that are far more sensitive and thus, perhaps, capable of detecting fainter signals.

Meanwhile, some scientists are highly critical of SETI on the grounds that it isn’t science in the strictest sense of the term. The scientific method requires that one form a hypothesis, make predictions based on that hypothesis, and then conduct tests to see whether the predictions are true or false, providing support or counterevidence for the hypothesis. But the hypothesis that there is intelligent life in outer space is not falsifiable—it can’t be disproved, even in theory. If SETI operated for centuries, it would only be able to listen to the tiniest portion of the observable universe, and even then, a lack of evidence would not be the same as proof of the nonexistence of intelligent life beyond our planet.

Given such a slim hope of success, why does anyone bother? For the same reason people play the lottery—the odds may be terrible, but the reward, if you happen to hit the jackpot, is huge.

If we do find out that we’re not alone in the universe, that’s bound to make a lot of people very unhappy. But some of us would be relieved to know there’s intelligent life somewhere. —Joe Kissell

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More Information about SETI...

To get all the facts on SETI straight from the source, visit the SETI Institute on the Web. (Be sure, in particular, to read their FAQ.) If you want to donate some of your computer’s spare processing power to the cause, check out SETI@home.

You can read more about SETI (and the Drake Equation) in the Wikipedia.

Contact is, of course, a fictional story—the real SETI project simply isn’t set up to do what that version did—but it’s still very entertaining, besides providing ample food for thought. You can get the DVD or the book from Amazon.com.

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• Sedna’s Moon
• Xena
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℗ & © 2005, alt concepts. All rights reserved.

It’s Dead, Jim
When a type of media can no longer be decoded, displayed, or presented readily, it’s said to be “dead.” So 8-track tapes, for example, have been dead for a long time. Even though you can, with some effort, still locate a working player, new media is not being created in that format, and the existing media is deteriorating—sooner or later it will be completely unusable, even if you have the necessary equipment. This process is not unique to modern times. Media formats have come and gone regularly for as long as humans have had the ability to communicate. But although technology must march on, we still lose something valuable every time media dies: the words, images, sounds, or ideas it contained.

This may not seem like much of a problem when it comes to bad pop music from the ’70s, but think about older media. Computer punch cards. Wire recorders, which predated tape recorders. The wax cylinders used in early phonographs. Stereopticon images. Magic lantern slides. Over the millennia, thousands of varieties of media have been used to record and exchange information, and as many of those media have died, the information has slipped from our grasp too. Never mind that modern media are quantifiably better in almost every respect; if the only recording of someone’s voice, say, from over 100 years ago is in a fragile and rapidly disintegrating medium that can only be retrieved with nonexistent equipment, that does us no good today—and yet it’s clearly something of tremendous historical interest.

Book of the Dead
In 1995, well-known science fiction author Bruce Sterling presented a manifesto called “The Dead Media Project: A Modest Proposal and a Public Appeal” at the International Symposium on Electronic Arts in Montréal. Sterling described the urgent need for someone to catalog all the forms of media humanity has created and then allowed to die off, documenting their successes, failures, and all the elements—cultural, political, financial, and technological—that may have contributed to their demise. This project would not only provide an important historical record, but crucially, would help technologists of the present and future to avoid the many mistakes of the past. Every medium in use today will surely be superseded or replaced someday. New media are appearing (and disappearing) at a shocking rate, and this is only likely to continue. Perhaps paper books will still be around long after DVDs are no more than a faint memory; perhaps blogs and other Web sites will survive for decades or centuries. But sooner or later, the world will move on to new ways of communicating.

Sterling proposed, specifically, that someone undertake the task of writing what he called The Handbook of Dead Media—as he put it, “A naturalist’s field guide for the communications paleontologist.” And as a tiny incentive, he offered a crisp, new $50 bill to the first person or group to produce such a book. He even offered his own notes on the subject for anyone to use freely, and started an email discussion list and Web site called the Dead Media Project where members of the public could contribute their own information about dead media. All this data was there for the taking, royalty-free, for anyone willing to sit down and do the research, track down all the relevant facts and images, and produce a nice coffee-table book that could be used as a reference for people like Sterling, who imagine future technologies for a living.

What Don’t You Know?
As Sterling admitted, such a project is full of ambiguities. What counts as media, anyway? Does it include, for example, delivery mechanisms such as carrier pigeons, pneumatic tubes, or the telegraph? Does it include ephemeral means of communication, such as Native American smoke signals? What about media production devices, such as unusual typewriter designs? Or particular methods of encoding information—say, obsolete computer file formats? For that matter, what does it really mean for media to be dead? Are there degrees of deadness? If media can still be recovered somehow, does it make the cut? If a few scattered hobbyists actively use a medium that’s otherwise dead, should it be included? If the Vatican uses smoke signals to indicate the selection of a new pope, does it mean that medium is still alive? The questions, to which there are no definitive answers, go on and on. One could spend months simply trying to define the scope of the project.

Now, ten years later, The Handbook of Dead Media still does not exist. The Dead Media Project itself is, if not dead, barely kicking—the Web site hasn’t been updated since mid-2001, and the mailing list no longer functions. Other programs and Web sites devoted to the preservation of old media, especially early audio recordings, are in operation, but as yet, I’ve seen no signs that anything approaching the scope of Sterling’s manifesto is even in the works.

