Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (70 page)

“People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them somebody famous said them first.”

—Benjamin Franklin

Study: Kids who eat high-sugar cereals eat twice as much as kids who eat low-sugar cereals.

CEREAL FACTS

A few more golden nuggets for you to savor
.

• First athlete to appear on the front of a box of Wheaties: Olympic pole vaulter Bob Richards, in 1958. Athlete with the most Wheaties box appearances: NBA star Michael Jordan, with 18. Tiger Woods has appeared 14 times.

• Most unusual cereal premium of the 1980s: actual $1 bills, stuffed into 1 out of every 20 boxes of Cheerios in General Mills’ 1986 “Treasure Hunt” sales promotion.

• In 1960 Post cereals sponsored
The Danny Thomas Show,
set in New York City, but the big-city show didn’t appeal to rural Americans. When the company decided it wanted a homier showcase for its traditional Grape-Nuts cereal, which had been on the market since the 1890s, an episode was created in which Danny Thomas’ character, a nightclub singer, makes a trip to a small town in North Carolina and has a run-in with the local sheriff. The episode was a hit; the spin-off
Andy Griffith Show
was born.

• How did Kellogg’s Product 19 get its name? The advertising executive assigned to come up with a name for the product in 1966 couldn’t think of one…until he noticed that it was the 19th product developed by Kellogg that year.

• First slogan used by the Trix Rabbit: “Rabbits are supposed to like carrots. But I hate carrots. I like Trix.” (It was later changed to “Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids.”)

• Why was Franken Berry cereal temporarily pulled from store shelves shortly after it was introduced in 1971? According to the character’s designer, graphic artist Bill Tollis, “When kids went to the bathroom, their stools were pink from the food coloring.”

• In 1937 Wheaties held a contest to find the most popular baseball announcer in the country. First prize: an all-expenses-paid trip to Hollywood. Winner: a 26-year-old Iowa sports announcer named Ronald “Dutch” Reagan. While in Hollywood, Reagan took the screen test that launched his movie career and set him on his path to the Presidency.

President Eisenhower damaged the floor of the Oval Office with his golf spikes.

BIRD BRAINS, PART III

Caw! Caw! 256! Caw! Caw! Caw! Caw! Caw! Caw! Caw! (Translation: On
page 256
, you learned that crows and ravens are really smart. Here’s our final installment of brainy birds.)

P
OLLY WANNA DOCTORATE
Have you ever seen a talk show where an animal expert comes out with a parrot and they perform tricks? The handler asks, “What sound does a pig make?” The parrot replies, “Oink. Oink.” This isn’t as impressive as it may seem. Using treats as rewards, the bird was simply trained to give that response to that question. It would be much more impressive if the bird could give a vocal response that required actual thinking.

An African grey parrot named Alex could do just that. But Alex wasn’t a genius among birds, he was just one of several young parrots at a Chicago pet store, selected at random by a college student named Irene Pepperberg for an experiment in 1977. After watching a TV show about gorillas that use sign language, Pepperberg wanted to see if a parrot could also learn to converse with a human. So for the next 30 years, she and Alex—whose name is short for
A
vian
L
anguage
EX
periment—worked together in a lab at Boston’s Brandeis University. By the time Alex died of natural causes in 2007, he had learned more than 100 words, could identify 35 objects by recall, and understood the words “yes” and “no” as well as relative adjectives such as “bigger,” “smaller,” “different,” and “same.”

WHAT A BLOCKHEAD

In one test, Dr. Pepperberg held up a tray of objects and asked, “How many green blocks?” There were several blocks on the tray, not all of them green. There were also several green objects that weren’t blocks. To come up with the answer, Alex needed to know how to differentiate between colors, how to differentiate between objects, and how to count. He inspected the tray for a moment and then answered, “Two.” He was correct. Alex even understood the concept of zero, something that humans don’t really pick up on until about age three. Dr. Pepperberg showed him a tray with three triangles, four squares, and five circles, and asked him, “How many are six?” His reply: “None.”

No wonder they smell so good: Laid out flat, a human’s nasal membranes would be be about the size of a quarter. A dog’s would be the size of a paper towel.

But Alex’s abilities went beyond using words and numbers; he understood emotions, too. When Dr. Pepperberg was stressed out, Alex would say, “Calm down.” When Alex himself was getting a little tired of answering questions, he’d say, “I want dinner” or “I want to go back” (to his cage). According to Pepperberg, he displayed the emotional equivalent of a two-year-old child and the intellectual equivalent of a five-year-old child. In fact, several of the cognitive tests that were created specifically to teach Alex—and now his successors, Griffin and Arthur—are being used by developmental therapists to teach learning-disabled children how to talk and count. “This kind of research is changing the way we think about birds and intelligence,” said Dr. Pepperberg, “but it also helps us break down barriers to learning in humans—and the importance of such strides cannot be underestimated.”

COMING HOME TO ROOST

The more that scientists discover about parrots, crows, and other birds, the smarter they get (the birds
and
the scientists). Yet because the field of avian psychology is only a few decades old, there’s still a lot about bird behavior that we don’t know. For example, how does a flock of thousands of starlings seem to move as a single organism? And how exactly does a migrating Swainson’s hawk find its way from Brazil to the same tree in Oregon year after year? Does it have a built-in magnetic homing device? Or can it actually
see
Earth’s magnetic field? Biologists and psychologists alike are pecking away at these mysteries—trying to gain more insight into the avian condition in the hope of better understanding the human condition.

SMARTER THAN THE AVERAGE BIRD

Want more evidence of avian intelligence? While researching this article, we learned about so many birds with amazing abilities that our gooses would be cooked if we didn’t include just a few more.

•
Herons:
Displaying a behavior that may have been learned by watching humans, the striated heron uses bait to catch fish. It lands on a riverbank and tosses an object into the water—an insect, berry, twig, people food, or even a fisherman’s discarded fly. It waits until a hungry fish swims by, and then dives in and grabs
it. Not all striated herons catch their fish this way, but it’s been observed that those who do yield more fish than those who don’t.

•
Honeyguides:
These African birds eat beeswax, but to get at it, they must pierce tough beehives and survive the onslaught of angry bees. Two honeyguide species get around the problem by finding a honey badger and leading it to the hive. The badger gets the honey and the birds get the wax. But if a honeyguide doesn’t find a badger, it flies to a village and starts pestering people, who know exactly why it’s there. The bird leads the villagers to the hive and awaits its sweet reward.

•
Cowbirds:
Brown-headed cowbirds are like mob enforcers. Females don’t incubate their own eggs; instead, they wait until a female of another species, say, a warbler, lays her eggs. Then the cowbird flies in and lays her own eggs among the warbler’s. If the warbler throws out the cowbird’s eggs, the cowbird comes back and destroys the warbler’s eggs. Over time, the warblers—and more than 200 other host species—have come to understand that if they want to raise their own chicks, they must raise the cowbirds’ as well…or else.

•
Owls:
Ironically, “wise” owls rank quite low on the avian intelligence scale. Who needs tools when you have such keen nocturnal senses and silent flying abilities? But a recent discovery shows that burrowing owls do indeed use stools…er, tools. They collect animal dung and spread it out near their burrows. The dung then attracts beetles—an important part of the owls’ diet.

•
Snowball:
A pet cockatoo named Snowball is believed by ornithologists to be the “first non-human animal that’s conclusively demonstrated to be capable of beat induction.” In other words, he can dance. After his dancing videos became famous on YouTube, scientists at Harvard University studied the bird, along with other animals, to see if they could dance. Snowball proved his abilities by keeping perfect time even when the music was slowed down and sped up. (Dogs, cats, and chimps were found to have no sense of rhythm whatsoever.) So the next time you’re on the Internet, type “snowball” and “cockatoo” into a search engine. And while you’re tapping your toes to the video, appreciate all of the brainpower it takes for that little ball of feathers to come up with such incredible dance moves.

Researchers say: New Zealand kea birds drop stones onto roofs just to watch people run outside.

INVENTORS, U.K.

You may not be familiar with these British people’s names—but you know the things they invented
.

I
NVENTOR:
Bryan Donkin (1768–1855)
STORY:
In the early 1800s, Donkin, an engineer by trade, ventured into the pursuit of a cutting-edge invention. In 1812 he acquired the patent of British merchant Peter Durand: an idea for preserving meat in cans made of tin. Durand never actually made tin cans, but Donkin made the concept a reality when he developed a method of sterilizing meat inside sealed cans by heating them very slowly, and in 1813 opened the world’s first canning factory in London. Apart from the exclusion of lead soldering used in the original tin cans, and the change from tin-coated iron to tinned steel in the 1860s, the product has changed little since then and is still being produced by Crosse and Blackwell—the company that took over Donkin’s original business—to this day.

INVENTOR:
Stephen Perry (dates unknown)
STORY:
In 1839 Charles Goodyear of New Haven, Connecticut, invented the process of
vulcanization
of rubber, in which natural rubber, made from the sap of rubber trees, is heated and mixed with sulfur. This made the normally fragile raw rubber very tough, durable, and elastic, and led to its many uses in the modern world, not least of which are the tires that bear Goodyear’s name. Just a few years later, an English businessman named Stephen Perry had a vulcanized-rubber factory up and running in London, and one day found himself with a small, thin, stretchy loop of vulcanized rubber, which he used to bind a bunch of letters. On March 17, 1845, he was issued the very first patent for the rubber band.

INVENTOR:
George William Manby (1765–1854)
STORY:
In 1807 Manby was an army captain serving on the east coast of England when he witnessed a ship sinking in a storm just 60 yards offshore. Many people died as Manby and others looked on helplessly. He went on a mission after the event, it seems, because over the next 15 years he developed several lifesaving
devices, including a way to shoot a rope to distressed ships via cannonball; a device for catching people jumping from burning buildings; and yet another device for rescuing people who’d fallen through ice. But he invented his most famous lifesaver by far in 1819. It was a capped copper cylinder filled with compressed air and potassium carbonate, a fine white powder known as “pearl-ash.” The pearl-ash could be shot from the “Extincteur,” as it was named, through a narrow hose at a fire, smothering the flames in the process. Manby’s creation: the first portable fire extinguisher.

According to Guinness, each year 200,000 pints of beer are lost to beards and mustaches.

INVENTOR:
James Henry Atkinson (1849–1942)

STORY:
Atkinson was an
ironmonger,
meaning he sold goods made from iron, in a shop in Leeds in the north of England. In 1897 he received a patent for what he called the “Little Nipper.” Today it’s known as the common mousetrap.

INVENTOR:
Frank Pantridge (1916–2004)

STORY:
Pantridge was a cardiologist at a hospital in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1961, when he started working on a problem: Too many heart attack victims arrived at the hospital dead. If they had made it to the hospital sooner, a defibrillator might have saved them. (Defibrillators are the “paddles” that deliver an electric shock to people having
ventricular fibrillations,
or rapid, uncontrolled heart contractions, the most deadly heart attack symptom. The electricity causes the contractions to cease.) But what if a defibrillator could be brought to the victims? Pantridge received little support from his colleagues, who believed that only doctors like themselves were qualified to operate a defibrillator—not lowly emergency personnel. He kept at it anyway, and finally tested a device of his own design in 1965. It weighed 150 pounds and was powered by car batteries. Pantridge had it installed in an ambulance—and over the next 15 months successfully defibrillated 10 people. It took several years for the device to catch on, but today there are portable defibrillators in ambulances worldwide, not to mention at fire stations, on airplanes, and in many other public places. The number of people saved by Pantridge’s invention may literally number in the millions.

Survey says: 57% of British kids think Germany is the most boring country in Europe.