Collection of Curiosities - Cynic's Edition

Hoaxes, practical jokes and confidence schemes have featured in entertainment (and the art of separating people from money) for hundreds of years. Despite massive amounts of cynicism present in today's society, hoaxes still manage to catch quite a few people, but only a select few have impacted entire nations and imprinted themselves on the public psyche.


Of Mars and Men

Substantially famous already, the War of the World's hoax isn't actually so much a practical joke or a hoax as it is a testament to people's tendency to jump to conclusions. Taking place on October 30th, 1938 (and continuing on for a few people in the population), the hoax generated a panic in some of the population in fear of a Martian invasion.

The War of the Worlds hoax was a radio broadcast of a radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds directed by Orson Welles. The broadcast followed a format of "breaking news" bulletins interrupting a performance by an orchestra. Each of the bulletins provided the audience with updates that followed the plot of the War of the Worlds - essentially a Martian invasion. Subsequently, portions of the public panicked at the thought that the invasion was real.

You know how some people miss the first five minutes of television shows or movies? Well, most television shows produced today are designed so that audiences can watch them without paying close attention. After all, viewers may be making dinner or folding clothes and they might not be pouring all their energy into watching. This means that many shows (particularly sit-coms) restate the plot or update viewers quite frequently. Unfortunately for listeners to the Welles broadcast, many missed the disclaimer introduction.

The broadcast also functions as a testament to some people's short attention spans. The story eventually switches to one man's narrative of his attempts at survival. This makes it readily apparent the broadcast is not real...but by that time people had ran screaming from their radio sets and were busy stockpiling supplies before the impending Martian invasion force arrived.

You can relive the mystical aura of a panic-stricken 1930s by listening to the broadcast here or here. Just like when you're watching TV, remember to skip the first few minutes.


Nothing for the Spaghetti Weevils

Did you know spaghetti grows on trees? Of course you don't... because it doesn't. That didn't stop the British show Panorama from broadcasting a fake documentary on April 1st, 1957 showcasing the bountiful Swiss spaghetti crop. Panorama happened to be one of the most trusted news sources on British television, so the hoax managed to get two types of responses: people who loved the joke and people who wanted to know how to grow their own spaghetti trees. This was the first - and only - time that the news program decided to air an April Fools joke. This is the benefit of having a cameraman who knows a good practical joke.

Through the glory of the internet you can pretend to be British in the 50s by watching the video here.

Pasta has become so ubiquitous now that everyone knows its secret ingredient: flour. Of course, you can add things like salt and eggs to the mixture, but pasta is essentially flour formed into fancy shapes. Unfortunately for much of the British population in the 50s, who had suffered rationing throughout the 40s, pasta was still considered something of a delicacy and remained relatively rare (I'm guessing their college students must have subsisted off some sort of Dickensian gruel, instead).

As a side benefit, the hoax documentary created and exterminated the adorable spaghetti weevil.


Soaking in Cynicism

Have you heard of the dangerous chemical dihydrogen monoxide that's responsible for thousands of deaths per year? I'm sure you have, but it was probably called something different, like hydrogen hydroxide or hydroxic acid. Or maybe water.

Developed in the 1990s, this hoax plays on a lack of scientific knowledge. Usually the hoax pops up in the form of a petition banning dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO), with a spokesperson listing off many of the dangerous-sounding aspects of water to persuade someone to sign. At face value all of this information is true, but used in an exaggerated manner (after all, thousands of people die every year to drowning). The hoax even has its own psuedo-advocates with a website listing off the dangers of DHMO.

This hoax ends up a source of amusement for chemists and a source of embarrassment for politicians. The hoax relies on exaggeration and a listener's lack of specific knowledge (or attention). It tells us that pretentious language and specialized jargon can often be used to circumvent people's logic and reasoning. Unfortunately it also showcases people's willingness to generate uninformed decisions. Who would ban water? Plenty of people if they don't know it's water.

Also lava monsters.


Many people might believe that modern hypercyncism may prevent hoaxes from even gaining a foothold anymore, but the case of DHMO shows that people as a whole are as gullible and misinformed as ever. Afterall, there's more information now than ever before, how do you know who to not trust? Unfortunately this results in more work for individuals because it takes even more effort to form factual, informed decisions... many people often don't bother.

The predominant form of the hoax is no longer steeped in April Fools Day jokes and emails that can be disproved with a single Google search. They rely more on confidence schemes and human fallibility. Even in the digital age, con artists still rely on surreptitiously gaining information directly from people more often than through brute force cracking of electronic information. For less criminal misinformation there's plenty of help around. The website Snopes exists to discredit modern hoaxes and urban legends which manage to find their way into chain mailings and conversations.