Needless to say, I myself find this project enormously interesting and inspiring—linguistically, historically, and technologically. Compiling The Handbook of Dead Media would be right up my alley, a project I could really sink my teeth into. And if I ever become independently wealthy with absolutely nothing to do for a year or two, I’ll get right on it. The problem, of course, is that there’s almost certainly not enough money in such a book to reimburse an author for the time required to research and write it. That, like the death of media, is a great pity. —Joe Kissell

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More Information about Dead Media...

This article was featured in Carnival of the Infosciences #45.

The first place to go for information on dead media is the Dead Media Project Web site, which includes Sterling’s manifesto, an FAQ, and notes on many media that readers submitted before the site seemingly went into hibernation. You may also enjoy reading Bruce Sterling: the Dead Media interview by Alessandro Ludovico at neural.it or Dead Media list tracks forgotten revolutions by Elizabeth Weise in USA Today.

A similar project, also called the Dead Media Project, is being run by students of the Vancouver Film School-Multimedia. It appears to be slightly more alive, but has far less material.

NPR’s award-winning series Lost and Found Sound covers (and broadcasts) many examples of audio recordings that would be considered Dead Media. For more information on old sound recordings, see The Sound Recording Technology History Site.

Phil Sandifer at the University of Chicago proposed a Dead Media Taxonomy Model.

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• Grass Photographs
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• On-Demand Publishing
• Wikis
• The Antikythera Mechanism
• The Beale Ciphers
• Radio Call Letters

℗ & © 2005, alt concepts. All rights reserved.

At first blush, this seems like a no-brainer, a long-overdue exercise—one that we might as well get out of the way now, because it will only be harder later on. And yet, beneath the surface of this noble idea lurk extraordinarily pesky issues. As annoyed as I get when I read misspelled words, and as sympathetic as I am to the plight of those trying to learn the language, I find myself very torn over whether I could actually support an official reform of English spelling.

Wutz Rong With This Pikcher?
The problems with English spelling, of course, are obvious with a moment’s reflection. We have words with silent letters that serve no apparent purpose—such as the second l at the end of “pill” or the gh in the word “eight.” We have letters or groups of letters that are pronounced many different ways (or sometimes not at all). A good example is the letters “ough,” which are pronounced “oo” in “through,” “ou” in “bough,” “oh” in “though,” “uf” in “enough,” and so on. We have words with different meanings that are pronounced the same but spelled differently—think “there,” “their,” and “they’re,” for example. And there are countless other examples. Such peculiarities in spelling, for the most part, serve no useful function, and simply add to the amount of work we all need to do in learning and using the language. A reformed, simplified spelling system would resolve all these annoyances and many others.

Indeed, a certain amount of reform has happened all by itself over the years, as previously alternative spellings have worked their way into the dictionary as standard forms. Think of the word “catalog,” which was formerly spelled “catalogue,” or “draft,” formerly spelled “draught.” On a relatively small scale, sensible spellings do sometimes replace less sensible ones. However, this process has been hit-and-miss, with more misses than hits.

The proposal, then, is that we systematically and definitively wipe out all the anomalous spellings in English so that anyone looking at a word in print will immediately know how to pronounce it—and, conversely, anyone attempting to write English will be able to get every single spelling right the first time. In other words, proponents of English spelling reform want us to adopt a (mostly) phonetic orthography, perhaps along the lines of what one finds in Spanish or Indonesian. Needless to say, though, it’s not quite that simple.

Fasing Douts
The first question that arises is how far such a reform would go. For instance, we could make a good start by simply removing letters that are never pronounced. “Though” could become “tho,” “guard” could become “gard,” “foreign” could become “forin,” “doubt” could become “dout,” and so on. We could also, perhaps, reduce the number of ways to write any particular sound—so the “ee” sound in “street,” for example, might always be written “ee,” never “ea,” “ie,” “ei,” “i,” “e,” or whatever. Although these changes would help, however, they would solve only a subset of the problems—and the more extensive the changes are, the more difficult they would be for the public to accept.

Consider the question of words that are pronounced differently in different situations. You don’t even have to get into dialectal differences here—think of a word as common as “the.” If we’re spelling it phonetically, which vowel do we put on the end? Or do we have two separate spellings—one for when it’s pronounced “thuh” and another for when it’s pronounced “thee”? In such cases, some reformers propose adopting a neutral spelling that, while perhaps not perfectly phonetic, can adapt itself to either pronunciation. Other reformers say that this is exactly the kind of problem we’re trying to solve in the first place.

Then there are those who point out that a word’s spelling gives important clues to its etymology, meaning, and relationship to other words. So even though the “a” in the word “real” is not pronounced, it serves the important function of showing the word’s connection to the word “reality,” in which the “a” is pronounced. Lose that letter, and the words no longer appear to have anything to do with each other. Thus, at least some of the peculiarities of English spelling exist for entirely legitimate, and still useful, historical reasons. Critics of this argument point out that English also has plenty of words whose spellings were entirely arbitrary—the word “receive” might just as easily have settled into the lexicon with an “ie” rather than an “ei,” and we can’t blame such oddities on the words’ derivations from other languages.

