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Illustration by Arnie Bermudez
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Arizona Daily Wildcat
Monday, December 8, 2003
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Things you always never wanted to know
In the summer of 1902, a printer in Brooklyn, New York, was having trouble with color printing because the hot, humid weather was causing the paper on the presses to change size enough to cause printing distortions. Willis Haviland Carrier, a young engineer trying to solve the problem, found that air retained less moisture at lower temperatures. He designed a machine that blew air over chilled pipes and stabilized the amount of moisture. The printing improved, and Carrier's concept became the basis of the home air conditioner.
There is one phobia that is mainly a physical disease and not merely a state of mind. A person who has suffered a certain viral infection that attacks the nervous system cannot swallow. The sight or sound of water throws this unfortunate person into a convulsion. The ancient Greeks thought that kind of convulsion resulted from a morbid fear of water. They called the disease hydrophobia from "hydor," or "water."
Bees are known to cure rheumatism. A number of sufferers have been given relief through controlled stinging. Several bees are placed in an inverted glass over the aching limbs; they soon sting, irritated by their captivity.
In September 1942, a Japanese plane flew over Oregon on two occasions and dropped bombs in an attempt to set the forests on fire. The float-equipped plane had been carried across the Pacific by the submarine I-25. It wasn't until many years after World War II that it was revealed that the U.S. mainland had been bombed from the air for the first time. The general public had assumed that the forest fires of 1942 were started by firebombs carried in balloons by prevailing winds from Japan to Oregon.
There were geomancers, literally "earth diviners," in ancient China. They would place on a magnetic stone a metal disc that was inscribed with astronomy and water signs. From its orientation, they would read the "lines of force" stretching across the landscape. Some of the most beautiful Chinese villages and towns were designed by geomancers, who set houses in places needed to concentrate energy or to disperse it.
Because the Japanese word for "four" sounds exactly like the word for "death," and because the word for "nine" sounds like the word for "suffering," there are no rooms numbered four or nine in many hospitals and hotels in Japan.
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