Answers To Fascinating Questions

May 21, 2010

Interview with Ivan Semeniuk, one of the authors of the book Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze?: And 114 Other Questions

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Mike Carruthers:
Traditionally on boats and ships the windows or portholes are round, why?

Ivan Semeniuk:
The roundness of windows on ships is something that's a by-product of the switch from wooden to metal ships.

Ivan Semeniuk, one of the authors of the book Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze?, says if you look at pictures of old wooden ships the windows were typically square.

But metal is a little different because when you cut a rectangle or square into a piece of metal, the metal is subject to more fatigue at those corner points. Over the years naval architects quickly learned that the roundness still preserves the most strength in the metal hulls.

On a calculator the row of buttons one, two, three are on the bottom - on a telephone they run across the top.

The telephone and the calculator come to us from two different evolutionary tracks. The calculator is basically a descendant of the mechanical adding machine.

And if you recall, those adding machines and old cash registers had the lower numbers across the bottom. The telephone keypad is descended from the rotary phone, where the lower numbers were near the top of the dial. And here's another question, "What time is it in the North Pole?"

There's no real time at the North Pole. All the time zones theoretically converge at that point so it can essentially be any time that you want. And people who are polar explorers actually have to go through the motion of selecting a time that makes the most sense for them.