Perhaps the most persuasive argument against spelling reform is that simplified spellings would be—at least initially—much harder for all the hundreds of millions of English readers to read, since we’ve already programmed our brains to work under the current, flawed system. There’s also that little matter of what to do with the billions of books, magazines, Web sites, and other documents that already use the “old” spelling. The task of retooling them in a new spelling system is unthinkably huge, but if they remain in their current state and are expected to be readable, most people will have to be able to understand how to read both systems—an even larger cognitive burden than what we already have. Supporters of spelling reform admit that the transition process is bound to be difficult, but that in a few hundred years, our descendants will thank us and the world will be a happier place.

I have no doubt that this is true. But if English were spelled the way it sounds, I’d no longer be able to make snap judgments about people’s intelligence by observing their spelling skills. That may be too high a price to pay. —Joe Kissell

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More Information about English Spelling Reform...

A few of the many Web sites dealing with English spelling reform are:

• The Simplified Spelling Society
• English Spelling Reform by Wendell H. Hall
• English Spelling Reform by David Barnsdale
• English Spelling Reform Link Page by Steve Bett, Ph.D.
• The Spelling Reform Ring

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• Hypercorrection
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℗ & © 2005, alt concepts. All rights reserved.

About four centuries earlier, someone developed a rather more sophisticated code and hand-wrote approximately 240 pages of it using a quill pen on vellum—complete with colorful illustrations of plants, stars, naked women, and other assorted figures. Whatever this book is, it clearly required an extraordinary amount of time, effort, and care. It also, very likely, made its author quite wealthy. And yet, to this day, no one knows for sure who wrote it, what it says, what language it’s in, or whether it really says anything at all. Linguists, historians, and cryptographers have spent many decades poring over it and subjecting it to every conceivable form of analysis, only to reveal that there are more questions than answers. This text, known as the Voynich manuscript, is one of the last great unsolved cryptographic puzzles.

Book of Mysteries
Wilfrid Voynich, an American antique book dealer, discovered the manuscript in 1912 in the library of a Jesuit college in Frascati, Italy. Believing it to be extremely valuable, he purchased it and brought it back with him to the United States. The text itself is written in a completely unique script, which suggests that it’s a cipher of some kind. The characters, which are presumably letters, do not correspond to any known alphabet. They are separated into groups that appear to be words, but lack any punctuation. The book as a whole is divided into several sections, each with distinctive drawings and other individuating features.

A cover letter inserted in the manuscript, written by one of its owners around 1666, claims that Roman Emperor Rudolph II had originally purchased the book for a sum equivalent to tens of thousands of dollars in today’s currency, and that Rudolph believed it to have been written by the 13th century English Franciscan friar Roger Bacon. The letter does not say, however, from whom Rudolph acquired the manuscript. Voynich himself apparently believed Bacon to have been the author, and enlisted the aid of the nation’s top cryptographers to decipher it.

Over the next several decades, as one expert after another weighed in on the text, several interesting findings emerged. Bacon’s authorship was disproved fairly decisively, and most estimates put the manuscript’s creation somewhere between the mid-15th century and the mid-16th century. Analysis of the text showed many patterns typical of natural language, though it clearly is not a simple cipher of English, Latin, German, or any other European language. On the other hand, some features of the text, such as the range of word lengths and the frequency with which some words are repeated, seem remarkably unlike any known language.

Much Ado about Nothing?
Some researchers have suggested that the text is an attempt to transcribe a Chinese dialect. Others say it’s a representation of Hebrew. Still others believe it’s an exquisitely coded message in some Romance language. And then, predictably, there are those who say it’s the language of angels—or maybe aliens. In any case, no credible translation of the text has appeared, despite many attempts.

The illustrations in the Voynich manuscript—which, I should add, are mostly rather crude drawings—suggest that it covers such topics as botany, cosmology, and pharmacology. There are some indications that it may be an alchemical or mystical text, too, though this is largely speculative. The biggest question facing researchers is whether the text is about anything at all.

The fact that the manuscript has resisted all efforts at decoding has led many people to suspect that it’s not a code at all—it’s simply nonsense, very cleverly disguised as language. In 2003, Gordon Rugg, a professor of Computer Science at Keele University, demonstrated that using a simple device called a Cardan grille, someone could have formed words from a fixed set of prefixes, roots, and suffixes that exhibit language-like patterns similar to those in the Voynich manuscript. In other words, it could have been a hoax—and if so, Rugg thinks the most likely culprit is Edward Kelley, a 16th-century English spiritualist who believed in alchemy and was known to be a forger.

Although Rugg’s work is interesting, it’s far from definitive. It proves only that the manuscript could be a hoax—and even if it is, that doesn’t eliminate the possibility that there is actual coded text hidden within it somewhere. And according to some researchers, at least, Rugg’s solution does not account for some of the important features of the text. In any case, if the manuscript is actually gibberish, there would be no way to prove that with complete certainty.

Now, I’m not saying the manuscript isn’t a hoax. In fact, I lean toward the opinion that it is. But what troubles me is the lack of clarity about what it was supposed to be a hoax of. Presumably, if someone spent months creating the manuscript with the expectation of selling it for a small fortune, the forger must have had a compelling story to tell the prospective buyer about the document. Was it represented as being a recipe for eternal youth, a treasure map, a message from aliens, or what? No one seems to know for sure, and the answer may never be found. All I can say is that if I saw an old page full of incomprehensible ciphered text and doodles of naked women, I’d immediately assume I was looking at a high school student’s notebook. —Joe Kissell

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More Information about The Voynich Manuscript...