At least we don't need to worry about spaghetti weevils. Or do we!?

Arabian Golf

The Persian Gulf has been a hotspot of contention ever since some Sumerians decided they wanted to live next to each other a few thousand years ago. Recently, Arab dominated lands have referred to the body of water as the Arabian Gulf, which has led to a vehement outcry among Iranians (or Persians, for anyone alive before 1935). This nationalism has evolved to the extent that Iran now has a Persian Gulf Day (on April 29th, in case you planned on taking the day off). You might also notice the rather undiplomatic language that seems to permeate Iranian literature on the subject. To their credit, the UN and some random guy at MIT (someone in Iranian Studies, anyway) have determined that Persian Gulf (or variations thereof) has functioned as the de facto name for the gulf in European circles for centuries and should stay that way. I'm not really sure where the Arabian prompt to change the name is coming from - they have a perfectly fine Red Sea to the west that could do with a spruced up name. Maybe they're hoping the next war in the area to be a more eponymous Arabian Gulf War instead of a Persian Gulf War.

Now, my History 104 course with Professor Wick also featured a bit of discussion on the popular gulf (he also writes a mean introduction to the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides). One of my favorite professors through a mixture of immense topical knowledge with dry wit, his lectures provided an exceptional historical background for future learning and critical thinking. When covering the topic of ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf featured in the topical discussion to a fair extent. (Un)fortunately, we didn't cover any sort of historiography on the subject of the gulf's geography.

The depth of the modern gulf does not exceed 90m, which is helpful since sea levels rose by about 90m when the glaciers from the last ice age melted. The Persian Gulf of the time was likely a fertile valley, but there was no recorded history at that point. The Sumerian great flood (an early analogue to the Biblical tale of Noah) is likely unrelated to the inundation (or Deluge, if you're still going all Biblical on me) of the Persian Gulf. The gulf sits at the collision zone of the Eurasian and Arabian tectonic plates which still periodically undergo tectonic activity related to orogeny (that is: mountain upheaval and usually accompanying subsidence somewhere else).

For quite a while the historical coastline of the Persian Gulf was believed to have been between about 200 kilometers to the northwest of its present position. An archeological geologist named Jacques de Morgan theorized around 1900 that the Persian Gulf had slowly been filling in with sediment deposited by the Tigris, Euphrates, and Karun rivers. He suggested that the Tigris and Euphrates emptied into the gulf without forming a confluence (the Shatt al-Arab estuary (or the Avrandrud, if you're Persian - not to be confused with the Evinrud)), and that the Karun river's sediment formed a series of shoals, which eventually built up into the modern shoreline. Through an in-depth survey of archeological sites in Mesopotamia, de Morgan hypothesized that the coast of the Persian Gulf would have been near Baghdad in the 4th millennium BC... Never mind that his use of historical sites relied on his own survey of historical voyages whose point of origin we still don't definitively know (turns out you can say you've found anything if no one knows the actual location).


There are a few problems with de Morgan's assertion (besides his mélange of potentially made-up historical sites). Much of the rock in the area appears to be from freshwater sediment. There's also the problem of Lake Hammar in southeastern Iraq which miraculously hasn't really filled with sediment and wasn't there six thousand years ago. While sedimentary accretion is an accepted geological phenomenon, de Morgan was missing a few important bits of information (mostly the geology of his archeological geology).


The predominant theory behind the coastline of the Persian Gulf seems to still be Lees and Falcon's subsidence theory. With their fancy use of geological sampling, they hypothesized that the Persian Gulf had intermittently undergone (and continues to undergo) subsidence, which counteracts the silt deposits to a great extent. Iraq collides with Persia building mountains, but the creation of mountains requires a complementary subsidence zone. So, the story of Noah had it wrong: the land wasn't being flooded by water, the water was being flooded by land (...and was slowly sinking to cover it up, like some geologist-fantasized episode of CSI). Sure, Noah's flood is supposed to be from rain and rivers overflowing, but you can't have quality jokes and accuracy, what do you think this is the Daily Show?

Through the use of aerial photography and charts from the 1800s, Lees and Falcon determined that the primary coastal change was a migration of the Shatt al-Arab's output further to the northeast. Subsidence and silt deposits have resulted in some ancient sites buried under a substantial depth of sediment (and occasionally water) as the shoreline meanders northeast. Or maybe Sumerians were just subterranean, Tolkien-esque dwarves with gills. So maybe in a few millennia the main river outlet into the Persian Gulf will be in Iran and we can avoid squabbles about preferred geographic names. Or half of the region will be buried under ten meters of silt, and everyone will turn into Morlocks. Either way I see a great future for the science fiction community and historians. I preemptively dub it historical futuristic science fiction.


