Why Do Pirates Love Parrots? (29 page)

O
ur Inbox section is full of fans frothing about the mistakes they think we’ve made in our books, but sometimes they help us find new information that screams for an update. Usually, we find a particular new source of information that we’re bursting to share with you. We’ve wanted to include an update section for a long time, and with
Why Do Pirates Love Parrots?
, we inaugurate the feature. Let us know if you’d like us to continue.

A
ppropriately enough, we addressed these burning questions in
When Do Fish Sleep?
We spoke to many experts, who emphasized that most fish were attracted to live bait that moved in the water. This year, we stumbled onto a 1994 article in
The Wall Street Journal
about a man who makes a living pondering the taste predilections of fish. Dr. Keith Jones, a biologist, is the director of fish research at Pure Fishing, the world’s largest fishing tackle company. With fish tanks in his laboratory, Jones conducts empirical research on the roles of sight, smell, and sound on aquatic biting proclivities. The
Journal
article mentioned that Jones tested all sorts of variables: For example, would fish be more attracted to a lure that mimicked the torso of a crayfish without the head, or a head without the body? Jones told the reporter: “We set up behaviorial tests to let the fish make choices…We let the fish design the lure for himself.”

What really piqued our interest is that the company’s plastic worms were “a quickly growing segment.” Much to our delight, more than ten years later, Dr. Jones is still pursuing his passion at Pure Fishing. When we posed Dr. Jones our Imponderable, we were pleased to find that this Ph.D. is concerned with the important things in life:

We noted in
When Do Fish Sleep?
that fish, like most animals, tend to prefer prey common to their environment. Jones concurs:

So if Jones’s theory is correct, earthworms are the victims of mistaken identity! He speculates that the earthworm’s shape might be just on the fringe of the shape profile that a bass would attack—and in his tests with artificial worms, he proved that the average worm would be more attractive to a bass if it were shorter and plumper—more fishlike.

Jones confirms that smell definitely plays a part in attracting a fish. Earthworms

Pure Fishing (and its competitors) adds scents to their lures. In the past, liquid attractants were applied to the outside of the bait, but these tended to wash off when they were dunked in the water. Now, Pure Fishing also offers baits with scent inside, so that the scent exudes from within.

Different fish have different skills in detecting prey, and different preferences, too. Catfish, for example, smell like bloodhounds but have lousy vision. Bass see well and don’t rely on their sense of smell, while other fish rely on sound or the vibration in the water. For this reason, Jones and his fellow researchers have worked on creating specific lures for different species.

So even if earthworms wouldn’t be the first choice of any discerning fish, the humble earthworm retains its appeal to fishermen. There’s always room for bait that’s always available, seriously cheap, and that fish will lunge at, even if it would recoil at the thought of risking its life for a humble worm.

D
o you remember the grand old days of new-car smell that we chronicled in
Do Penguins Have Knees?
We wrote that the elements of that enticing aroma were paint, primer, plastic and vinyl materials in the car, whatever material constituted the carpeting, trim, and upholstery of the interior, and the adhesives that held them in place.

Little did we know that only a few years later, Cadillac, a division of General Motors, would be working on a way to assure that every car had a pleasing, uniform smell. Armed with the results of chemistry labs and focus group research, G.M.’s Cadillac division launched Nuance, an aroma designed to appeal to consumers on the fence about whether to spring the extra bucks for its luxury brand.

In a 2003
New York Times
story about how carmakers were engaging all the senses of consumers, G.M.’s James T. Embach remarks: “You pay the extra money for leather, you don’t want to smell like lighter fluid. You want it to smell like a Gucci bag.” The trend is accelerating, with Porsche now introducing its own proprietary scent.

Meanwhile, the American automobile manufacturers’ biggest rival has been concerned not so much with adding smells as it is with eliminating the ones already there. Recent research indicates that “volatile organic compounds,” the chemicals that leach from the plastics and vinyl found in cars, may be a serious health hazard, at least in the first six months or so of the automobile’s use. The big five Japanese automakers vow to reduce these emissions, even if the end result is a no-car smell.

A
lthough citing ambient temperature and visual cues as minor factors, all of the sources we cited in
What
Are
Hyenas Laughing At, Anyway?
agreed that mosquitoes were attracted to humans whose fragrance attracted them—sort of the insect equivalent to new-car smell. In early 2005, Rothamsted Research, in Hertfordshire, England, announced that its researchers found that bad smells can drive out good. Some folks are lucky enough to give off more than ten separate chemical compounds, “masking odors,” that either repel mosquitoes or prevent the critters from detecting the human smell that they ordinarily like so much.

This research confirms previous research on cattle. By taking individual cows with masking odors away from the herd, scientists found that mosquitoes would flock to the remaining cattle in greater numbers. We’ve known some humans who can clear a room of other humans with their odor, but mosquitoes and humans don’t seem to share the same taste in fragrances.

I
n
How Does Aspirin Find a Headache?
, we gently chided Polaroid print flappers for continuing a ritual that no longer helped hasten the print’s development. Since we wrote about the futility of print flapping, two important developments have occurred. The world was bombarded with Outkast’s “Hey Ya,” in which Andre 3000 intones the immortal lyrics: “Shake it, shake it like a Polaroid picture, shake it, shake it.”

And in a stern rebuke to Outkast’s exhortation, Polaroid has taken an official stance against gratuitous shaking. Its online support assures customers that a Polaroid print now dries behind a plastic window—the print itself is never exposed to the air. Indeed, the potential price for excessive flapping of prints is high, just as it can be for excessive shaking of one’s booty: “Rapid movement during development can cause portions of the film to separate prematurely, or can cause ‘blobs’ in the picture.”

The first sentence of our answer in
Why Don’t Cats Like To

Swim?
was: “Reformers are calling for weekend elections in order to increase voter turnout.” Twenty years later, reformers are still calling for weekend elections in order to increase voter turnout. But national elections, and the vast majority of state and local elections, remain on Tuesday.

When we were researching this Imponderable, none of the politicians or election officials we spoke to had the slightest idea why elections were held on Tuesday (we found the answer from a historian who specialized in U.S. elections). But evidently
Imponderables
isn’t required reading in political science classes. In 2000,
The Wall Street Journal
published a story by John Harwood, with the headline: “Old Election Secret Is Revealed: Why We Do It on a Tuesday—Tradition Is Tied to Harvests And Horse Carts: Pressure Is Rising for Some Change.” Although Harwood found plenty of local officials who wanted to change the system, either by allowing weekend voting (most European countries, for example, conduct elections on Sunday) or Internet voting over a period of time, Americans are resisting dumping Tuesday as voting day, even if they have no idea why. Harwood quotes Phil Kiesling, the former Oregon Secretary of State, who ushered in a vote-by-mail system that allows Oregonians to mail in ballots any day of the week during a two-week period:

F
inally, scientists have set their priorities right and are studying really important stuff. Neurologists at the University College of London hooked up volunteers to a magnetic resonance imaging machine to see whether they could detect a difference between when the human guinea pigs were tickled by a machine versus when they tickled their own palms.

As we detailed in
Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses?
, Freud argued that surprise was a crucial element in an effective tickle. Neurologists already knew that the cerebellum predicts what the effect of a particular movement will be on the rest of the body, assisting balance and locomotion. But the experiment indicated that the cerebellum is unsuccessful in warning the other parts of the brain when the stimulus is external. When the scientists controlled the timing, the machine successfully tickled the volunteers, even though the subjects anticipated it.

The subjects were also asked to activate a robot to tickle them. When they did, not only was there no tickling sensation, but several parts of the brain, including the cerebellum, acted differently from when the volunteers were surprised by the tickling. When the scientists built in a slight delay, so that the robot tickled the subjects later than the volunteers anticipated, the tickling sensation was back. So Freud’s “surprise theory” is confirmed. A tickle is only a tickle if the cerebellum can’t predict it. Sarah-Jane Blakemore, leader of the experiment, quipped: “So it is possible to tickle yourself, but only by using robots.”