This article was featured in the Carnival of Bad History.

For more information about the Voynich manuscript, see:

• The Voynich Manuscript by René Zandbergen
• Voynich manuscript in the Wikipedia
• The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript by Gordon Rugg in Scientific American, July, 2004 (see also Rugg’s Web site, Replicating the Voynich Manuscript)
• Voynich Manuscript at World Mysteries
• The Voynich Manuscript at Museum of Hoaxes
• The Voynich Manuscript Textbook

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• The Klingon Language Institute
• The Writings of Carlos Castaneda
• Orgone
• The Beale Ciphers

℗ & © 2005, alt concepts. All rights reserved.

Years later, I was to discover that there are a number of urban myths about the boiling point and freezing point of water, with “hot water freezes faster” being just one of them. I scoured a bunch of Web sites, and came up with contradictory information. But this is not, after all, rocket science—there’s no reason I should have to live with uncertainty about something so easily demonstrated. So I decided to conduct my own experiments and find out for myself. Although I didn’t have a wooden bucket handy, I did have a freezer, a stove, some water, and a digital thermometer. I’ll tell you the results of my experiments in just a moment. But first, here are some of the interesting claims about water I found.

• Hot water freezes faster than cold water. Most experts say that, all things being equal, cold water freezes faster. However, things are not always equal. A curious phenomenon known as the Mpemba effect can, under some very specific (and poorly understood) circumstances, result in hot water freezing faster than cold water. One of the several possible explanations for this effect involves evaporation: if you start with extremely hot water, a good bit of it will evaporate (and a smaller quantity of water will freeze faster than a larger quantity). And so, according to chemists, this one is not a myth, and this is presumably what my high school chemistry assignment was getting at.
• Previously boiled water freezes faster than regular water. Notwithstanding the previous explanation, water at room temperature that was once boiled, according to some experts, should freeze faster because the dissolved oxygen has been removed.
• Previously boiled water boils faster than regular water. Likewise, previously boiled water at room temperature should boil faster than water that has never been boiled, for the same reason it freezes faster (less dissolved oxygen).
• Cold water boils faster than hot water. If hot water freezes faster, maybe cold water boils faster! Again, this defies common sense—and again, say scientists, it’s simply wrong. Hot water from the tap should in fact boil much faster than cold water. However, using hot water for boiling does not actually save any energy. You may use less gas (or electricity) on the stovetop, but your water heater will have used the same amount of energy to heat the water in the first place. (If you use solar energy to heat your water, of course, that’s a different story.) Some water heaters may introduce additional sediment into the water, giving you another reason to consider starting with cold—at least, if time is not of the essence.
• Adding salt to water raises its boiling point. Chemically speaking, this is a verifiable fact. Salt does raise water’s boiling point (and lower its freezing point—which is why home ice cream makers use rock salt). But the real question is whether this makes it take longer to get to the boiling point (and, for that matter, how far above 212°F/100°C it will get). Despite what you read in cookbooks, scientists claim that the amount of salt you’d typically add to a pot of boiling water is too small to make any meaningful difference in the boiling time or boiling point.

So, given what I knew should happen, here’s what actually occurred in my experiments.

Freezing Water: I started with three identical glass containers, each holding 100ml (about 3.5 fl. oz.) of filtered water: one at room temperature (72°F/22°C), one at the same temperature as my hot water tap (115°F/46°C), and one boiling (212°F/100°C). I put all these into my freezer, which has an air temperature of 0°F (–18°C). Since I knew that the water would not turn from liquid to ice all at once, my arbitrary standard for frozenness was the time at which a wooden chopstick dropped into the center of the container would no longer touch the bottom. I checked each of the containers every 5 minutes. The results? The room-temperature water froze in 50 minutes. The hot water froze in 80 minutes. And the boiling water froze in 95 minutes. My verdict: no contest—not even remotely close. Given the conditions in my freezer and the water I used, I could not reproduce the Mpemba effect.

I also tried a container of previously boiled water, now at room temperature. It froze in 60 minutes—more time (not less) than the unboiled water had taken, but not by much.

Boiling Water (Hot vs. Cold): I put a liter (about 34 fl. oz.) of water at room temperature in a pan at room temperature and set it on a high flame. It boiled in 6 minutes. I then cooled the pan back to room temperature and put in a liter of hot (115°F/46°C) tap water. With the flame unchanged, the hot water boiled in 4 minutes, 30 seconds. My verdict: hot water does boil significantly faster, just as you’d expect.

Boiling Previously Boiled Water: I put a liter of water that had previously been boiled, now cooled to room temperature, into a pan at room temperature. With the flame unchanged from the last experiment, this water boiled in 6 minutes, 11 seconds. My verdict: essentially the same as water that hadn’t been boiled.

