The Science Askew Companion

by Donald E. Simanek

For those who actually paid money for a copy of the book Science Askew by Donald E. Simanek and John C. Holden, here's a list of additional comments, errata, and discussion.

Some links are provided to close equivalents of some parts of the book which are on this web site. They aren't always the same.

Notes and Comments

Science Askew

p. v. Fake Title Page, This page was an afterthought. Our editor insisted on the "lighthearted look" subtitle. (Yechh!) We liked "An Almanac of Scientific Ephemera", an echo of "The American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac." Our editor thought that too subtle. So we sneaked it in here in the style of 17^th century title pages: verbose, with run-on sentences and silly-looking "s" which look like "f". The 17^th century typeface is from Crazy Diamond Design in England. Their typefaces were also used in printed props for the first two "Harry Potter" movies. Harry's train ticket is in this same 17^th century typeface, and it got him to Hogwart's. I have no idea where our title page will get you. Crazy Diamond is now (Dec 2002) offering a set of Wizard's fonts, parchment paper, a folio bound in genuine green dragon skin, seals and ribbons for keeping your parchments secure. It even has sample "spells" and instructions on proper wand waving technique to make the spells work properly. This should be fun for kids, and even adults who would like to cast a spell on someone (and who hasn't at one time or another?). This kit is also educational for it includes the true history of each of the medieval fonts. Order one now, before we turn you into a spider.

1: The March of Science

Work is the curse of the laboring class, p. 4.

A chemistry graduate student consulted his advisor for guidance in choice of a chemistry career. "I enjoyed doing my research paper on acetates," he said. "Perhaps I could seek a research job specializing in that."

"That's probably not a good idea," his advisor replied. "It is well known that 'He who acetates is lost'."

More "Do It" jokes

• Statisticians probably do it, with 95% confidence.
• Mathematicians do it with perfect precision.
• Physicists do it with charm.
• Experimental physicists do it with string and sealing-wax.
• Mathematicians do it to the limit. But only in theory. (Then how can they multiply?)
• Mathematicians feel they must prove that they did it.
• Astronomers do it in the dark—all night long.
• Geologists do it when rock hard, in the sedimentary position.
• Organic chemists do it on the bench.
• Electrical engineers do it till it Hz.

• Old physicists never die; they decay exponentially, becoming improbable.
• Chemists never die; they just fail to react.
• Chemists never die; they just smell that way.
• Mathematicians never die. They just lose their functions. And then their number comes up.
• Economists never die; they become expendable.
• Old statisticians never die; they are broken down by age and sex.
• Electricians never die. They just lose contact.

p. 13. We dropped one of John's nice cartoons here, which illustrated "Captain Hooke's Law." It showed Captain Hook dangling from a huge spring hung from the mast of a ship, bouncing just out of reach of the jaws of the smiling Crocodile while Peter Pan and Tinker Bell fly around him. The figures were of course the recognizable ones from Disney's film version of Peter Pan. We approached the Disney Legal Department, and after repeated inquiry letters (which they claimed to have lost) we finally got a reply denying permission in these words:

While we are sincerely flattered that you would choose to use our characters in your book, unfortunately, I am placed in the unenviable position of having to advise you that we cannot grant permission for use of your co-author's drawing. Our established policy prevents our granting anyone other than our licensees and our DISNEY artists the right to draw our characters. The reason behind this decision is we must closely control the appearances of our copyrighted characters as well as the manner in which they are depicted. As I am sure you can imagine, not all requests we receive are as wholesome as yours.

It seems to me that the folks running things at this Mickey-Mouse ® organization lack a sense of humor. If you want to judge this for yourself, click here.

4: The Ideal Scientific Equipment Company

My web page version of this chapter has something we couldn't afford in the book: a color picture of a perpetual motion machine.

The publication of this book has generated considerable interest in such products. Here's an order which came in recently:

Dear Sir,

I have recently stumbled upon the website for your physics products company. I would like to place an order, but was unable to find an email address on the company page itself. Thus, I am directing this request to you in the hopes that it may be forwarded to the appropriate products distribution personnel.

I would like to purchase :
4 square meters of your frictionless planes at $16.95/square meter,
1 10-kg. package of point particles at the advertised $11.65, and
3 standard horses at $1599.95 each.

Further orders may be expected to be forthcoming as I will be using inextensible strings and gamma-ray microscopes in my classes next semester. Thank you for your time and assistance.

Regards,
(Signature)

Mr. _____,

We are in receipt of your recent order, and thank you for your interest in our fine products.

We regret to inform you that we cannot at this time supply frictionless planes in any size larger than 10 x 10 cm. The product has been judged unsafe by OSHA. Due to their concern about worker safety on and near such surfaces, we have been asked to reformulate them with a non-skid coating. As that would make them unsuitable for their intended purpose, were are seeking a ruling granting this product an exception to OSHA regulations. This is complicated by the fact that OSHA is concerned that any use of these planes in any orientation other than horizontal would make them fall under governmental "slippery slope" regulations. Appropriate warning labels are now being designed.

To make matters worse, the Consumer Protection people are complaining about the labeling of our point particles, insisting that we not only specify the net weight in each box shipped, but the number of particles as well. We are now designing a machine to count them as they are boxed.

And the animal-rights organizations are picketing our testing laboratories, asking us to prove that our rigorous testing of our standard horses is humane. Of course it is, but until we sort this out, we have put the horses out to pasture.

So we regret that we are unable to fill your order at this time. These are troubled times for our company. The bankruptcy of Enron has resulted in their failure to pay for the research and development that we have already done on their contract with us to design an improved perpetual motion machine.

We hope this will not tarnish your image of our company and our products, and we hope to be of service to you in the future.

Ken Amis
Marketing manager
The Ideal Scientific Equipment Company
"When anything less than ideal isn't good enough."

7: Perpetual Motion

We have also included pictures with very subtle jokes. The top picture on p. 46 is from a 19th century British patent. The artist/inventor seems to be teasing the reader. It has an outer wheel, with half-spherical cups to hold balls of a chain of lead balls. The upper and lower pulleys keep the balls always on the right side of the wheel, aided by a pulley at the top. So the wheel is always heavier on the right side.

1. The brake, to prevent the machine from going so fast it would tear itself apart.
2. The deliberate design which makes both the weight on the right side greater, but leads you to think that the torques are greater on the right side.
3. The artistic deceptions in the drawing. The upper two spokes of the wheel are behind the rectangular supporting frame. The other spokes are in front of it. If that were so, they would block any motion of the wheel. But of course, since the wheel couldn't move anyway, that's not a concern.
4. The lower pulley which is non-functional, and could be omitted without compromising the machine's performance.
5. Certain other details need to be fixed. The upper pulley needs support. The spokes should be behind the plane of the wheel so they won't interfere with the ball-chain. The upper pulley then could be supported by another frame on the near side of the wheel.

10: Mind Sciences

11: History of Science as it Wasn't

p. 103. Alfredo da Vinci. The picture of Alfredo is taken from Leonardo's notebook drawing "Universal Man" shown here. Click on the drawing to see a larger picture of it. Leonardo may have used Alfredo as a model in a number of his drawings, though some scholars disagree.

For many years we did a physics lab on simple machines, including pulleys. My instruction sheets included diagrams of mechanical systems they might study in lab, including a fool's tackle. Some students would try and try, in mounting frustration, to make it. I'd watch with amusement as it collapsed every time. When they finally gave up and asked for help I'd say "It's always a good idea to solve simple mechanical systems using physics principles, mathematics and pencil and paper before using up lab time with trial-and-error methods." I also continually advised students to read the entire experiment before even coming to lab. At the very end of the instruction sheets were some questions, the last one being "Why do you suppose the system of figure 8 is sometimes called a "fool's tackle"?"

12: Pseudosciences

Barney, the evil one?

A reader asks "We know that 666 is the Biblical 'number of the beast', but just when did people start 'beasting', that is identifying institutions and people with that number by numerological finagling?" Does any reader care to supply us with an authoritative answer?

Michael, from the Leiden U. sent us this additional example of numerological absurdity: A proof that girls are evil. This uses the logic of "Gilbert's Salary Theorem on page 5.

Girls cost you time and money (to a first order approximation; in reality far more)

So, girls = time X money .

Since time is money, obviously this simplifies to girls = money².

It is well known that money is the root of all evil, so money = evil^1/2.

Hence girls = evil

13: The Emperor's New Clothes

The typeface used here is Nicholas Cochin (NicholasCocTReg) from URW Euroworks.

14: Mathematics

p. 139. The Limerick has an error. Can you find it? You will find a corrected version here.

Here's another math limerick to check:

The integral of sec y dy
From zero to one-sixth of pi
Is the log to base e
Of the square root of three
Um...times the square root of the fourth power of i.

15: Statistics

Studies have shown that the leading cause of death is life.

16: Sam Schwartz

This chapter has the distinction of having been rejected for publication by the Journal of Recreational Mathematics.

The rebellious Surd, cover (above) and p. 158 has the surds: infinity, ¥ (in his spear); Ö3 (in his spear); the unit imaginary, i (on his helmet); the base of natural logarithms, e (his shield)); and pi, p (his trousers).

John Holden has included accurate representations of mathematical curves in his drawings: loxodrome (p. 159), tractrix (p. 162), and the witch of Agnesi (p. 163). John told me he was fascinated with the epicycle (p. 164) for you must pedal it backward to go forward. Or if you pedal forward, you go backward, just like real life.

17: Engineering

Page 168. The "tax them" quote is of dubious authenticity, and we could not document it specifically to Faraday.

The poem on page 179, "If at first you don't succeed..." is an anonymous parody of Edgar Guest's poetic optimism.

The illusory gears on page 171 may be seen in color and three dimensions in my Illusions in 3d page.

The Dope Building picture (p. 180) has quite a few illusory deceptions in it, several (the planks connecting floors) based on the Penrose illusory triangle (p. 92). It is also used in the belt on the top floor. The duct work has a three-tined fork and two (?) floors above two workers carry a two-tined version of it. The fool's tackle seems to be lifting a heavy load, as well as some workmen at the right (see p. 103 and 107). A number of the drive belts are similar to those in the picture on p. 191.

You may think that the structure of this building couldn't be realized with real building materials. The picture at the right shows a similar structure achieved with Qubo ® building bricks. (These are compatible with Lego ® bricks, but we haven't yet tried this with Lego, and can't guarantee this would work with them.) These plastic interlocking bricks are 1 cm high and this model is 6 cm high. The photo was made with a digital camera, and an auxiliary close-up lens. The model was only about 10 cm from the front lens. The picture was made with one exposure, with no retouching or digital manipulation. Readers are invited to figure out how this result was accomplished. Or get out your kid's plastic blocks and construct one. If you really want the answer, look here.

19: Cutting Edge Science

The age of the Universe is a Function of Time grew out of the innocent looking table on page 197 which I had prepared for a college Astronomy class. Struck with the obvious implications of the data, I plotted it (bottom of page 197). The text just embellished these facts. I am pleased to report that most recent age estimates made by NASA (Feb 2000) gives the age of the universe as 13.7 billion years, to an accuracy of 1%. Well, that's in decent agreement with our graph, but I confidently predict that within 10 years this value will be found to be at least 10% too low.

For those of you who like this sort of parody, you will find more listed in the Cutting Edge Science department of my web site.

20: Research

The reference to Omni magazine (p. 202) was from The New Scientist. I gave up trying to find the original Omni contest in the magazine, and now I strongly suspect that there never was such a contest. If any reader can set me straight on this, we can correct the record in the next printing of the book.

We may have omitted an important principle of laboratory research:

The Principle of Resistentialism. Inanimate objects are innately perverse.

21: Limericks

P. 208. A Möbius strip has only one side. But our stripper does show her backside on the last page of this book.

The limericks from p. 209 to 214 are original to this book. All are by Donald Simanek, except the very last one, which is by John Holden.

22: Philosophy of Science

We asked Prof. Congdon to supply us with a brief, easy-to-understand explanation of the logical deceptions in this little essay. To our surprise, he obliged:

Ah, unicorns! They have it all: 1) sex- the bit about virgins; 2) violence- a vicious animal, with a savage temperament ("They'll never take me alive!" and all that); 3) drugs- the horn is said to be an aphrodisiac; and, if you want to push it, perhaps a bit of 4) rock and roll (ever notice the gait of a horse?). Finally, they are a part of our lore, a thread in the tapestry of our campfire musings, a myth. I.e., they don't exist...probably. Given the difficulty of proving a negative we cannot be dead certain of that last item. But what about this proof of a positive?

Normally, it would be unusual to attack an argument primarily because we know damn well the conclusion is false. In logic that approach would be dismissed as "begging the question." (The phrase has a meaning distinct from the common use referring to a question that screams to be asked. Here the idea is that, as the issue is the existence of unicorns, it is inappropriate to settle the question prior to analyzing an argument which claims to resolve that issue and then pretend that constitutes some kind of evidence against the argument). So, given that we know damn well unicorns don't exist, and that this is quite irrelevant to any arguments claiming otherwise...whathehellz wrong with this argument?

I won't reproduce the argument here—read the book; it's on page 224. And I don't mean to insult those who believe the flaws of the argument are too obvious to merit any explanation of them. You guys can skip this and get on with your Mensa correspondence and the rest of your pathetic one-dimensional lives. But here's my take on the preposterous claim that unicorns not only exist, their existence is logically guaranteed.

The argument asks the reader to buy into two notions, both of which have a vague plausibility, neither of which is anything but ridiculous.

• There is the claim that line 2) is a true conditional proposition with an antecedent which is necessarily true. Well, yes and no (thus violating the axiom of non-contradiction). 2) is certainly a true conditional proposition, and it looks like the antecedent is a necessary truth. It says 'If it is necessarily true that there is a unicorn in my garden, then unicorns exist.' But the antecedent has not been established as a necessary truth. Notice that the line reads 'If it is necessarily true that ....' which is quite different from saying 'It is necessarily true that ... and this implies that unicorns exist.' Clearly unicorns would exist, if it is logically necessary that there is one in my garden. But until it is shown that logic requires the appearance of a unicorn in my garden, you can't get a unicorn out of the true, but vacuous, claim presented in line 2).
• It is further claimed that whatever follows from a necessary truth is itself a necessary truth. Well, yes and no (I contradict myself because I am large; I contain multitudes... and I do not have a little mind). If a logically necessary proposition entails some other proposition (the consequent), then that consequent is certainly true. In some sense, it has to be true. But logic defines conditional propositions as true so long as the consequent is true—regardless of the truth of the antecedent, or the logical status of the consequent. Thus the following propositions are, according to the truth value definition of conditional statements, true:
  • If 2+3 = 5, then George W. Bush is President of the United States.
  • If 2+3 = 5, then all black cats are black.

Both have antecedents which are necessarily true, but only the second is followed by a logically necessary consequent.

Finally, I am accused by a friend of writing this because I am afraid that people will think I actually believe in unicorns. I am not at all afraid of what people think I believe in.

I have tenure.

