Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (64 page)

Uncle John found this in a book called
Reading the Numbers,
by Mary Blocksma. He’s embarrassed to admit that when he was a kid, he thought FM stood for “foreign music,” and
AM
stood for “American music.” But after reading this piece, he finally understands what radio waves are.

D
id you ever wonder why the AM numbers on your radio dial are bigger than the FM numbers? Or what the difference is between regular (VHF) television channels and UHF channels? Or why you sometimes hear a CB radio in the middle of your favorite rerun? In fact, what do these things—plus electricity, microwaves, infrared waves, light waves, X-rays, and gamma rays, have in common? All are electromagnetic waves—all of which travel at the same speed—the speed of light—and each of which vibrates at a constant rate.

DOING THE WAVE

What makes one electromagnetic wave different from another is how fast it’s vibrating, or the
frequency
(number) of the waves, called
cycles
, that go by per second. Frequency is measured in
hertz:
1 hertz = 1 cycle per second. Very low frequency waves with long wavelengths, like electricity (AC power) vibrate at only a few cycles per second; 60 hertz is common in the United States. Radio waves begin at about 15,000 hertz. Compared to electricity, that sounds high, but it’s nothing compared to X-rays, which vibrate at about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 cycles per second (10 to the 18th power hertz), or gamma rays, at more than 10 to the 24th power hertz. Hertz are also referred to in larger, more easily used units:

ON YOUR RADIO

How does this translate to your radio dial? The AM side, usually numbered from 550 to 1600 (some dials remove the last zero, leaving it 55 to 160), stand for
kilohertz
, although today’s AM band extends from 525 to 1,700 kilohertz, or 525,000 to 1,700,000 cycles per second. The FM side of your dial is usually numbered from 88 to 108, which stands for
megahertz
. FM numbers are lower than AM numbers, but the frequencies are much higher—88,000,000 to 108,000,000 cycles per second. The FM stations are sandwiched between television stations, which are assigned frequencies according to channel: VHF channels 2 through 6 broadcast at 54 to 88 megahertz, below FM frequencies; while channels 7 to 13 broadcasting at 174 to 216 megahertz, and the UHF channels (14 to 83), broadcast at 470 to 890 megahertz, are above the FM channels. CB radio uses two bands, one of which is in 460 to 470 right under the UHF band, which accounts for its occasional television interference.

WHAT’S THE FREQUENCY?

Whatever it’s broadcasting, each station is assigned its frequency by the FCC—the Federal Communications Commission—which has been regulating American broadcasting since 1934, to keep stations from interfering with one other. Each station operates strictly within its assigned channel, whose size depends on the type of broadcast. AM channels require only a 10-kilohertz band, while FM channels require closer to 200 kilohertz, and television channels require 6,000 kilohertz each.

So how big is a radio wave? The length of a wave (cycle) is measured from crest to crest, or from the tip of one wave to the tip of the next. Very low frequency waves (lower than 30 hertz) can measure over 10,000 yards—more than six miles—from crest to crest. Medium frequency waves—AM broadcasting waves fall in here—are about 100 to 1,000 yards each. VHF waves—used for FM and television broadcasting—measure 1 yard to 10 yards. UHF waves are from about a yard to half an inch. Extremely high frequency waves, such as X-rays, are so small that they are measured in angstroms (one ten-billionth—0.0000000001—of a meter): light rays are approximately 3,900 to 7,700 angstroms wide, while an X ray might measure 1 angstrom, and gamma rays can be smaller than 0.000001 angstrom.

LIGHT VS. RADIO

It’s the size of the electromagnetic wave, related to its frequency, which is really what makes a light wave (which you can see) different from and electrical wave, or a radio wave, or an X ray. The range is phenomenal—frequencies run from 1 to more than 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 0.0000000000000001 meter.

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SCIENTIFIC HOAXES

The Amazing Tomato-wheat-cow

Background:
In September 1984,
Omni
magazine ran a story about “an amazing tomato-wheat-cow,” a single plant-animal hybrid that had been created by two biologists at the University of Hamburg in West Germany. “With all the characteristics of a giant stalk of wheat,”
Omni
wrote, “the skin can be tanned and used as leather, and several udder blossoms provide the grower with a steady supply of tomato juice.”
Omni
attributed the genetic breakthrough to “Dr. Barry MacDonald and William Wimpey of the Department of Biology at the University of Hamburg.”

The Truth:
Omni
got the story from the April issue of
New Scientist
magazine…which turned out to be the April Fool’s issue. The “cow” was an obvious hoax—Wimpey’s and McDonald’s are the two largest hamburger chains in England—but
Omni
somehow missed the joke. According to one account, “fact-checking for the article was limited to leaving a message for Wimpey and MacDonald at the University of Hamburg. The message was not returned.”

Bruno Bettelheim

Background:
From the 1940s until he committed suicide in 1990, he was considered a pioneering psychologist in the study of the treatment and education of emotionally desturbed children.

What Happened:
In 1997 biographer Richard Pollak (whose mentally ill brother had been treated by Bettelheim) discovered that Bettelheim “constantly falsified his credentials after arriving in the U.S. in 1939,” had plagiarized the work of others throughout his career, and had never even earned a degree in psychology.