Boiling Water (with salt): I added a generous 2 tablespoons of table salt—much more than most people would ever use for boiling pasta or vegetables—to a mere 1 liter of water. It boiled in 6 minutes, 33 seconds (versus 6 minutes for unsalted, room-temperature water) and reached a temperature, according to my thermometer, of 216°F (102°C). So clearly the salt had an effect, but not much of one—and this was with an uncommonly high concentration. My verdict: Add salt to water if you want to season it, but don’t expect it to make any significant change in the water’s boiling time or temperature.

Now, I freely admit that my kitchen is no laboratory, and that any number of variables could have influenced the outcome. My measurements may have been imprecise. My freezer may have had uneven zones of warmer or colder air. My glassware may have been contaminated. And so on. But whatever may occur under ideal conditions in a laboratory, when it comes to freezing or boiling water in an ordinary kitchen, common sense prevails. —Joe Kissell

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More Information about Water Freezing and Boiling Myths...

Other resources discussing the boiling and/or freezing points of hot and cold water (and remember, take these with a grain of salt) include:

• Which freezes faster, hot water or cold water? and Which boils faster, hot water or cold water? at The Straight Dope
• Ask the Experts at Scientific American
• Ice Ice Baby at the Misappliance of Science
• What freezes first, hot or cold water at The Naked Scientists Science Discussion Forum
• Kitchen Myths at Peter Aitken’s Pages
• Energy Myths at Bankrate.com

And for more information about the Mpemba effect in particular, see:

• Can hot water freeze faster than cold water? in the Physics FAQ
• The Mpemba Effect: Hot Water Freezes before Cold by Ron Kurtus at School for Champions
• Mpemba effect in the Wikipedia

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• Freeze Drying
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In-N-Out
The short answer is that castor oil is a strong laxative—and presumably, cleansing the bowels in such a forceful manner could serve either a beneficial or a punitive purpose. But then, if it’s a laxative you’re after, there are less obnoxious potions, such as prune juice or even oatmeal. The taste itself, apparently, was supposed to build character. Castor oil is also known to induce vomiting—again, occasionally a medically useful thing, though more often, a symptom one would wish to be cured of.

It turns out that there’s much more to castor oil—both good and bad—than Grandma ever suspected.

Castor oil comes from the seed of a plant called Ricinus communis, which grows in most parts of the world. The seeds are commonly known as “castor beans” because they look like beans, though the name Ricinus is Latin for a type of tick, which the seed also resembles. To obtain castor oil, one simply removes the hulls of the seeds and cold-presses them.

The oil is extremely versatile. Castor oil is used in the production of plastics, soaps, textiles, paints, cosmetics, inks and dyes, adhesives, lubricants, polishes, and numerous other products. It’s also sometimes used to induce labor in pregnant women, though from what I’ve read, its effectiveness in such cases is somewhat in doubt. Only a tiny percentage of the oil is sold for medicinal use—and only a tiny percentage of that is ever actually used as a purgative or emetic. Although it’s very effective at causing the digestive system to discharge its contents (from whichever end), its unpleasant taste has made its use quite rare these days.

Weapon of Mass Doo-Doo
Mussolini famously used castor oil as a weapon of sorts against political dissidents in Italy in the 1920s. Fascist operatives would capture their opponents and force-feed them a large quantity of castor oil. This produced severe diarrhea—in some cases, severe enough to cause death. (When the explicit goal was to murder someone rather than scare them, a little gasoline was mixed into the castor oil for good measure.)

But the humble castor plant can in fact do much worse. The residue left over after pressing castor seeds contains about 5% ricin, an astonishingly toxic poison. How toxic? Well, I’ve read that it’s twice as poisonous as cobra venom, 6,000 times as poisonous as cyanide, and 12,000 times as poisonous as rattlesnake venom. A dose as small as the weight of a single grain of salt can be lethal to an adult human. And it’s even more deadly when inhaled than when ingested. In other words, it’s really not something you want to mess with, especially since there’s no antidote. Ricin has been used in the production of chemical weapons, and although it’s not as toxic as some such agents, it’s extremely hard to control, as the plants can grow nearly anywhere and extraction of the poison is relatively simple. (For that matter, simply consuming a few of the raw seeds can kill you.)

All this, of course, leads one to wonder whether there might not potentially be tiny amounts of ricin in castor oil. I’ve read conflicting statements—some sources say no, pure castor oil contains no ricin at all; others say it contains some, but it’s such a miniscule amount that it wouldn’t hurt anyone. For some reason, I don’t find that terribly comforting. All in all, it’s a good argument to stick with that high-fiber diet, and if I really need an awful-tasting laxative, I’ll spike my prune juice with vodka. —Joe Kissell

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More Information about Castor Oil...

Read more about castor oil at:

• Castor oil in the Wikipedia (see also the entries on Castor bean and Ricin)
• The Castor Bean at Wayne’s Word
• Castor oil in the Columbia Encyclopedia
• Did Mussolini use castor oil as an instrument of torture? in The Straight Dope
• What is castor oil used for? at Ask Yahoo!
• Natural induction: Does castor oil work? at iVillage Pregnancy & Parenting

I did actually make a prune juice cocktail once, just out of curiosity. It was disgusting.

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Several years ago, Morgen and I visited Germany—more specifically, the region in southeastern Germany known as Bavaria. Although Germany ranks third in per-capita beer consumption (after the Czech Republic and Ireland), it is clearly a place where people take their beer very seriously. Bavaria, in particular, is home to the oldest (non-religious) legal standard of food production still in force: The legendary Bavarian Purity Law of 1516, known in German as the Reinheitsgebot.