Now we just need to work on renaming Lake Michigan to Lake Wisconsin.

Hydrogen Hydroxide or Hydroxic Acid?

"You know when you go to a concert and it's like punk rock and the kids get on stage...and they jump into the crowd, stage diving? People think that's dangerous - but not me. Because humans are made out of 95% water, so the audience is 5% away from a pool."

The esteemed, late Hedberg may be a few percentage points off (adult humans are closer to 60% water), this is just one reason why water is one of the most consistently awesome chemicals that exists.

Structure of Water

One of the first chemical formulas many people learn, H₂O is a common name for water. A more fitting chemical formula is HOH. H in this case is an ion of hydrogen, often called hydron, and is a positively charged ion (also called a cation). OH, also called hydroxide, is a negatively charged ion (also called an anion). Unfortunately there are no dogions (I can't guarantee there won't be other bad chemistry jokes later).

This combination of a cation and an anion results in a polarized molecule (the oxygen ends up negatively charged, the hydrogen ends become positively charged). This relatively unique structure is one of the primary reasons for all of water's awesomeness.

So, what is cool about water?

Properties of Water

Water is amphoteric, which means it is both an acid and a base (hence the title of this post). Contrary to what the Simpsons would like you to believe, mixing acids and bases doesn't cause massive explosions that turn you green (unless they're very concentrated...but they still won't turn you green). You'll get a salt and water. The most common chemical formula you'll see for illustrating this concept is the reaction between hydrochloric acid (HCl) and lye (sodium hydroxide - a base, NaOH) to get table salt (sodium chloride - NaCl) and H₂O. I was never good with chemical formulas written out in prose, so here's what it looks like:

NaOH + HCl → NaCl + H₂O

Water can be superheated above its normal boiling point. If distilled water is cooked in a container without deformities or dirt (no scratches and no dust) it can surpass its normal boiling point. It also tends to instantaneously boil when an impurity is added to the water (a spoon, sugar, etc.). This is where the idea of 'explosive water' comes from...although it's not so much exploding as it is simultaneously boiling everywhere.

Water has a high heat of fusion (energy needed to freeze) and high heat of vaporization (energy needed to turn into a gas). This gives it great thermoregulatory properties. This is the reason for warmer temperatures near lakes during winter (the water gives heat to the surrounding air in order to freeze), and why sweat cools the body (the water takes heat from your body in order to evaporate). Any liquid could perform this action, but water does it particularly well due to the large amounts of energy needed to overcome the attraction between individual molecules. This is also why water is a preferred coolant in many engines and industries (it takes a lot of heat to boil water). IUPAC standards require that this paragraph maintain an excitment level of 6.0 ±0.5 exciteograms. How about a picture of Schwarzenegger as Mister Freeze to meet this quota?

Ice floats in water. As it cools from 4°C to 0°C, water expands. When water freezes normally it forms a crystal lattice which has more volume than its watery counterpart (same mass in a larger space). This is why ice cubes (...and icebergs - take that Titanic) float. Another side effect from freezing is that icebergs end up mostly freshwater. Although saltwater has a lower freezing point than freshwater, the formation of ice crystals slowly presses out salt and other impurities in the water.

Water has the highest surface tension of all non-metallic liquids (not including solutions with water as the solvent like saltwater or sugar water). Surface tension is an aspect of all liquids, but the polarity of water increases its surface elasticity. Surface tension is the result of intermolecular forces trying to pull the liquid into the smallest possible volume (if gravity didn't exist this would be a sphere). Since the liquid is as compact as it's going to get (liquids aren't easily compressible), this means things need a certain amount of force to penetrate into the liquid. This is also why water forms spherical droplets when falling and people urinating on electric fences aren't electrocuted.

Pure water doesn't conduct electricity. Unfortunately this property isn't as useful for swimmers as it might seem. If exposed to the atmosphere the water will disolve some of the air (and won't be pure anymore). Thus we have electrocuted swimmers. 

Electrolysis separates water into its consitutent parts - diatomic hydrogen and diatomic oxygen. Running an electric current through water seperates the water into the natural state of its two component elements (hydrogen gas and oxygen gas). Unfortunately this isn't a good way to make hydrogen as a fuel since it takes more electrical energy to create the hydrogen than you'd get from burning it.

Water, like its constituent parts, is transparent, odorless and tasteless. All the crappy tasting water you've ever drank is due to impurities (I don't mind iron so much). It does take on a slight bluish tinge in large quanitites, and this is a minor reason why the sky is blue.

Without even touching hydrology or the biologic processes that rely on water, I believe we have defintively established that water is awesome. Way better than isopropanol and tetrafluoroethylene anyway.