Why Do Pirates Love Parrots? (12 page)
Read Why Do Pirates Love Parrots? Online
Authors: David Feldman
A
re you sick of all the commercials on American radio? Don’t want to spend the bucks for satellite radio? One alternative is to tune in to the 160 to 161 megahertz bands to listen to one of the ninety-six channels that railroads use for internal communications—not a lot of music, but no commercials.
But trains didn’t always have radio. Dating back to the days of the steam engine, railroad crews relied on other forms of communication, including whistle, horn, flag, and lantern signals, to let personnel within a train crew transmit important information.
The signals were not completely uniform. We have charts from six different railroads detailing their signals, including Union Pacific, Northern Pacific, Southern Pacific, and B&O Railroads, and the codes are similar but not identical. In each case, though, manuals make distinctions between short and long “toots.” In every case, one short signal tells the brakeman to stop the train. Two long sounds say: “Release the brakes and proceed.”
In the days of the steam engine, when a train stopped, it was the role of the flagman, who usually rode in the caboose, to leave his perch and walk behind the train to make sure no approaching train collided from the back. Many of the early whistle codes were methods for the engineer to communicate with the flagman. One short toot followed by three long ones asked the flagman to protect the rear of the train, and three longs followed by one short asked him to guard the front. Other signals prescribed from which direction the flagman should reenter the train.
Generally, short signals indicate an urgent action. Even today, a series of short signals (usually at least seven) is a warning for a miscreant to get off the tracks—a train is approaching! When a train is moving and three short signals are sounded, it means that the train should stop at the next station; if a train is stopped, three shorts usually signal to proceed backward.
There’s a reason why the poser of this Imponderable asks about two long, one short, and one long: it’s one of the signals that the average person is most likely to hear. This is a standard signal to indicate that the train is approaching a public crossing. Here’s the verbatim explanation for this signal from the 1943 Southern Pacific rule book:
Approaching public crossings at grade, tunnels, and obscure curves; to be commenced sufficiently in advance to afford ample warning, but not less than one-fourth mile before reaching a crossing, and prolonged or repeated until engine has passed over the crossing.
Of course, the loud warnings can be a bone of contention between railroad workers and the communities where the crossings are located. Fitz, a retired locomotive engineer from Chicago, Illinois complains:
Today, all the yuppies complain about the noise. Few of them understand that without railroads, they wouldn’t have the houses that they own, and the city that they live in.
Railroad workers required other signals to communicate with each other if one of the workers, such as a signalman, was out of earshot, or if conditions were too noisy for a whistle to be heard. Railroads have long used color signals to communicate the most basic commands. These colors could be signaled by a flag or by a stationary lantern at night. Red, of course, meant to stop; green said to go, but with caution. A white light signified that the coast was clear to go, and blue flags or lanterns were placed where men were working. Electronic color signals can now transmit more complicated information to train crews.
We thought that the days of lantern and hand signals were long over, but this is not the case. Retired Burlington Northern Santa Fe locomotive engineer Charlie Tomlin told
Imponderables:
I personally prefer to use hand or lantern signals, because it gives one better control over the movement when there is a line of sight. In a busy railroad yard (such as Eola, in Illinois, where I worked a good deal), there could be several crews working on the same radio channel and there was the danger of not being heard or being “walked on,” not to mention the yardmasters giving instructions to the crews via the same channels.
It was just so much easier to have a job brief and agree on hand or lantern signals, using the radio only in an emergency. When you are switching with a small cut of cars, it is senseless to use the radio when the crew members can see each other or a lantern. As an engineer, I know that the new people are trained in giving and passing on hand and lantern signals and that they are trained to “exaggerate” the signal. I always told the new guys to give “big” hand and lantern signals. It is well appreciated by most engineers.
Lantern signals are simple, but dramatic, and not a little reminiscent of the movements of flag drill teams at football games. “Stop” is transmitted by a horizontal swing across the track—in an arm movement that mimics the “no” shake of the head. And the “proceed” signal resembles a nod up and down, with the arm raised and lowered vertically. If a signalman swings his arms up and down in a circle at full arm’s length, watch out: the train has parted, not departed!