The Duke of Beers
The short version of this law, which was enacted on April 23, 1516 by Bavarian Duke Wilhelm IV (a.k.a. William IV), is that beer may contain only three ingredients: barley, hops, and water. Ostensibly, this makes the law one of the oldest “consumer protection” regulations, instilling confidence in purchasers that the beer they get will contain no questionable grains or additives. (Among the additives the law sought to ban were some commonly used herbs that had hallucinogenic effects.) But in fact, the bit about beer ingredients was simply one sentence in a much longer ordinance that primarily specified beer pricing regulations. The intention of the law was not only to ensure the quality of the beer and control pricing, but also to guarantee that more valuable grains such as wheat and rye, which were needed for bread and often in short supply, were not used for beermaking. This was not actually the first law of its kind, either—similar ordinances date back as far as 1165—but it was the first to apply to all of Bavaria, and the oldest such regulation still in force today.

Astute observers will note that yeast is not among the three ingredients listed—and without yeast, beer could not ferment. In the 16th century, the existence of microorganisms was still unknown, and beer was sometimes made simply by allowing the ingredients to sit out until some airborne yeast found its way into the vat and fermentation began on its own. Other times, sediment from an earlier batch was used as a starter—but this was not thought of as a separate “ingredient.”

The Yeast You Can Do
During the 20th century, the Reinheitsgebot underwent some significant changes. For one thing, yeast was officially added to the list of allowable ingredients. For another, a distinction was made between beers brewed with “top-fermenting” yeasts and those brewed with “bottom-fermenting” yeasts. For bottom-fermenting beers, only malted (that is, sprouted) barley is permitted; for top-fermenting beers, any malted grain (such as wheat) can be used, as can sugar. There are also a number of exceptions and variations in the law that can be applied under certain circumstances. In some cases you can manufacture a “special” beer that colors outside the lines slightly as long as you clearly identify it as such, and of course you can put anything you want in your beer as long as you don’t actually call it “beer.”

Critics have pointed out that one can follow the Bavarian Purity Law and still produce very bad beer (for example, using poor-quality ingredients or sloppy technique)—and that, conversely, many excellent beers (including some well-known Irish and Belgian varieties) do not and could not conform to this law. (European Union rules, by the way, now stipulate that the Reinheitsgebot can only apply to beers brewed inside Germany, not to imports.) So in a way, what the regulations enforce is “purity” in the sense of values traditional to the region, rather than the absence of contaminants or a guarantee of quality.

German beers that conform to the Bavarian Purity Law get to advertise this fact on their labels, and it’s popularly believed to have a great deal of marketing appeal. So much so, in fact, that the principles have been adopted by beermakers in many other countries as well, right down to local microbreweries in the U.S. and Canada. I must admit that, despite having my own high standards for beer, at this point I think the Bavarian Purity Law is anachronistic and more than a bit gimmicky. Or at least, I did until I discovered that Anheuser-Busch is now selling a beer with caffeine, guarana, and ginseng (not to mention fruit flavors). That is a prime example of a beverage that, whatever its merits may be (and I can barely imagine), should not be permitted to call itself beer. —Joe Kissell

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More Information about The Bavarian Purity Law...

Get a free recipe every day plus kitchen tips and other useful information for food aficionados at Worldwide Recipes.

To read an English translation of the original 1516 Bavarian Purity Law, see The Brewery.

More about the Bavarian Purity Law:

• Reinheitsgebot in the Wikipedia
• What Every Beer-Lover Needs To Know About The Reinheitsgebot at Beer Church
• Purity Law at Erdinger Weißbräu
• The German Reinheitsgebot—why it’s a load of old bollocks by Ron Pattinson

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• Herrenchiemsee Castle
• The Passglas
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My food choices are influenced much more by taste than by nutrition. I do recognize that fermented foods, as a class, are not always the healthiest—but in my experience, the foods touted as “healthy” often seem to have the least appealing flavors and textures. While I’m willing to make some compromises in the name of nutrition, I have my limits. On the other hand, on those rare occasions when taste and healthiness intersect, I couldn’t be happier. Such is the case with kefir, a fermented milk beverage that has been in existence for centuries but has only recently begun to attract a popular following here in North America.

Going With the Grain
Kefir bears more than a passing resemblance to yogurt (or, at least, yogurt-based drinks): it’s much thicker than milk, has a tangy flavor, and is formed by the action of live cultures. But the differences are significant—starting with the microorganisms themselves. Kefir production begins with something known as kefir grains, though “grain” is an odd choice of word to describe this substance that is white, rubbery, and roughly cauliflower-like in appearance. The grain is formed from a conglomeration of over 30 kinds of bacteria and yeast, along with a structure of proteins, fats, and sugars that the organisms create to live in. This may sound yucky, but it’s actually rather fantastic: this mega-colony has emergent properties that make it act as though it were a single entity. It grows (when immersed in solutions containing sugars or starches) and repairs itself when damaged. Even more interesting, the various types of bacteria are able to defend the entire colony against foreign pathogens in a way that any single strain could not.

Producing drinkable kefir from kefir grains couldn’t be easier: put some grains in a glass container of milk at room temperature and wait 24 hours or so. During this time, the liquid thickens due to the bacterial action. When it has reached the desired consistency, strain out the grains (which, in the process, will have grown a little bit), and pop them into another container of milk for tomorrow’s batch. Repeat indefinitely—as long as kefir grains have a relatively consistent supply of food, they can live, theoretically, forever. When a clump of grains grows too large, you can pull off a piece and eat it or share it with a friend who needs a kefir starter. According to an old ethic of kefir making, the grains must never be sold, but may be freely given away to anyone who wants them. As a result, there are several Web sites where you can search for one of the thousands of people all over the world who are willing to mail you, for the cost of postage alone, enough kefir grain to start your own production.

Ancient Cultures
This drink originated in the Caucasus Mountains eons ago, most likely as a method of preserving milk for long periods of time without refrigeration. According to legend, the first kefir grains were gifts from the Prophet Mohammed; where he may have obtained them is anyone’s guess. In any case, the grains were passed on for many generations within a rather small community but always kept diligently from outsiders. As the story goes, in the early 1900s, a Russian woman named Irina Sakharova managed (after many misadventures) to persuade a Caucasian prince to part with some kefir grains, which she then took to Moscow. Before long, the drink became a staple in the Russian diet, and by now it has spread all over the world.

To what does this strange concoction owe its success? Well, first things first: it tastes good. That’s a matter of opinion, of course, but if you like the taste of yogurt or buttermilk, you’ll probably like kefir too. (And if not, you can certainly flavor it with honey, fruit, chocolate syrup, or whatever else strikes your fancy.) Unlike yogurt drinks, though, kefir is very slightly carbonated and very slightly alcoholic. These properties are barely noticeable—like the tiny bite apple cider gets when it’s sat in your refrigerator just a couple of days too long—but they undoubtedly contributed somewhat to kefir’s popularity.

The biggest advantage of kefir over milk or yogurt is in its nutritional properties. The bacteria in kefir are usually referred to as probiotic, or life-supporting. In one sense, this refers to the mutually supportive relationship the various bacteria have with each other. In another sense, it refers to the fact that the bacteria support human life by aiding digestion once they arrive in the intestines. (Kefir also, by the way, produces a mild laxative effect.) According to some reports, the friendly yeasts in kefir can even wipe out pathogenic yeasts that may be found in the body. Kefir is rich in protein, vitamins, and minerals (particularly calcium). And like yogurt, it has very little lactose, making it safe for lactose-intolerant people.

Goat Milk?
Most experts claim that the best kefir is made from raw goat’s milk, but cow’s milk also works, even if it has been pasteurized. If fact, people have made kefir from soy milk, coconut milk, and even fruit juices. But kefir grains differ in the combinations and proportions of bacteria and yeasts they contain, so not every grain is compatible with every food.

Kefir is sold commercially under such brands as Lifeway and Helios; my local Whole Foods Market, for example, carries both brands. Many who produce their own kefir at home regard these mass-produced varieties as grossly inferior to “real” kefir. One often-heard complaint is that some commercial suppliers, in the name of consistency, use a laboratory-engineered starter powder rather than the authentic kefir grains from the original lineage. Not being a microbiologist, I can’t say precisely what differences such starters might make in the final product—for all I know, store-bought kefir may be chemically and biologically identical to the stuff you can create at home. And at least one major brand, Helios, claims to use actual kefir grains. Be that as it may, since kefir is so easy to make at home, and since the kefir grains can be obtained at virtually no cost, you might want to think twice before buying the bottled product. On the other hand, if the presence of bottled kefir in grocery stores can help to popularize the taste, that can only be a good thing. —Joe Kissell

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More Information about Kefir...

Thanks to reader Paul Perkal for suggesting today’s topic!

Get a free recipe every day plus kitchen tips and other useful information for food aficionados at Worldwide Recipes.

For more information about kefir, see:

• Kefir at Answers.com
• Dom’s Kefir in-site
• Kefir—Ancient Traditions of the Soviet Staple at Food Reference Website
• Body Ecology (which manufactures and sells powdered kefir starter)

Lifeway and Helios Nutrition are the two largest commercial suppliers of kefir in the United States.

To find a source of kefir grains so that you can make your own, search for a nearby donor at Live Kefir grains.

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As a San Francisco resident, I like to brag that my city is where Important Things were invented. The television. The jukebox. Bay windows. Denim jeans. The slot machine. Cable cars. The fortune cookie. Chop Suey. And yes, Rice-a-Roni. It’s also reputedly the birthplace of quite a few alcoholic beverages, including Irish Coffee, the Mimosa, the Mai Tai, and the Martini.

Although the martini is apparently less than 150 years old, records of its invention are sketchy at best, and several other municipalities would like to take credit for it. A great many widely divergent stories about the drink’s origin are in circulation, each one as plausible as the next. But since this is a question that cannot be answered definitively, I choose to believe the story I like best. That story says that in the mid-1800s, a miner about to board a ferry in San Francisco for the trip across the bay to his home town of Martinez asked a bartender to whip up an interesting drink for him. The resulting mixture was named after the traveler’s destination, and years later, when the drink had become more popular, the name was shortened to “martini.” This story, I hasten to admit, may be entirely apocryphal, but it does at least seem likely that the name “martini” is in fact derived in some fashion from “Martinez.”