Are you the kind of person who always expects the worst—who’s never surprised by scandals or heroes who are exposed as phonies? Then this page is for you. Read it and weep
…or
laugh…or whatever.

D
ENNIS THE MENACE

Hank Ketcham, creator of the “Dennis the Menace” comic strip, considers his work a beacon for families. “The Mitchells represent what I hope America is,” he said in 1990. But at last report, he was estranged from the real Dennis—his son—who inspired the strip in the first place. “We lead separate lives, there’s very little communication,” Ketcham told a reporter unapologetically. He added: “I don’t want a closer relationship.”

At age 46, Dennis was living in an Ohio trailer park with his second wife, working as a tire retreader. The cute kid with the cowlick told
People
magazine: “Dad can be like a stranger. Sometimes I think that if he died tomorrow, I wouldn’t feel anything.”

FAMILY VALUES

Nancy Reagan has publicly said she’s against premarital sex. But it turns out the former first lady was pregnant when she and Ronald Reagan were married. Apparently, she claimed for years that her daughter Patti had been born prematurely. But in her 1989 autobiography,
My Turn,
she revealed the truth. As UPI reported when the book came out:

      
For the first time she admitted that her daughter Patti “was born—go ahead and count—a bit precipitously but very joyfully October 22, 1952.” The Reagans were married the previous March, two weeks after announcing their engagement. Mrs. Reagan told [reporters] she saw no conflict between her public disapproval of premarital sex and her daughter’s conception.…“We’re not talking about teenagers. And we knew we were going to get married.”

          
Critics have accused the Reagans of hypocrisy for preaching “family values” while having a tangled set of personal relationships.

          
“It’s true that we weren’t always able to live up to the things we believed in,” she said in the book, “but that doesn’t mean we didn’t believe in them.”

IT’S JUST MONEY

From 1989 to 1993, Catalina Vasquez Villalpando was treasurer of the United States—the person in charge of the U.S. Mint whose signature appeared on all paper money until 1993. But in 1994, she pled guilty to “evading federal income taxes, obstructing an independent counsel’s investigation, and conspiring to conceal financial links to her former company” while she was serving in her government position. In addition to not reporting income, she concealed information about money she received from a telecommunications firm in which she was a senior vice president. (Coincidentally, the company was awarded several contracts from the federal government while she was in the Treasury Department.)

A WHALE OF A PROPERTY

When the first
Free Willy
film became a hit, kids started asking about the star. To their surprise, the real whale—named Keiko—wasn’t doing too well. “The 3-1/2 ton whale spends his days endlessly circling a pool so shallow he has trouble remaining submerged,” Ted Bardacke wrote in a 1994
Washington Post
article. “Three times a day, he does a few tricks at Reino Aventura, the Mexico City amusement park that has owned him for more than a decade….He is sick with a herpes-type skin infection, he is dangerously underweight, and his teeth either never matured or are being worn down by constant contact with the pool’s walls and bottom.

Keiko is not the only one with a problem. With the killer whale still in captivity, Warner Bros., the studio behind
Free Willy
, has a public relations disaster swimming around in a Mexico City fish tank. Not only has the studio been unable to follow through on its promise to…let the whale go, but Keiko is slated to star—via outtakes from the first film and through robotics—in a sequel,
Free Willy II: The Return Home….
If Keiko is still languishing south of the border while in the sequel Willy is out in the wild…the new movie could draw more protests than viewers.”

Reino Aventura was willing to donate the whale, but not to pay his moving expenses. “Warner has made a lot of money on the film and only paid us $75,000,” said a spokeswoman. “Now we have to deal with all this bad publicity. Warner should cough up the dough.” Ultimately, the orca was moved to a more appropriate facility in Newport, Oregon and Warner was free—to churn out more
Free Willy
films, videos, and a TV series.

How long did Johnny Carson host “The Tonight Show”? Look at it this way: If Jay Leno wants to break the record, he‘ll have to stay on the job until 2022.

R
OUGH RIDING

Carson’s “Tonight Show” got off to a good start in 1962. His ratings were high all over the country—in Chicago, for example, he captured 58% of the viewing audience on the first night. By early 1963, his ratings were even beginning to surpass Paar’s.

But Carson wasn’t happy with the quality of the program. The interview format was inflexible—if a guest was scheduled for 10 minutes, they stayed on for 10 minutes, even if they ran out of things to say. Some nights were particularly awful. When an interview fell apart, Carson would become so frustrated, he’d yawn into the camera; his eyes would wander as his guests droned on and on.

MAKING CHANGES

In early 1963, the show’s producer transferred to another program just as Art Stark, Carson’s producer on “Who Do You Trust?” became available. Stark had helped Carson turn the game show into a surprise hit, and Carson hired him to do the same thing with “The Tonight Show.”

Stark immediately went to work on the format. He and Carson agreed that from now on, if an interview ran out of gas they’d go to a commercial as quickly as possible, and the offending guest would slide down the couch and off-camera. When the commercials ended, a new guest or skit would begin the next segment. The flexible scheduling helped the show’s pacing, and put a lot of pressure on guests to perform.

Robert Blake, a frequent guest during the Carson years, describes what it was like: