Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy (38 page)

We took a poll, and 72 percent of BRI employees thought there were too many polls out there
.

• The winner in a 2009 British poll for “Best Celebrity Mom”: Britney Spears—who, only two years earlier, briefly lost custody of her children after a mental breakdown and had to undergo parental counseling.

• In 1995 two University of Wisconsin researchers published in the
Journal of Clinical Psychiatry
perhaps the most exhaustive research ever conducted on nosepicking. Their polling found that 66 percent of people pick their noses “to relieve discomfort or itchiness,” while only 2 percent did so “for entertainment.” Most common finger used: the index finger (65 percent).

• In a recent poll, 35 percent of parents admitted that that they play video games when their kids aren’t home.

• A European pollster asked 15,000 women from 20 European countries to rate European men on their lovemaking habits. German men were ranked as the worst lovers because they were “too smelly.” Second worst: the English, who were “lazy” lovers. (The best: Spanish men.)

• A 2010
New York Times/CBS
News poll found that 70 percent of Americans support “gay men and women” openly serving in the military. In the same poll, however, only 60 percent of respondents said they support “homosexuals” serving openly in the military.

• In 2009
Travel and Leisure
magazine asked 60,000 Americans to rate 30 cities in various categories. The city with the “least physically attractive” citizens: Philadelphia. It also ranked near the bottom on cleanliness, friendliness, and safety.

• According to a 2006
Washington Post
poll, 79 percent of Americans believe they are “above average” in appearance, 86 percent feel they are “above average” in intelligence, and 94 percent believe they are “above average” in honesty.

In 2006 Dong Changsheng of China pulled a 3,300-lb. car 32 feet…using his lower eyelids.

BOTOX YOUR ARMPITS

Cosmetic surgeons can do some amazing things to you these days. Here are a few real procedures you can try if you have a little defect—and a lot of money lying around
.

• Have you always wanted to look like an elf, or Mr. Spock? Consider
ear-pointing
surgery. A small slice at the top of the ear is cut out and the two sides of the incision are stitched together, creating a pointy ear. It’s considered such a minor procedure that most doctors farm it out to tattoo artists and ear-piercers.

• As humans age, more things deteriorate than just our physical appearance—even our voices age, growing drier, scratchier, and quieter with time. A
voice lift
reverses all that. An incision is made into the throat and the vocal cords are strengthened with either a synthetic implant, the patient’s own fat, or ground-up tissue from medical cadavers.

• Do you have an “innie” belly button, but would rather have an “outie,” or vice versa? There’s a surgery for that. Technically called
umbilicoplasty
, this procedure involves a surgeon manipulating the fat and skin in the belly button to make it protrude more or recede into the belly, whichever you prefer.

• Botox treatment, an injection of the botulinum toxin, causes mild, temporary paralysis and smoothing of whatever tissue it’s injected into, making it popular for erasing facial lines. Now there are
Botox armpit treatments
, which use the same technology to halt underarm perspiration for three to six months. The treatment can also be performed on overly sweaty feet.

• The
weight-loss tongue patch
is an increasingly popular procedure in California cosmetic-surgery clinics. A stamp-size plastic mesh patch is sewn onto the top of the tongue. Every time the patient eats solid food, the patch digs into the tongue, causing excruciating pain. Result: The patient switches to a liquid diet, which hastens weight loss. (The patch is removed after the target weight is reached.)

Southampton, Britain, banned residential barbed wire fences. (Burglars might injure themselves.)

6EQUJ5

It’s the stereotypical sci-fi movie scene: The nerdy astronomer is sitting in a poorly lit room, searching through data for some kind of evidence that we’re not alone in the universe. Suddenly, among all of the bleeps and blips and printouts, something strange catches his attention…something that looks like nothing he’s ever seen before
.

T
HE “WOW!” SIGNAL
That scene played out in real life on the morning of August 19, 1977. Jerry Ehman, an astronomer working at the “Big Ear” radio telescope on the outskirts of Delaware, Ohio, was going over the results of the telescope’s most recent survey of the night sky. His computer had spewed out pages and pages of numbers representing everything the telescope had detected. As Ehman was scanning the records from the night of August 15, a series of six numbers and letters stopped him in his tracks: “6EQUJ5.” What did they mean? In the language of radio telescopes, they represented an unusually strong burst of radio waves that originated in the constellation Sagittarius. Unable to explain what might have caused the reading, Ehman simply circled that part of the computer printout. Next to it, he wrote: “Wow!”

