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.
At somethingyoushouldknow.net
I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.
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