Do Penguins Have Knees? (27 page)
Read Do Penguins Have Knees? Online
Authors: David Feldman
When the grease cools, it changes from a liquid to a solid. Because of its molecular structure, it cannot quite form a crystalline structure. Instead, it forms “amorphous regions” and “partial crystals.” These irregular areas scatter white light and make the grease appear cloudy.
If grease were to solidify into a pure crystal, it would be much clearer, maybe like glass. Incidentally, paraffins like candle wax behave just like grease: They are clear in the liquid form and cloudy in the solid form.
Submitted by Eric Schmidt of Fairview Park, Ohio
.
Why
Is the Skin Around Our Finger Knuckles Wrinkled When the Skin Covering Our Knees Is Not?
We received this Imponderable about three years ago, in a stack of letters from Judith Bambenek’s South St. Paul High School class. No doubt, her students were bludgeoned into writing us, but we were nevertheless impressed by the quality of the questions. By now, we’re sure that Chris Dahlke is on the way to becoming a Rhodes Scholar.
Dr. Harry Arnold, Jr., a distinguished dermatologist from the land of Rice-A-Roni, was happy to solve the Imponderable troubling the youth of South St. Paul:
In extension, the knuckles need enough skin to permit flexing the joint roughly through 100 degrees, so there is excess skin when the joint is fully extended.
The knees require much less skin but there is wrinkling there too, over a much larger area, so it is less obvious. Even with the extra skin, we get “white-knuckled” when the joints in the knee are fully flexed.
We’re sometimes amazed at the lengths to which our sources will extend themselves for the sake of science and the vanquishing of Imponderability. In the case of Chesapeake, Virginia, dermatologist Samuel T. Selden, it included disrobing. Selden has a speculative but fascinating anthropological theory to explain the knee-finger disparity:
I had to take off my shoes and socks to check, but interestingly, the skin over the knuckles of our toes is not very wrinkled either. The skin over our elbows is corrugated, but not to the degree that the skin over the finger knuckles is wrinkled.
My theory for the wrinkling is that our ancestors, the apes, walked on their fingers, as we probably did prior to becoming upright beasts. The wrinkles are most apparent over the middle knuckles, the proximal interphalangeal joints, where apes place most of their weight when walking. Some individuals, through heredity, have thickened skin in this area known as “knuckle pads,” and they are probably even more of a throwback to their ape ancestors.
We’re sure they’ll be thrilled to hear that.
Submitted by Chris Dahlke of South St. Paul, Minnesota. Special thanks to Chris’s teacher, Judith Bambenek
.
Where
Does All of the Old Extra Oil in Your Car’s Engine Lurk After an Oil Change?
Our befuddled correspondent, Victor Berman, elaborates:
Just before you change your oil you can check the dipstick. The oil level is “full.” You then drain the oil and change the filter, put in the recommended amount of oil, and check the dipstick. The level is “full.”
Now you go to dispose of the old oil from the crank case and the filter and, lo and behold, there is less than five quarts. More like three to three and one-half quarts. I know that even after turning over the filter and letting it drain there is some oil left in the filter, but not one and one-half quarts. Is my car’s engine storing an extra quart and a half every time I change the oil?
We were intrigued with this mystery, so we contacted several auto manufacturers, who had no explanation for the case of the missing oil. So we persisted, engaging in two long conversations with oil specialists: H. Dale Millay, a research engineer for Shell Oil, and Dan Arcy, a technical service representative for Pennzoil Products Company. After much soul-searching, all of us decided we still had an Imponderable, bordering on a Frustable, on our hands.
Some questions don’t yield one simple answer. So the experts ventured several possible explanations:
1. If the oil change is conducted while the engine is cold, the oil will be thicker and tend to sit on the motor’s surface and coat internal surfaces. Even hot oil will wet the internal surfaces and result in some oil loss.
2. The amount of oil unleashed depends to a great extent upon the location of the plug on the drain. Dan Arcy points out that Ford, for example, manufactures several models with two drain plugs—one needs to pull both plugs to get rid of all the oil.
3. In some cases, the slant of the car may inhibit or promote freer flow of oil out of the drain. Any flat reservoir has to be tipped over to spill out all of the contents.
4. Are you sure you drained the oil filter adequately? Millay thinks the oil filter, which is built to hold up to two quarts of oil, is the most likely hiding place for most of the missing oil.
5. Oil will continue to drizzle out of the plug a long time, often an hour or more. This doesn’t explain the loss of a quart and one-half, but then every drip counts when trying to solve this Imponderable.
6. A significant amount of oil may be left on your oil pan. Not a quart, perhaps, but a half-pint or so may be underestimated if spread around a pan with a large circumference.
7. Not to challenge your dipstick-reading acuity, Victor, but our experts wanted to ask you if you are sure you were really checking the oil directly before changing it. All engines are designed to consume some oil when operating.
8. How about a mundane reason? A leak? Arcy relayed an astonishing maxim of the industry: The loss of one drop of oil every fifty-five feet is equivalent to the consumption of one quart of oil in 500 miles. Of course, the leak theory doesn’t explain why the oil shortfall occurs only when changing the oil.
Any readers have a solution to this greasy Imponderable?
Submitted by Victor Berman of East Hartford, Connecticut
.
Why
Do Fish Float upside-Down When They Die?
Imponderables
cannot be held responsible for the consequences if you read this answer within thirty minutes of starting or finishing a meal. With this proviso, we yield the floor to Doug Olander, director of special projects for the International Game Fish Association:
Fish float upside-down when they die because internal decomposition releases gases that collect in the gut cavity. Anyone who’s ever cleaned a fish knows the meat is on top (dorsally) and the thin stomach wall on the bottom (ventrally). So as gases accumulate, the dense muscle mass of the top of the fish is positioned down and the gas-filled stomach up.
Fishes with swim bladders already have gas inside, which tends to make them at least neutrally buoyant. Benthic fishes, lacking swim bladders (flatfishes, for example) would
not
float upon death.
Deepwater fishes float high atop the surface when pulled rapidly upward, a common angling experience, because the gas trapped inside their swim bladder expands at the reduced pressure of the surface.
Dr. Robert Rofen, of the Aquatic Research Institute, adds that since so much of a fish’s body weight is concentrated along the bone structure of the back and skull, it is not uncommon to find dead fish floating with heads down.
Submitted by Melissa Hall of Bartlett, Illinois.
Why
Do Some Companies Use Mail-In Refunds Rather Than Coupons?
Applying our usual paranoid logic, we always assumed that more people will redeem coupons at a grocery store than will bother tearing off proofs of purchase and mailing in forms to receive a refund. Therefore, a mail-in refund’s purpose in life was to seduce you into buying eight cans of tuna but then being too lazy to ever send in the proofs of purchase and cash register receipt to receive the rebate.
We remember once soaking pineapple cans in hot water, trying to peel labels off to send as proofs of purchase, and wondering: “Is this why we were put on earth? There must be a better way.” But there is logic in marketers’ refund nonsense.
F. Kent Mitchel, chairman of the Marketing Science Institute, confirmed our conspiracy theory:
Mail-in refunds are generally less expensive largely because of lower usage by the public, yet they protect existing brands about as well as coupons in a competitive situation.
What does Mitchel mean by “protect”? In many cases, coupons are used to promote items that consumers consider as commodities, with insubstantial differences in quality, and where brand loyalty may not withstand a pricing differential. Pepsico and Coca-Cola wage perpetual price wars in the stores and through coupons. A similar skirmish invades the detergent and coffee aisles. Coupons and mail-in refunds, then, are often used to “protect” one brand against price cuts by competing brands.
In many cases, the cash reward for mail-in refunds is higher than those for coupons, but the lower redemption rates make mail-ins cheaper in the long run. As Robert A. Grayson, publisher of
The Journal of Consumer Marketing
, told
Imponderables
, “the promotion looks as big but doesn’t cost as much,” particularly if consumers purchase the goods and neglect to ever send for the rebate.
But cost isn’t the primary consideration in implementing a mail-in rather than a coupon campaign. The choice is really a strategic decision dictated by whom the marketer is trying to attract. Thomas L. Ruble, consumer response manager of the Louis Rich Company, explains:
Coupons are used to stimulate new business—to encourage first-time buyers. Mail-in refunds, on the other hand, encourage continuity among the established customer base. Mail-ins also encourage established customers to purchase multiple packages.
Mail-in refunds are also most effective for products, including foods, sold outside of grocery stores. Supermarkets are geared for the paperwork involved in processing coupons. But a family-run hardware or camera store might not know how to receive compensation for the refund on a package of batteries or be willing to put up with the nuisance of doing so.
One other crucial point. By making you fill out personal information for the refund, the marketer now has in its possession your name and address. Most companies retain this information in databases, and then can ply you with direct-mail campaigns.
Why
Do Grocery Coupons Have Expiration Dates?
Why are some grocery coupons effective for only a few weeks? Why would the marketer spend so much money, not only in redeeming coupons but in placing them in newspapers, only to invalidate the coupons so quickly?
Usually, the expiration date is added for the same reason a deadline was placed on when your term paper in school was due: Marketers, like teachers, know that you need a cattle prod and the threat of a deadly weapon to motivate you to act in the “right” way.
Occasionally, a company might want to spur sales, either because the brand is in danger of losing its shelf space if sales don’t improve or because the company (or a particular executive) needs to demonstrate sales growth in a short period. As we have already said, coupons can be used as a preemptive price-cutting strike against new (or old but gaining) competition.
But another, more important financial consideration plagues food marketers, one that threatened the financial stability of the airlines after frequent flier programs were instituted. F. Kent Mitchel, chairman of the Marketing Science Institute, explains:
