     | september 10, 2010
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| september 10, 2010
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To The Max (Or, On Pedantry) Max Perelman -- 05/03/2006  We are thrilled to announce the debut of long-time-listed-contributor-first-time author Max Perelman (aka, "The Human Wikipedia"), who answered random questions Catherine gathered for him over a brunch at Andy and Jenny's house. Got something you want answered? Email him. (There's an email link on his contributor page, which you can get to by clicking on Contributors at the left.)Did people in Europe have sugar before they came into contact with the Far East, India, the New World and Africa? Besides honey, you mean? Yeah sure. The Romans used sapa to sweeten their wine and ridiculously weird desserts–they made it by boiling grape juice in lead pots. What you end up with is part reduced grape juice (think white grape concentrate) and part lead acetate, (aka sugar of lead) which is what you get when you combine lead oxide (the whitish blush formed by exposing lead to the air) with acetic acid. It’s sweet and white and powdery like sugar, but it has all those fun side effects. If (and it’s pretty arguable) Rome was laid low by lead poisoning, (anemia, gout, deafness, birth defects) this is a much more likely culprit than lead water pipes. (Lots of old houses in the US have lead pipes.) The Romans were, by the way, aware of the health hazards of lead–they just liked their sweet, dilute wine and lead-candied fruit. If I’m thinking of renting office space in San Francisco at $1.35 per square foot and it’s 886 square feet, how much would it cost me? And more importantly, is it worth it as an investment of my money? Haven’t you been keeping up with your liberal eschatology? The housing market’s gonna crash and we’re all gonna die. How do I adjust the remote control on Andy and Jenny’s television without messing up their Tivo programming? See attached diagram. What is the best way to give a small dog a haircut? Um, two parts Nair, one part something stinky to roll in? How do filters on my macbook’s photobooth program work? Some combination of the following: video codec, fourier transform, color space, luminance, Gaussian blur. What’s an effluvium? A gaseous outflow. (See also: my mouth and this column) What’s mead? Fermented honey. It was like the first liquor. Everyone knows that. n.b.: it can be sweet or dry How do I use a bidet without making a mess? (posed by Max himself) This just strikes me as an inherently risky proposition. You are directing a stream of water at what is essentially the least congenially located spot, (see gravity, surface tension) as far as water runoff is concerned. Baby wipes I can understand . . . but bidets? Where, exactly, are the Doldrums? The Doldrums, I think, prefer to be referred to as the "equatorial convergence zone" these days. I’m not sure to what degree this is the result of the coriolis effect (aka the phenomenon that doesn’t cause toilets in the Southern Hemisphere to drain universally backwards). It’s more likely got something to do with the higher input of solar energy into those latitudes–but the end result is a belt around the equator with no real prevailing winds which moves with the seasons. (It’s centered around the tropic of cancer during the Northern hemisphere’s summer, and around the tropic of Capricorn during our winter.) end of page 1 [ 1 ] read more ... [ 2 ] |