Submitted by Lawrence Atkinson, via the Internet.
W
e always hear about dogs’ vaunted sense of smell. The olfactory area in a human is about one-half of a square inch; a dog’s is twenty square inches. While humans tend to trust their senses of sight more, a dog evaluates food and other living things with its sense of smell.
And with this heightened ability, the dog chooses to eat stuff that smells like dog food? Maybe we olfactory ignoramuses cannot savor the scent that is kibble, like children who can’t appreciate the bouquet of a fine Burgundy. But we’re not buying that. We’re going to have to agree to disagree with our canine buddies.
Pet owners tend to anthropomorphize our dogs, so it’s surprising that designer dog foods haven’t been developed to make masters want to compete with Fido for the grub, but the pet industry maintains that its focus is on what pleases the pet. Robert Wilbur, of the Pet Food Institute, explains:
Pet foods (unlike most human foods) provide the sole diet of most pets and the product must be complete and balanced nutritionally. In addition, pet foods must also be appetizing and appeal to a pet’s sense of smell and taste. This is known as palatability and is a source of competition among pet food manufacturers. Scent and flavor must appeal to the dog and may differ from what would appeal to us.
Ironically, dogs, who will eat just about anything lying on the street, also have sensitive stomachs. Lucille Kubichek, of the Chihuahua Club of America, notes that efforts to find a scent that humans would like could lead to health issues:
Dog foods carry the odors of the ingredients of which they are composed. I doubt food odors could be neutralized without adding one or more chemicals, which probably would be harmful to the animal.
By American law, dog food need not be fit for human consumption, and ingredient labels can be difficult to decipher. For example, dogs love lamb, and many kibbles include “lamb meal.” What the heck is lamb meal? It consists of dehydrated carcass, including muscle, bone, and internal organs. For humans who are skittish about finding a hair in their soup, it might be more than a little off-putting to find that lamb meal is often infested with wool and with starch from the inside of the lamb’s stomach.
Fat is often the second ingredient listed on pet food nutrition labels, and this is often responsible for that awful dog food smell. In her book,
Food Pets Die For,
Ann N. Martin lambastes its quality:
Fats give off a pungent odor that entices your pet to eat the garbage. These fats are sourced from restaurant grease. This oil is rancid and unfit for human consumption. One of the main sources of fat comes from the rendering plant. This is obtained from the tissues of mammals and/or poultry in the commercial process of rendering or extracting.
While the pet food industry and its critics, such as Ann N. Martin, wrangle about whether commercial pet food is dangerous to their health, most dogs seem to be quite content to quickly clean their plates. That makes us happy. The faster they eat the dog food, the sooner the smell goes away.
Submitted by Dotty Bailey of Decatur, Georgia.
I
n middle-distance track events, such as the 800-meter run, the athletes start the race in lanes. Because the runners in the outside lanes must travel a greater distance than those on the inside, the starting lines are staggered, with those closest to the inside farthest back at the start. At the “break point,” usually right after a full turn and at the beginning of the straightaway, runners in the other lanes have the opportunity to break to the inside to save running distance.
But sharp-eyed reader Dov Rabinowitz wrote us:
The outside runners always seem to start moving toward the inside at the beginning of a long straightaway, and by the time they are about one-quarter to one-half of the way down the straightaway, they have moved completely to the inside of the track, so that the runners are nearly single file.
Rabinowitz theorizes that runners waste extra steps to break to the inside prematurely, and that a sharper turn wastes some of the runner’s forward momentum.
We posed Dov’s Imponderable to four full-time running coaches and even more runners. All of the coaches agreed with Greg McMillan, an Austin, Texas coach, runner and exercise scientist, who preaches simple geometry:
The question is a good one and the situation drives many coaches crazy. Every track athlete is taught that once you are allowed to “break for the rail,” the athlete should run at a gradual diagonal to the inside lane. Since the point where the athlete may break from running in lanes is usually after the first curve (as in the 800-meter race), the best thing to do is run in a straight line toward the rail at the far end of the back stretch (around the 200-meter mark on most tracks). This will create the shortest distance around the track.
