Why Do Pirates Love Parrots? (17 page)

5. How Does the Hair on Your Head and Chin Know To Grow Long, But the Hair on Your Eyebrows or Arms Stays Short?

Although Andy Rooney and other folks with bushy eyebrows might not agree with the premise, we get the idea. Next to the Braille/drive-up ATM mystery, this is our second most frequently posed Unimponderable. Not a bad question, but the answer to the part we can answer is readily available, and the rest can never be answered.

The hair we see on our head and body doesn’t know much; in fact, by the time we can see it, it is quite dead. Inside each hair follicle, new cells form and push out older cells (the hair that we see) during the follicle’s growth phase. But the follicle goes through a rest phase, as well, when the hair shaft breaks, and the new hair replaces it. The varying lengths of these rest and growth phases determine the length of our hair. None of this is synchronized, or we would shed like a Golden Retriever.

We are constantly losing hair, as our bath drains will attest—it is just that the growth phase for the hair on our head is longer than for other parts of the body. Why is that? Some biologists argue that the hair on top of our head was originally a survival mechanism to shield us from the sun. Most evolutionists argue that the main purpose of our manes is to attract the opposite sex (the folks at Clairol, Grecian Formula, and Rogaine subscribe to this theory), and that the beards and mustaches on men are signals—just in case women don’t notice the bulging muscles and remote control in hand—that the fairer sex is looking at striking specimens of male pulchritude.

6. Why Do We Park on Driveways and Drive on Parkways?

We believe this Unimponderable sprang from the fertile mind of comedian Steven Wright. To the best of our knowledge, he’s never answered it. Once again, we will milk his wordplay of any vestige of wit, and answer this one more time if you vow on a stack of
Imponderables
books never to ask again. To quote from the scholarly yet illuminating classic, David Feldman’s
Who Put the Butter in Butterfly?
:

One of the main definitions of
way
is “a route or course that is or may be used to go from one place to another.” New York’s master builder Robert Moses dubbed his “route or course that was used to go from one place or another”
parkway
because it was lined with trees and lawns in an attempt to simulate the beauty of a park. The
driveway,
just as much as a
highway,
or a
parkway,
is a path for automobiles. The driveway is a path, a
way
between the street and a house or garage.

Imagine a time when the government was trying desperately to encourage us to drive more often—this was the inspiration behind the dubbing of Moses’s “parkway.”

7. Why Do They Use Sterilized Needles for Lethal Injections to Prisoners? Why Do They Use Rubbing Alcohol on Their Arms?

Some variation of these two questions seems to be on just about every e-mail forwarded “Things That Make You Go Hmm” list. Like the Braille-ATM question, it probably started as a one-liner from a comedian, but it is so-often asked here at Imponderables Central that we’ll answer it seriously on the assumption that some folks do want to know the answer. Actually, there are a whole bunch of reasons why executions are handled meticulously:

1. Practical Advantages:
Even if the main purposes of an execution are deterrence and retribution, there are practical reasons for using sterilized needles. For one, needles come packaged sterilized to begin with. Imagine the public relations nightmare if the State injected prisoners with used or dirty needles. The purpose is to kill the prisoner, not torture him.

Likewise, the rubbing alcohol doesn’t just disinfect the area to be pierced—it also raises the blood vessels closer to the surface of the skin, making it easier to find an entry point for the needle. Several executions have been delayed for up to an hour while technicians futilely tried to find a vein to inject. In a famous case, the execution of Randy Woolls in Texas in 1986, the condemned man actually helped technicians to find a usable vein.

One other obvious practical advantage to these precautions—they help protect the technicians administering the drugs. Why should they be subjected to less than sterile conditions?

2. Political Reasons:
Opponents of capital punishment seize on any opportunity to criticize lethal injection (as well as other methods of legal executions), and the most obvious argument is that capital punishment is cruel and unusual. One of the reasons why lethal injection is now used in thirty-seven of the fifty states in the United States is that it is perceived as less cruel than hanging, firing squads, electrocution, or the gas chamber. The less humane the actual execution appears, the less support lethal injection will garner from citizens.

Opposition doesn’t come only in the courts. The American Medical Association’s Code of Ethics prohibits doctors from aiding in executions. With a few exceptions, physicians don’t administer the lethal injection itself, although in some states a doctor is in attendance to at least monitor the proceedings. Most of the technicians who administer lethal injections are not experts in anesthesia, and as a result there have been many accidents in which the condemned prisoners suffered unexpected adverse reactions to the drugs (in most cases, three different drugs are administered). If only for political reasons, the state governments and capital punishment supporters don’t want witnesses, especially the press, to describe the execution as torture.

3. Legal Reasons:
Procedures for executions are mandated by each state, and the ones that we’ve seen include provisions for everything from the prisoner’s last meal to the specifics of the administration of the lethal drugs. For example, the California procedures mandate that an IV line be attached to two usable veins (in case one line malfunctions), prescribe the exact amount of sodium pentothal, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride to be injected, insist that the line is flushed with normal saline solution in between the first and second injection, and require that a physician be present to declare the time of death.

