RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 117, 11 February 1936, Page 8

RANDOM NOTES

Sidelights on Current

Events

(By Kickshaws.)

Sian proposes but the week-end disposes.

“Something abolished, something done, has earned a night’s repose."— Mr. Semple at bed-time.

Under the new bread-fixing scheme the bakers’ employees will get more money. They knead the doughy

We received a chain-letter the other day. It was reported recently lu the news that the German authorities had made chain letters illegal. Just what methods they intended to take to check the sending of anonymous chain letters was not stated. Anyway one result will be that the postal authorities win lose a handsome income in the sale of postage stamps. If chain letters serve no other purpose they offer a ready method of selling stamps. Indeed if chain letters did not usually die shortly after birth there would be no stamps left in the world in any country whatsoever. If all the stamp printing machines worked at full speed, day and night, not even then could the demand for stamps be satisfied. Just think of the ridiculous mathematics of chain letters. Suppose that somebody, who receives a chain letter assumes that it. has been sent already to nine friends by each of the persons named in the letter. It may be a shock, but that particular letter would therefore have been sent already to 446,558,335,611,459,141,367,807,641 persons. As the population of the whole world is only 2,000,000,000, each one of us would have spent roughly 200,000,000,900,000 pennies on sending that one letter to our friends.

The mathematics of chain letters makes it obvious that very few people trouble with them, and the decision to make them illegal in Germany seems to have been unnecessary. These snowball letters have cropped up repeatedly for many years. Readers may perhaps remember one during the Great War that contained a prayer for peace. It was eventually officially condemned by the Pope as a superstition. Another chain letter was supposed to have been started by an American officer; it was Intended that it should go three times round the world. Usually it went that number of times into’the waste paper basket. Despite the fact that chain letters are usually honoured in the breach rather than in the observance, it was estimated at one time that the British Post Office made a steady £lOOO a week out of the sale of stamps for such letters. There are, it seems, people who cannot bear to break the chain. To ignore a chain preys upon their mind to such an extent that they commit suicide or go into a decline. Indeed, it is this power of superstition working on the herd instinct that has kept those idiotic letters circulating. '

There ate some optimists who think that we have, wrested all the secrets of the air from Nature. Let those who think that watch an albatross in flight. Man has yet to learn how to fly against the ocean winds without using any power at all except that of the wind itself. Gliding has done something to teach us that there are ipany more secrets of the air than we imagined. But no glider can compete with an albatross. Perhaps some gliding expert would care to glide across Wellington harbour in the teeth of a southerly. Yet that feat is done by many gulls without the flap of a wing. Perhaps one day we shall build an aeroplane that can alight on the top of a swaying mast, or its equivalent. Let us study the ways of vultures and hawks, which can ascend to great heights without using any power at all except from outside sources. In practically still air a vulture can launch itself from a tree top and rise to several thousand feet without a flutter of a feather or a wing. There is much for us to learn in the air. The marvel is that despite our ignorance our brute force machines arc sb reliable.

One has only to examine the structure of a bird to realise what a hopeless task it would be for a man to expect to fly under his own power. All manner of adaptations of the skeleton have had to be made to enable a bird to attain sufficient lightness to be able to fly. Not only are the bones of a bird hollow, but in some cases they contain special air sacs connected with the lungs. Built on a hollow girder principle, instead of the solid pillar'principle of a man, the skeleton of a bird contains special provision for attaching the enormously powerful muscles required for flight. This is done without any corresponding increase of weight. In the albatross, for example, every bone is pneumatic and the breast bone is shaped in such a way that the flying muscles are securely fastened, without impeding the action of the heart or lungs. To attain this end many of the bones found individually in man have been fused together in a bird so that the required strength may be obtained. Fused vertebrae, for instance, serve as a firm fulcrum for the down stroke of the wing.

"Am I justified in asserting that ‘force of pull’ or ‘pulling force’ is a natural impossibility, and its apparently obvious existence is merely a figment of imagination?” says a reader whose signature cannot be read. “An engine pushes, not pulls a train. The force of gravitation is likewise a natural impossibility. There is only one physical force in the universe. That Is ‘push or pressure.’” [Engineers and mathematicians make a distinction between a pushing force and a pulling force. Indeed, if the two were not allowed for in the erection of a building, queer things would happen. You can, for example, pull with a chain, but it would be a waste of time to try to use a chain to push a thing. The difference between a pull and a push Is one of tension and compression, The result is the same in many cases, whether a thing is pulled or pushed. If, however, you push a railway train round a curve, the carriages tend to take up a more circular position, but if you pull the carriages round a curve they tend to take up a straight line. The railway line in each case resists this tendency. Nobody knows the mechanism that causes the attraction of gravity. It may be a closing in of lines of force behind the body, in which case it would be a pushing force. Nevertheless, no figment of the imagination is involved when a dentist pulls out a tooth; he does not push it out.]