Mixed Messages
In addition to the drink’s uncertain provenance, no reliable documentation of its original recipe exists. Among the ingredient lists I found claiming to be the original are these:

• 4 parts sweet vermouth, 1 part gin, dash of bitters, two dashes of Maraschino, slice of lemon
• 3 parts gin, 1 part sweet vermouth, 1 part dry vermouth, dash of orange bitters, slice of lemon
• 3 parts gin, 1 part dry vermouth
• 2 parts gin, 1 part sweet vermouth, (sometimes) dash of orange bitters
• 1 part gin, 1 part dry vermouth

(In addition to the ingredients listed, every martini is mixed with ice to chill it; the ice is strained out before serving.)

You will notice, of course, that all these recipes contain gin—not vodka—and vermouth (a type of wine flavored with herbs and spices). Vodka martinis are a more recent invention (and, according to some, an egregious misuse of the very term “martini,” since vodka is all but tasteless). The same is true of the ubiquitous olive garnish, which is suspiciously absent from early ingredient lists. But the uncertainty of the recipe is precisely what’s at issue here. Since there is no canonical reference as to what the “one true” martini should contain, anyone who gets uptight over the fact that a certain martini recipe is “wrong” is arguing from a position of ignorance. (More on this in a moment.)

How Dry Am I?
In any event, it is clear that over the last century, the commonly expected ratio of gin to vermouth has steadily increased to the point that some martini aficionados consider even an extra-dry 8-to-1 ratio too “sweet.” If you want to be extremely hip, you can buy spray bottles designed expressly for “misting” a few microdroplets of dry vermouth onto cold gin to give your hyper-desiccated martini the mere suggestion of a hint of vaguely vermouthish essence.

This change is apparently no accident. Some sources claim that the gin commonly available a century ago was much more bitter than what we have today, that the purpose of the vermouth was to mask this bitterness, and that the decreasing proportion of vermouth has thus been nothing more than a natural adjustment to expose more of the gin’s flavor.

Shaken, Not Stirred?
But the biggest (and silliest) martini controversy is, of course, whether they should be shaken or stirred. Everyone knows James Bond’s choice, and I’ve read countless criticisms that Bond orders his martini the “wrong” way—that a sophisticated international spy ought to know better. One could perhaps justifiably criticize Bond (or, to be more accurate, Ian Fleming) for preferring a vodka martini, since the one thing we can say with certainty about the traditional recipe is that it uses gin. But surely the manner of combining the alcohols is of little consequence? Well, you’d be surprised.

Putting the ingredients (including ice) in a covered container and shaking will result in a colder beverage—ordinarily considered a benefit. But purists never seem to tire of saying that shaking a martini bruises the gin, as though this were a self-evidently ridiculous thing to do. You cannot bruise gin. You can bruise yourself or even a piece of fruit, but you simply cannot damage gin in any way merely by shaking it.

OK, say the critics, maybe “bruise” was a poor choice of words, but by shaking gin with ice you do change it—you aerate it (a tiny little bit) and you probably melt a little more of the ice, diluting it a smidgen more than you would by stirring. The presence of air bubbles (and perhaps a few ice fragments) can in fact make the martini slightly cloudy, but this appearance dissipates quickly. The real question is whether you can taste the difference between a shaken martini and a stirred one, and let’s just say that innumerable blind taste tests have yielded inconclusive results but a lot of bruised feelings.

Even if a shaken martini does taste different from a stirred martini, who’s to say the difference is objectionable? Some people like carbonated water better than still water. Some people like Pepsi better than Coke. Some people like their orange juice without pulp. These are all merely preferences, not matters of right and wrong. And so what if Bond, for whatever fictional reason, preferred his martini shaken? The point is that he knew stirred martinis were the norm—otherwise, there’d have been no point in ordering his specially. So he’s not betraying ignorance, but rather expressing a preference.

Or maybe he was doing it for his health. As crazy as it sounds, the British Medical Journal published a study showing that shaken martinis have measurably higher antioxidant properties than stirred martinis. Higher enough to make any real difference? Probably not. But at least when your know-it-all friends give you a dressing down for being clueless about proper martini preparation, you’ve got a great comeback.

By the way…the right way to make me a martini is to use 2 parts gin and 1 part sweet (yes, sweet) vermouth, shake with ice, and garnish with a twist of lemon. Cheers! —Joe Kissell

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More Information about The Martini...

Get a free recipe every day plus kitchen tips and other useful information for food aficionados at Worldwide Recipes.

To learn more (including a lot of contradictory claims) about the martini, see for example:

• Martini cocktail in the Wikipedia
• Martinez: Martini festival toasts city’s signature drink by Tony Cooper in the San Francisco Chronicle (October 22, 2004)
• The Martini Story at the City of Martinez, California
• The Rise and Fall of the Martini at DrinkBoy
• History of the Martini at Jon Alan’s Steak & Chop House

For more on the James Bond connection in particular, see James Bond and the Martini at AMC TV or Shaken or Stirred at DrinkBoy.

Shaken, not stirred: bioanalytical study of the antioxidant activities of martinis really did appear in an honest-to-goodness medical journal.

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