How Does Aspirin Find a Headache? (21 page)
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Authors: David Feldman
7. Most credit card companies pay the merchant’s bank, electronically, the total amount charged, often within twenty-four hours. This quick transfer of money is one of the reasons why restaurateurs are willing to pay the “discount fee” that allows the credit card companies to make money. While it may take six weeks for the credit card company to be paid for the restaurant bill by the consumer, the restaurant is paid within a day or two. Thus the credit card issuer has to “eat” the float—the “free” use of the value of the charge—that the consumer has been granted.
The negative float of credit card issuers, especially those, like American Express, that do not impose (high) finance charges for late payments by consumers, is one of their major costs of business. Nobody, especially you, is going to get rich by not having to pay a bill of fifty dollars for forty-five days, but imagine the impact of a financial institution contending with twenty million consumers receiving an interest-free loan for that period. Premium cards, such as American Express, try to regain the revenue lost in finance charges by pricing their cards higher than Visa or Mastercard, and by charging merchants a higher-percentage fee.
If there is any reason why waiters might prefer cash, it might have to do with three letters—IRS. Obviously, tips put on credit cards leave a paper trail; increasingly, the IRS is trying to find ways to chase after undeclared income from workers who derive most of their money from tips.
Submitted by Maria Scott of Cincinnati, Ohio
.
Police work is serious business. We’ve always wondered why officers in fast pursuit of bad guys flash two-tone signals from their beacons. We called many big-city police departments to find out who their color consultant was.
We quickly discovered that there is no national law specifying the colors on police car beacons. Yet in practice, the choices are few. A law enforcement information specialist at the National Criminal Justice Reference Library who wished to remain anonymous told
Imponderables
that at the time when red and blue lights were chosen for most police department beacons, high-intensity lights were not in use. So there was a practical advantage to using two colors—blue was easier to see during the day, and red was more clearly discerned at night.
From time to time, there have been attempts to make yellow (the easiest color to observe from long distances) the official color of beacons throughout the United States, but the expense and effort of defying tradition and passing the legislation have killed such attempts. A federal regulation would cause disruptions in states like Pennsylvania, which have laws designating the color of beacons (in this case, blue and red for police). And opponents argue that yellow flashing lights would be confused with construction or street lights.
Blue was probably chosen initially for its long association with police (e.g., blue lights in front of police stations, blue uniforms), and because of its high daylight visibility. And red has long been a symbol of warning and danger, and a signal to stop. Police departments in Los Angeles, Dallas, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Salt Lake City all use the red and blue beacons. Chicago and the Virginia State Police, on the other hand, have switched from red and blue to all-blue beacons.
Several of the police officers we contacted argued that blue is the most effective color for beacons because no other emergency service uses it (both firefighters and ambulances use red beacons, and most construction and emergency transport cars employ yellow or amber). According to Bill Dwyer, of beacon manufacturer Federal Signal Corporation, big-city police departments, in particular, tend to prefer blue beacons, because the color distinguishes them from the many other emergency vehicles. And no other emergency vehicle features a two-colored beacon.
Why is the red light on the driver’s side? We received the same answer from everyone, but Officer Romero, of the Los Angeles Police Department, put it best:
The reason that the red light is over the driver’s seat is so that the driver being pursued can better see it. People are conditioned to stop for a red light; this is the most efficient way to signal the driver of a car in front of you to stop.
A passenger in the offending car cannot see the red nearly as well as the blue light. The LAPD uses an amber light on the rear of the car, which is activated by an on-off switch. We are also conditioned to think of a yellow light as a caution light; in this case, cars behind the police vehicle are being cautioned by the amber lights to slow down because police activity is taking place.
Police departments are constantly experimenting with color possibilities. The Virginia State Police experimented with blue lights for four years with equipment from six manufacturers before adopting them. Maryland tried a multicolor approach: Different colors hooked to switches controlled inside the car, with the intention of color-coding specific activities. In hot pursuit of a car, all-red might be appropriate; for a routine traffic ticket, red and blue might do the trick. And yellow would be the perfect understated fashion statement for lurking around a bend on a highway speed trap. But the state decided such color tactics were altogether too subtle and abandoned the idea.
Submitted by Ronald Lindow of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Thanks also to Jim Wright of New Orleans, Louisiana, and Sean O’Melveny of Littleton, Colorado
.
Obviously, milk distributors
do
make single-serving sizes of lowfat milk and skim milk. They can be found in schools and institutions throughout the country. As Paul E. Hand, secretary and general manager of the Atlantic Dairy Cooperative reminded us, single-serving cartons of lowfat milk are a staple at McDonald’s, Burger King, and many other fast food establishments. Hand added that many school lunch programs do include prepackaged chocolate whole milk in one-cup cartons.