4. Just in Case:
And what if there was a stay of execution after the process of lethal injection has started? It actually happened in 1983 to James Autry, a Texas convict. Thirty-one minutes before his scheduled execution, with needles already inserted and saline solution running through his veins, the Supreme Court issued a stay (Autry was eventually executed the following year).

5. Psychological Reasons:
Our comrade in Q&A-dom, Cecil Adams, wrote about this question in his “Straight Dope” column. After citing some arguments similar to the ones we mention above, he put forth his personal theory (which we liked):

Which brings us to what I think is the real reason for swabbing the arm—it allows the executioners to think of themselves as professionals doing a job rather than killers. Interviews with members of execution teams reveal that they place great stock in following proper procedures. We may be certain that if the prisoner were to choke on a chicken bone during his last meal, the authorities would spare no effort to save his life an hour prior to ending it.

Another reason to put stock in the psychological theory is that in many states, there are several “executioners,” none of whom know which one administered the fatal dose, just as members of a firing squad weren’t sure which of them actually killed the condemned prisoner.

8. Why Did Kamikaze Pilots Wear Helmets?

This Unimponderable, from the folks who brought you parkways and driveways and Braille-laden ATM machines, is on most Internet “Things That Make You Go Hmm” lists. Again, we have no idea who first uttered this question, but whoever it is, he or she should be getting royalties, for it is has captured the imagination of ponderers everywhere.

Some folks treat the question as a joke (“Was the helmet to cover up morning hair?”) while others sincerely want to know the answer. Some plausible reasons that kamikazes might have worn helmets while flying their suicide missions:

1. 1.
   In case of antiaircraft fire, the helmet might have provided some protection.
   
2. 2.
   The helmet protected pilots from jostling in the plane, especially hitting their heads against the sides of the cockpit or the canopy of the plane.
   
3. 3.
   Radio communication gear was inserted in the helmet. The electronics needed protection against being damaged during a ragged flight.
   
4. 4.
   The helmet was there for warmth. It got cold in those cockpits!
   
5. 5.
   The helmet was part of the uniform of a Japanese pilot. There were no special uniforms for kamikazes.
   
6. 6.
   Many kamikaze missions were abandoned. The pilots might as well have remained as safe as possible if they didn’t succeed in their mission.
   

All of these explanations are reasonable, but there’s one tiny wrinkle in the equation: Kamikazes didn’t wear helmets. They wore the same leather flight caps (and goggles) that were standard-issue equipment for other pilots. If you enter “kamikaze pilots” in Google Image Search, you’ll see scores of images of kamikazes, most in full uniform with leather caps, and none with hard helmets. While doing research on this Unimponderable, we found a fascinating Web site, Kamikaze Images (http://wgordon.web.wesleyan.edu/kamikaze/index.htm), a project created by William D. Gordon for his master’s degree at Wesleyan University. The site is full of images of kamikazes, and interviews with Japanese and Americans about the subject.

When contacted, Gordon was more than familiar with this Unimponderable, and tired of it, too (“Personally, I hope your book’s explanation stops this joke.”). Gordon thinks that the premise assumes that kamikaze pilots really wanted to live instead of carrying out their suicide mission. But Gordon says that based on his research, that is not the case. Kamikazes did not take on their task lightly, and were trained and prepared for their missions for many months.

Gordon confirms that the leather cap and goggles were “the same as any other pilot’s in the Navy or Army.” Many times kamikaze pilots wore a
hachimaki
(headband) with some saying written on it, “but I do not think this was that common for other pilots.”

We asked how often kamikaze missions were abandoned, and what the primary reasons were. He responded:

Many flights did not result in a ship being hit for the following reasons:

• mission postponed due to weather
  
• unable to take off because of mechanical problems
  
• returned to base due to not finding ship or due to bad weather
  
• shot down before reaching a ship
  
• forced (or crash) landing somewhere other than sortie base due to mechanical problems or enemy attack
  
• ran out of fuel before finding ship
  
• missed ship (e.g., pilot error, plane on fire)
  

The records are not available or are inconsistent, so an accurate percentage is impossible no matter how you want to calculate the figure. A rough estimate of kamikaze planes that sortied and hit a ship is about ten to fifteen percent.

9. Why Are “Black Boxes” Orange?

If Army tanks can be painted in camouflage to hinder detection in battle situations, then why can’t critical flight recorders be painted bright colors to ease finding them at disaster sites on the ground or in the ocean? The Federal Aviation Administration mandates not only that all large commercial aircraft must be equipped with two black boxes, but that they be painted “either bright orange or bright yellow.” We haven’t been able to find any examples of black “black boxes”—as far as we know, they are invariably orange.

That’s right, there are
two
black boxes in each plane: a cockpit voice recorder that monitors pilot conversations with each other, air traffic control, and ground or cabin crew, as well as engine noises; and a flight data recorder, which according to the National Transportation Safety Board, monitors “at least eighty-eight important parameters such as time, altitude, airspeed, heading, and aircraft attitude.” The most sophisticated black boxes now monitor close to 300 flight variables.