It was only later, as astronomers began to eliminate all other possibilities, that many became convinced that the “Wow!” signal was something more than a flash in space. Perhaps
much
more.

ALL EARS

The hunt for extraterrestrial life was already well under way before that night in 1977, and it’s still going strong today, led largely by a nonprofit organization called SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). SETI’s mission is to sanely conduct the search for “little green men”—a pursuit that some detractors claim is insane. SETI’s astronomers are generally skeptical of UFO sightings; most think it’s improbable that aliens have already visited Earth. SETI maintains that the universe is a very big place, so if we’re going to find life on other worlds, we’ll probably have to use powerful radio telescopes that can detect signals from a faraway, inhabited planet.

A Brazilian company created a Doggie Love sex doll for “lonely” pets
.

Here’s how the thinking goes: If you were a member of an alien race living on a planet across the galaxy, and you pointed a regular optical telescope at our solar system, it would look like any other medium-sized star. However, if you pointed a
radio
telescope in our direction, it would be immediately apparent that one of the planets had life on it. Why? Because our radio and television signals escape our atmosphere every day and fly off into space. Theoretically, aliens could be watching
Desperate Housewives
right now.

SETI has access to some of the most powerful radio telescopes in the world—and in 1977, the Big Ear was one of the biggest. But it was designed to be largely automated (astronomers have better things to do than listen to radio static all day), recording the results of its observations on rolls of printer paper. And what Big Ear detected that day was a very intense radio signal. It had no way of converting that signal into sound or images; the only information it had was that small group of numbers and letters.

OFF THE CHARTS

Looking at Ehman’s printout above, the numbers represent the “brightness,” or strength, of a signal that the radio telescope picks up—with 1 standing for a “dim” signal and 9 standing for a very “bright” one. In the unlikely event that the signal detected is stronger than a 9, the printout uses letters, with “A” being brighter than 9 and “Z” being the brightest possible source the observatory could record. So a signal that went as high as “U” naturally caught Ehman’s attention. In the 35 years that the Big Ear was in operation, this was the only time it detected a radio signal that powerful.

North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung died in 1994. He retains the title “Eternal President.”

It wasn’t just the power of the signal that caught Ehman’s attention; it was the way it rose and fell over the three minutes it was detected. The Big Ear was a massive telescope and couldn’t turn the way a normal telescope could to follow the stars across the sky; it could only sit there as stars came and went past its field of vision. So, given the Earth’s rotational speed, it could observe any point in the sky for only a few minutes as that point passed overhead. Any signal it detected would be expected to show up faintly, rise to its highest point, and then fall back down again. This is precisely what the “Wow!” signal did: It rose from 6 to E to U and back down to 5 again in exactly three minutes. This was a strong, steady signal.

THEORIES ABOUND

Because no known object in the night sky should be emitting a radio signal that strong, astronomers crunching the data came up with several perfectly normal (and a few abnormal) explanations:

•
Terrestrial sources:
It’s possible that an ordinary local signal, like a television or radio broadcast, somehow got detected by the sensitive antennas of the Big Ear. Scientists consider this explanation unlikely; it’s illegal to broadcast radio waves of the strength detected—and even if someone did break the law, the direction of the signal made it almost certain that the source was in space.

•
“Extraterrestrial terrestrial” sources:
Some piece of radio transmission from the Earth may have hit a reflective surface in space (a satellite, a piece of space junk, or a meteor) that bounced the signal back to the Big Ear. The odds of this happening are…well, astronomical, but some skeptics are more comfortable with this explanation than some of the alternatives.

•
Scintillation:
Light from space
scintillates
as it moves through our atmosphere. This is a fancy way of saying it gets brighter and dimmer. (It’s what makes stars appear to twinkle.) Radio waves do something similar, and the Big Ear telescope may have detected an unusually powerful scintillation of a weak radio source in space—a quasar, for instance.

•
Defective antenna:
It’s also possible that the Big Ear was just malfunctioning. Radio telescopes are large, complicated machines, and any number of things can go wrong. But the Big Ear’s performance on that night has been checked and rechecked, and no problem has ever been found.

A FL dentist calls his office “Starbase Dental,” and practices dentistry wearing his
Star Trek
uniform
.

•
Something new:
Since no known object in the universe emits such strong radio waves, and no (legal) device on Earth is even capable of it, it’s possible that the signal came from some
unknown
object in deep space—perhaps some undiscovered kind of star…or something even stranger.