So why can’t you find them in the supermarket? In some cases, you can. But grocery stores want to stock a limited number of container sizes and prefer selling big containers to small ones to maximize profits. (Note the demise of the seven-ounce soda bottle while three-liter containers proliferate on supermarket shelves.)
Dairy distributors realize economies of scale by saving on packaging costs (obviously, four single-serving packages of milk are required to provide the milk in one quart container). Milk is a staple in most households, one used on a daily basis; Hand reports that there simply isn’t sufficient demand for single-serving cartons. If consumers bought them or demanded them in sufficient quantity, they’d be on the shelves.
Prepackaged chocolate milk, an insignificant category two decades ago, while steadily gaining in market share, is still a stepchild to unflavored milks. In most cases, supermarkets don’t want to stock more than one type of chocolate milk. For example, Hershey, the closest to a national brand in this category, licenses local dairies to produce its brand of chocolate milk. Individual dairies can choose whether to use 2 percent or whole milk. According to Hershey Foods’ Carl Andrews, most local dairies will base their decision on whether to use whole or lowfat milk by assessing which type of unflavored milk sells better in their region.
You live in southern California, Mitch, where 2 percent milk dwarfs the sale of whole milk. In many parts of the East coast of the United States, you’d have a hard time finding single-serving cartons of lowfat chocolate milk.
Submitted by Mitch Hubbard of Rancho Palos Verdes, California
.
What
Happens to the Ink When Newspapers Are Recycled?
Before used newsprint can be recycled, it must be cleaned of contaminants, and ink is the most plentiful contaminant. The newsprint must be de-inked.
Although synthetic inks are gaining market share, most newspapers still use oil-based inks. To clean the newspaper, the newsprint is chopped up and boiled in water with some additional chemicals until it turns into a slurry. As the fibers rub against each other, the ink rises to the surface, along with other nuisances, such as paper clips and staples. A slightly different, more complicated procedure is used to clean most newsprint with polymer-based inks.
Theodore Lustig, a professor at West Virginia University’s Perley Isaac Reed School of Journalism, and printing ink columnist for
Graphic Arts Monthly
, stresses that current technology is far from perfect:
You should be aware that it is impossible to remove
all
ink from the slurry prior to recycling it into new paper. Since microparticles of ink remain, this would leave the paper rather gray if used without further processing. It is often subjected to bleaching or is mixed with virgin fibers to increase the finished recycled paper’s overall brightness, a requisite for readability contrast.
More and more states are requiring publishers to use a higher proportion of recycled paper. As recyclers extract more ink from more newsprint, it may save trees in the forest, but it results in another ecological problem: what to do with unwanted ink. Although we may think of ink as a benign substance, the EPA thinks otherwise, a Lustig explains:
The ink residue is collected and concentrated (i.e., the water is removed) into a sludge for disposition. However, since there are trace elements of heavy metals (lead, cadmium, chrome, arsenic, etc.) in this residue, this sludge is considered by EPA and other agencies to be a hazardous waste and has to be disposed of in accordance with current environmental laws.
In the past, sludge was dumped in landfills. Today, many options are exercised. According to Tonda F. Rush, president and CEO of the National Newspaper Association, some mills burn the waste, while others sell it to be converted to organic fertilizer.
Recycled newsprint can feel differently to the touch than virgin stock. Lustig explains that paper cannot be recycled infinitely. Three or four times is a maximum:
Eventually, the fibers lose their ability to bind together, resulting in a paper that is structurally weak and unable to withstand the tensile pressures put to it on high-speed web presses.
Submitted by Ted Winston of Burbank, California. Thanks also to Meadow D’Arcy of Oakland, California
.
Why
Do Lizards Sleep with One Eye Open?
We imagine that Sarah Robertson, who lives in Nevada, has had ample opportunity to observe lizards sleeping, but our experts beg to differ with this Imponderable’s premise. Professor Joseph C. Mitchell, secretary of the Herpetologists League, says that it is rare for lizards to sleep with one eye closed. Norman J. Scott, Jr., zoologist in lizard country (New Mexico), says, “Every lizard that I caught sleeping had both eyes closed. They may partially or totally open one or both eyes if they are disturbed.”
So is our questioner hallucinating? Not necessarily. Chameleons are distinguished not only by their ability to change color but by their knack for moving each eye independently. John E. Simmons, of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, thinks that a shifty chameleon might have been trying to snare our Sarah:
It is not uncommon for a chameleon to sit motionless for long periods of time with one eye closed and one open, but it is not sleeping when it does this, it is awake and watching for prey items and predators with the open eye.
Simmons also mentions that some lizards have a transparent membrane that closes over the eye to protect it. And according to Richard Landesman, a zoologist at the University of Vermont, some lizards have a pattern of scales and coloration on their eyelids that might fool predators into thinking their eyelids are closed. These lizards might also look like they have one eye closed but are actually capable of seeing with both eyes. Illusions that trick us into thinking they have an eye closed might be used to fool their potential predators as well.