HKC

23: Konrad Finagle

Other biographies of Finagle exist, but they are spurious. This one grew out of my love of old pictures, and the fact that I'd obtained a copy of an 1860 textbook with intriguing pictures which begged to be taken out of context and used for other purposes. The book was a basket-case, tossed in a basket in a used-book store in Scranton, PA: a jumble of loose pages which had come detached from the binding. The proprietor wanted to be rid of it, so it cost me 25 cents. I figured I'd find some use for the pictures someday. When I rebound it, I found it to be complete except for a missing chunk of a text page. The pages are brittle and yellowed. It is a tribute to our publisher that these reproductions look as good as the originals, and the old book itself never crossed the Atlantic. (Our publisher is in England.) We did "modify" two of the pictures. The Curate (p. 231) was a toy hydrometer in the form of a monk, whose cowl rotates to cover his head on a damp day. Claude Lumen (p. 244) was a guy looking through an optical system. Much of the story was inspired by what pictures were available and how they might be misinterpreted. John Holden supplemented them with his cart before the horse, rubber slide rule and the map of Verlegenstein. The lady in the corset was from an old mail-order catalog. The rest of the pictures came from clip-art collections.

Simon Laurensen, the production designer for this book, originally had the picture at the bottom of p. 244 too small. I asked that it be larger, to show the detail. He got the point, and suggested we could keep the small one and add a larger one on the next page with the caption "Enlarged to show detail." We didn't.

This document is not on my web page, for the server storage space required for decent copies of the pictures would be prohibitive.

The following information is provided here for the convenience of historians of science wishing to correlate Finagle's career with other historical events.

Timeline of events related to Konrad Finagle's life

Age	Date	Event
0	1858	Konrad Finagle born in Fensterbrechen
22	1880	Finagle graduates from Unwissenheit Tech
	1883	The Brooklyn Bridge is completed
28	1884	Finagle emigrates to the United States
28	1882	Finagle is appointed Instructor of Agricultural Mathematics at The Pennsylvania State College
35	1889	Finagle is appointed Dean of Engineering
	1889	The Pennsylvania State College Engineering Building burns
36	1890	Konrad marries Millicent Henry
44	1898	Finagle's Theory of the Void is published.
	1905	Albert Einstein completes his Special Theory of Relativity
55	1911	The first Solvay Conference is held in Brussels
	1915	Albert Einstein completes his General Theory of Relativity
71	1927	Finagle founds the Journal of Poorly Applied Physics
78	1936	Finagle dies at the age of 78

Rare photograph of attendees at the first Solvay Conference who happened to miss being in the more famous group photo because they were having a heated argument at the time. Second row, left to right: Gustave Breccia, geologist. Nadir Coma, astronomer. Charles Mho, inventor of the conductivity bridge. The Rev. Aristotle Parnassus, philosopher. First row, left to right: Cholodomy String, inventor of string theory. Kornard Finagle, inventor of the theory of the void. Bartholemew Field, inventor of field theory. Claude Lumen, champion of the ether theory.

p. 245. Here, in fine print, is a tidbit for perceptive readers. The title page of Finagle's 1898 book lists him as a professor of sciosophy and sciolism. The dictionary definition of sciolism is "A pretentious attitude of scholarship, superficial knowledgeability." The term "sciosophy" was coined by ichthyologist David Star Jordan (1851-1931), in his 1927 book "The Higher Foolishness", a debunking of pseudosciences. He defined the word to mean "shadow wisdom", the sort of thinking which concocts alternatives to science based on inadequate understanding of science and its methods. So we have here, obviously, a title page from a reprint edition of Finagle's book later than 1927, an edition which we have been unable to locate. Finagle founded the department of Sciosophy and Sciolism in 1929, late in his career, when he had become totally disengaged from the loop of mainstream science. He hoped this new major program would revolutionize science. Unfortunately few students signed up, and when Finagle retired in 1931, what remained of the curriculum was quietly integrated into many other courses throughout the university.

Finagle's theory of the void influenced other independent thinkers. Chrisfield Johnson's book The One Great Force: The cause of gravitation, planetary motion, heat, light, electricity, magnetism, chemical affinity, and other natural phenomena. (Breed & Lent, 1868) postulates a space filled with caloric, which he calls a "self-repellent" substance. To him, it is not gravity which holds the earth together, it is the pressure of the caloric which "holds the particles of the body together. Johnson is melding ideas from Finagle's void theory with the ether theory.

By coincidence, Finagle died the same year I was born. Perhaps I was destined to carry on Finagle's legacy in physics. I also note another coincidence. George W. Atherton was appointed President of the Pennsylvania State College in 1882. He hired Finagle in 1884. The graduate dormitory I lived in while completing my physics Ph.D. at the Pennsylvania State University was Atherton Hall.

24: Science and Religion

p. 266, last line. "O.k." is not OK. Back in the dark ages when I went to school, our English teacher would insist that abbreviations like O.K. have periods. Today the trend toward spelling simplification dictates that it's OK to leave out the periods. Old habits die hard.

In school we were told that the word derived from "Old Kinderhook", the birthplace of President Martin Van Buren and also his nickname. It was used in his 1840 re-election campaign. Some even said it was a corruption of German: "oll korrect". But research goes on, and Allen Walker Read showed that it dates from the 1830s where it was used in Boston newspapers, one of many "joke" abbreviations for common words, often based on mis-spellings of words. In this case the joke was that neither the O nor the K was correct, i.e., "OK". This is one of the few which persisted. Moral: don't believe everything your teachers tell you.

As for my combination of upper and lowercase, I blame it on the folks who wrote the software WS_FTP32 for file transfers on the internet. I use it often, and I just noticed that its "accept" button is labeled "Ok". That must have impressed itself on my consciousness. It could also be used as evidence that computer software writers aren't models of language literacy.

26. Final Exam

Bonus question: What happens when an irresistible force acts on an immovable object?

The philosophy major answers: "This question has two contradictory premises, therefore it's a logically improper question."

The engineering major answers: "You just solve F = ma for a and take the limit, which gives the form infinity over infinity, then use L'Hospital's rule.

The liberal arts major, taking Astronomy I as the easiest way to satisfy the science requirement, answers hopefully: "The Big Bang?"

The journalism major answers: "An inconceivable catastrophe."

This last answer was contributed by Dr. James A. Van Allen, who says that his college physics profs used to use it as a joke.

27: The Illustrated Dictionary of Physics

p. 293 Miss Metric. Our editor was not fond of our cartoon picture. She even subtly suggested that we might "lose it" while cutting the size of this book by 50%. Darn, we forgot. This made me wonder whether the Brits have lost their sense of humour sometime in the last three decades.

Some people have told us that the cartoon is not "politically correct" in these touchy times. How short are the memories of the British. In 1969 the British government established a Metrication Board to promote wider use of the Metric System. As part of this effort, the United Kingdom Metric Association and the Construction Industry Training Board distributed a series of posters to promote wider understanding of the metric system. One of these is reproduced here as a public service, to remind people of simpler times when even government agencies were not shy about promoting a good cause using attention getting methods. It depicts a bikini-clad gal with her measurements boldly indicated in centimeters on the left, and in inches on the right, in subdued grey. She quickly gained the affectionate name "Miss Metric." That's what John's cartoon was parodying, in case anyone missed the point. [No, you cannot click on this image to see a larger version.]

29: Anon

Errata

p. xii. The very last italicized quote on the page is by John C. Holden.

p. 14. The second line of text should read "...remained to be discovered." Chances are that the missing "to" will be found somewhere else in the book where it shouldn't be.

p. 28, last line of last paragraph. "IEC" should be "ISE".

p. 39. Third line from bottom. It should read "Terrorostracodus tectonica". The capital "T" is correct syntax for such names.

p. 78. The picture caption. The word "lesdyxia" should not be capitalized.

p. 149. The caption of the bottom picture should read "Make the width of the regression line proportional to the uncertainty of the data." Or something like that.

p. 265. Next to last line. According to style manuals the names sun, moon and earth should not be capitalized except when used with "the" in connection with other planets as in "The planets Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are sometimes called terrestrial planets." We tried to be consistent about this; we really did. But we failed.

p. 266. Last line. OK is preferred.

P. 287. Eighth line from bottom. The horsepower is not a unit of work, but is a unit of power.

p. 298. Fifth line from bottom. Delete the word "does".

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