Obviously runners want to win, and running extra meters is an obvious hindrance to that goal. So we asked the coach why they do so. McMillan thinks that the fly in the ointment is often psychological:
[The straight-line approach] sounds easy and every athlete will agree with it. But in the real world, this guideline goes out the window when the race starts. Most athletes will agree that it’s the “safety in the pack mentality.” The runner wants to get near the competition and feels vulnerable out on the open track. So while it doesn’t make logical sense to make a drastic cut toward the rail, the emotions of the athlete often cause this to happen. Some runners are better at controlling this urge than others.
Coach Roy Benson, president of Running, Ltd., based in Atlanta, Georgia, has coached professionally for more than forty years, and says that most runners have strategy rather than mathematics on their minds:
Those in the outer lanes are usually trying to cut off runners on their left and take the lead as soon as possible.
But you can find yourself in traffic problems if you stay on the inside, too. Dr. Gordon Edwards, a coach and runner from Charlotte, North Carolina, wrote about the tactical dangers of breaking to the inside too soon:
It would be impossible and hazardous to cut immediately to the first lane as you might impede other runners or bump into them. If you watch distance races, many runners run in the second or third lanes at times, even on the curves, for strategic reasons. Yes, they will run farther doing this, but sometimes it is a necessary tactic.
One of the reasons why runners might not break to the extreme inside is so that they can draft behind the lead runner, just as NASCAR drivers “leech” on the lead car. Rather than risk clipping the heels of the lead runner, it can be safer to be on the side. McMillan says that drafting is especially effective on windy days, and the benefits of running in the slipstream of another runner can outweigh the extra few meters the racer on the outside must complete.
We couldn’t entice any of the runners to admit that they scooted to the inside prematurely for psychological reasons. All of them understood the merits of the gradual drift to the inside, and several chided other runners for darting to the inside prematurely:
Every coach I ever had hammered home the distance-saving value of taking a tangent rather than cutting in; there’s plenty of time…to make a cut, if the traffic pattern dictates it, but the farther away from the break point you are, the better, particularly because so many runners have a sheep-like mentality and break all at once; let them stumble all over each other fighting for the rail.
But the runners were afraid of traffic problems. One used a roadway analogy:
[This problem is] not dissimilar from merging onto a highway…Although the straight diagonal line is slightly shorter, a quick analysis of the runners you are merging with might make one decide to cut in a bit quicker to avoid a potential bump, or to wait a bit, then cut in, also to avoid someone. In theory, if everyone is exactly even when they all go to cut in, and they all take the straight diagonal line to the pole, well, then that’s one big jam up!
Some runners, drafting be damned, prefer racing from the front. If the runner feels he is in the lead, but is on the outside, he might want to cut over “prematurely” to get to the inside immediately and force competitors to try to pass him on the outside. But runners realize that it is possible to be “boxed-in,” too—stuck in the inside lane, in a pack, with runners in front and outside of them, preventing acceleration.
Many a horse race has been lost because the jockey couldn’t keep his mount from veering wide. Peter Sherry, a coach and former medalist at the World University Games, disagrees somewhat with the premise of the Imponderable. He thinks that the incidence of “elite” runners cutting to the left prematurely is lower than we’re implying, and that it’s more typical of high school races or races with less experienced athletes. He argues that if an elite runner darts to the inside quickly, there’s usually a good reason—usually that
a runner wants to make sure he gets a position on the rail before the race gets to the first turn. If you get caught on the outside of the pack during the turn, you will be running farther than someone on the inside rail.
Submitted by Dov Rabinowitz of Jerusalem, Israel.
For more information about the configuration of running tracks in general and staggered starts in particular, go to http://www.trackinfo.org/marks.html.
