This is Improbable Too Read online

  Haseltine and Sileo credit the idea – substituting uranium for steel – to metallurgist Carl A. Zapffe of Baltimore. Zapffe was no slouch about steel; witness his 1948 study: ‘Evaluation of Pickling Inhibitors from the Standpoint of Hydrogen Embrittlement: Acid Pickling of Stainless Steel’. Zapffe also wrote a book disputing Einstein’s theory of special relativity, but that is a separate matter.

  Haseltine and Sileo listed what they call the ‘attractive characteristics’ of depleted uranium as a raw material for making birdshot. ‘In its pure form’, they wrote, ‘it is denser than lead and, in alloys, might be made to produce shot patterns and velocities attractive to hunters and within the effective range for waterfowl. Depleted uranium can be alloyed with many other metals and its softness and corrosiveness can be altered over a wide range.’

  But nothing is perfect. ‘Negative aspects for potential uranium shot include pyrophoricity [proneness to spontaneously burst into flames] problems with pure depleted uranium, which can be altered by alloying, and the expense of separating depleted uranium from other nuclear waste products.’

  Their main argument was that uranium may not be very poisonous even to a duck that, of its own accord, swallows some in pellet form. That is what Haseltine and Sileo sought to verify.

  They fed forty ducks a diet of commercial duck mash salted with powdered depleted uranium. None of the ducks died of it, or got sick, or even lost weight. Moreover, the researchers reported, the ducks ‘were in fair to excellent flesh’ when slaughtered. And so they enthused that ‘further examination of this metal as a substitute for lead in shot is justified.’ However, no one has yet followed up on this in a big way for hunting anything other than people.

  Haseltine, Susan D., and Louis Sileo (1983). ‘Response of American Black Ducks to Dietary Uranium: A Proposed Substitute for Lead Shot’. Journal of Wildlife Management 47 (4): 1124–9.

  Zapffe, Carl A., and M. Eleanor Haslem (1948). ‘Evaluation of Pickling Inhibitors from the Standpoint of Hydrogen Embrittlement: Acid Pickling of Stainless Steel’, Wire and Wire Products 23 (10): 933–9.

  Ricker III, Harry H. (2006). ‘Dr. Carl Andrew Zapffe: A “Cod” Proposes a “Flying Interferometer”’. General Science Journal, 15 November, http://www.gsjournal.net/old/science/ricker24.pdf.

  — (2007). ‘An Introduction to Dr. Carl A. Zapffe’s Classic Paper: A Reminder on E=mc2’. General Science Journal, 3 March, http://gsjournal.net/Science-Journals/Research%20Papers-Relativity%20Theory/Download/866.

  Zapffe, Carl A. (1982). A Reminder on E=mc2, m=mo(1-v2/c2)-1/2, & N=Noe-t’/gt. n.a.: privately published.

  —. (1985). ‘Exodus of Einstein’s Special Theory in Seven Simple Steps’. The Toth-Maatian Review 3 (4): 1531–5.

  May we recommend

  ‘Carbon Monoxide: To Boldly Go Where NO Has Gone Before’

  by Stefan W. Ryter, Danielle Morse and Augustine M.K. Choi (published in Science STKE, 2004)

  A bear to cross

  When a big bear approaches, some people choose to quietly stroll away. To give them an extra measure of safety, Anthony Victor Saunders and Adam Warwick Bell invented what they call a ‘Pop-up Device for Deterring an Attacking Animal such as a Bear’.

  Saunders, a London-based mountain climber, and Bell, a California patent attorney, applied for a patent in 2003, but later abandoned it. They would equip hikers with, essentially, an inflatable doll ‘meant to scare away an attacking or aggressive animal such as a bear’. The frightful balloon could also be used against ‘elk, moose, mountain lions, buffalo, hippopotamus, rhino, elephant, boar’. They explain that it ‘works on the principle of maximizing the apparent size and ferocity of the human, intimidating the bear’.

  ‌Events leading to the use of the pop-up device

  In the patent application, Saunders and Bell refined their thoughts. Here’s how they decided the device must deploy quickly: ‘The figure should be fully inflated within less than one minute, or within less than 30 seconds, or preferably within less than 10 seconds, or most preferably five seconds.’ The device can be ‘incorporated into clothing or luggage [or] into the hilt of a walking-stick’ and activated ‘by pulling a cord. The figure would inflate and pop up out of the back-pack, presenting the attacking bear with a huge and frightening opponent’.

  The bear then gets an escalating series of surprises, beginning with ‘one or more explosive “bangs”, a fog-horn, or a loud roaring or screaming sound’. The noise is augmented with smells. ‘The musky odour of a bear helps convince the attacking bear that he is being faced with a powerful, aggressive and musky opponent.’ Then would come ‘an odorous or noxious gas or liquid’.

  There’s also smoke: ‘from a typical “smoke-bomb” type of device’.

  Some bears are not easily deterred. So ‘the deployment of the device may be accompanied by the launching of projectiles. [This] would further confuse, scare and disorientate the bear. Such projectiles could be launched from a mortar or mortar-type device’.

  The whole thing, they say, is ‘detachable and may be left between human and bear as the human retreats’.

  Inventors Saunders and Bell are not the only pioneering individuals to consider novel methods for greeting bears. In this era of ‘big science’, there are still people who pursue thoughtful, original research, unencumbered by official scientific credentials, academic bureaucracies or government funding. Troy Hurtubise is a fine example of the breed.

  At age twenty, out alone panning for gold in the Canadian wilderness, Hurtubise had an encounter of some sort with a grizzly bear. He has devoted the rest of his life to creating a grizzly-bear-proof suit of armour in which he could safely go and commune with that bear. The suit’s basic design was influenced by the powerful humanoid-policeman-robot-from-the-future title character in Robocop, a film Hurtubise happened to see shortly before he began his intensive research and development work.

  Hurtubise is a pure example of the lone inventor, in the tradition of James Watt, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. Regarded by some as a half-genius, by others as a half-crackpot, he has unsurpassed persistence and imagination. He also is very careful. The proof that he is very careful is that he is still alive.

  A grizzly bear is tremendously, ferociously powerful. Hurtubise realized that he would be wise to test his suit under controlled conditions prior to giving it the ultimate test. He spent seven years, and by his estimate $150,000 Canadian, subjecting the suit to every large, sudden force he could devise. Volunteers have pushed him off cliffs, rammed him with trucks travelling forty kilometres per hour, and assaulted him with logs, arrows and pickaxes. For almost all of the testing, Hurtubise was locked inside the bulky suit, despite being severely claustrophobic.

  The suit is a technical wonder, especially when one realizes that Hurtubise had to assemble it mostly from scrounged materials. Among the components:

  titanium plates

  a fireproof rubber exterior

  joints made of chain mail

  a Tek plastic inner shell

  an inner layer of air bags

  nearly a mile of duct tape

  For conceiving, building and personally testing the suit, and for keeping it and himself intact the whole while, Troy Hurtubise was awarded the 1998 Ig Nobel Prize in the field of safety engineering.

  Hurtubise has continued to do advanced R&D work. He has had unexpected adventures involving, among other things, NASA, the National Hockey League, an invention to separate oil from sand, a tapped phone, a mysterious nocturnal break-in, getting kicked in the crotch on television by comedian Roseanne Barr, a visit from Al Qaeda hijackers and an encounter in a locked room with two Kodiak bears.

  He also created a book in which he tells secrets about the most advanced version of his suit, the fruit of fifteen mostly unfunded years of fevered research and development. Here’s a passage that brings together some of the main themes:

  Electronically speaking, the M-7 was right out of a movie. It sported an onboard viewing screen, an onb
oard computer built into the thigh cavity, a bite-bar on the right forearm, a five-way voice-activated radio system and an electronic temperature monitor. For protection against the grizzly’s claws and teeth, the M-7 boasted an entire exoskeleton made up of my newly developed … blunt trauma foam to dissipate the bear’s deadly power. Testing on the M-7 [was] short and sweet. A 30-ton front-end loader in fourth gear smashed me through a non-mortared brick wall and I suffered not a bruise. The world watched the test on CNN, and then came the sheer stupidity that nearly cost me my life, the fire test. My bear research suits were never designed for fire.

  Bear Man: The Troy Hurtubise Saga is a magnum opus, the tersely told summary of the man’s yearnings, frustrations, triumphs and philosophy. The book includes many of Hurtubise’s previous writings on these subjects, augmented with a powerful-as-a-riled-up-grizzly collection of previously private photos, philosophy, intellectualizing and emoting.

  He shares with us a letter from Her Majesty the Queen, to whom he had sent some lightly fictionalized writings about his personal knowledge of angels. ‘This great lady of ladies found the time to read my novellas and to respond to me in a letter through her Lady in waiting’, he writes. ‘I was so overwhelmed by Her Majesty’s kindness that I dedicated the third novella from the series, The Canadians, in her honour … As for her son, Prince Charles, his letter to me was stamped confidential.’

  Bear Man: The Troy Hurtubise Saga makes a lovely gift for any young girl or boy who might some day have to decide unexpectedly whether to devote a lifetime to inventing, testing and informing the world about new ways to protect themselves against grizzly bears while doing no harm to the animals, all the while struggling to lead a good life and set a fine example for the youth both of today and of the future.

  Hurtubise’s basic bear-suit research, which brought him the fame and respect he now enjoys, is best seen in the documentary Project Grizzly, produced by the National Film Board of Canada in 1996. You can watch it online at www.nfb.ca/film/project_grizzly.

  Bell, Adam Warwick, and Anthony Victor Saunders (2005). ‘Pop-up Device for Deterring an Attacking Animal such as a Bear’. US patent no. 2005/0028720, 10 February.

  Hurtubise, Troy (2011). Bear Man: The Troy Hurtubise Saga. Westbrook, ME: Raven House Publishing.

  The post-mortem dinosaur kerblam

  Seagoing dinosaurs did not explode nearly as often as scientists believed, according to a study called ‘Float, Explode or Sink: Postmortem Fate of Lung-breathing Marine Vertebrates’. The authors, an all-star team of palaeontologists, pathologists and forensic anthropologists from six institutions in Switzerland and Germany, deflated a hypothesis that had for years lain basking in the intellectual shade. They were addressing the underlying question: why are some dino skeletons scattered across an expanse of sea floor, while others remain fairly intact?

  The current adventure started with the discovery of an ichthyosaur skeleton, embedded in rock, in northern Switzerland. This skeleton was oriented weirdly, compared with most such fossils: aligned vertically, with its head down, its feet up.

  Someone hypothesized that ‘an explosive release of sewer gas’ had ‘propelled the skull into the sediment’. The subsequent research, resulting in the ‘Float, Explode …’ paper, tried to figure out whether that was at all likely.

  In so doing, the scientists confronted an idea proposed in 1976 by a palaeontologist named Keller. Keller, noting that beached whales fester in sunlight until putrefaction gases bloat and finally burst them, suggested that sunken sea animal carcasses also gassify and go kerblam. The Swiss/German study summarizes Keller’s idea as follows: ‘It was assumed that carcasses which lie on the sea-floor might have exploded or internal organs and bones erupted, and that in so doing, bones as well as foetuses were ejected and ribs were fractured.’

  The team scoured reams of research about what happens to dead dolphins, porpoises, whales, seals, turtles and other sea animals. They say that unless such bodies get stranded on a beach, there’s little evidence and little reason to expect that they explode.

  The team presented an early version of their debunkment in 2004 in St Petersburg, Russia, at the Fifth Congress of the Baltic Medico-Legal Association. They called their lecture ‘Did the Ichthyosaurs Explode? A Forensic-medical Contribution to the Taphonomy of Ichthyosaurs’.

  Taphonomy, a word that misleadingly suggests both telephones and tap-dancing, is in fact the study of how living things rot and decay. TV crime-scene forensics series present taphonomic adventures week after week, teasing out the likely when, where and how of one or another winsome corpse. This is better. Real-life scientists – Achim Reisdorf, Roman Bux, Daniel Wyler, Mark Benecke and colleagues – had the opportunity to fawn over a corpse way more glamorous than the TV crime drama standard: a sea-monstrous dinosaur.

  This is their own take on what actually happened in the mysterious case of the vertical victim: ‘The ichthyosaur sank headfirst into the seafloor because of its centre of gravity, as anatomically similar, comparably preserved specimens suggest. The skull penetrated into the soupy to soft substrate until the fins touched the seafloor.’

  A few people disagree. Creation magazine made a video explaining that no scientist can explain the existence of that upside-down dinosaur – that it deals ‘a lethal body blow’ to the theory of evolution. Behold their creative reasoning at http://creation.com/creation-magazine-live-episode-53.

  Reisdorf, Achim G., Roman Bux, Daniel Wyler, Mark Benecke, Christian Klug, Michael W. Maisch, Peter Fornaro and Andreas Wetzel (2012). ‘Float, Explode or Sink: Postmortem Fate of Lung-breathing Marine Vertebrates’. Palaeobiodiversity and Palaeoenvironments 92 (1): 67–81.

  Keller, T. (1976). ‘Magen- und Darminhalte von Ichthyosauriern des Süddeutschen Posidonienschiefers’. Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie Monatshefte 5: 266–83.

  Bux, R., Reisdorf, A., and Ramsthaler, F. (2004). ‘Did the Ichthyosaurs Explode? A Forensic-medical Contribution to the Taphonomy of Ichthyosaurs’. Proceedings of the Fifth Congress of the Baltic Medico-Legal Association, St Petersburg, Russia, 6–9 October, p. 69.

  Wetzel, Andreas, and Achim G. Reisdorf (2007). ‘Ichnofabrics Elucidate the Accumulation History of a Condensed Interval Containing a Vertically Emplaced Ichthyosaur Skull’. In Bromley, Richard Granville (ed.). Sediment–Organism Interactions: A Multifaceted Ichnology. Tulsa, Ok.: SEPM (Society for Sedimentary Geology), special publication no. 88, pp. 241–51.

  An improbable innovation

  ‘A Safety Device for Use in Making a Landing from an Aeroplane or Other Vehicle of the Air’

  a/k/a a parachuteless emergency glider, by Hermann W. Williams (US patent no. 1,799,664, granted 1931)

  May we recommend

  ‘Parachute Use to Prevent Death and Major Trauma Related to Gravitational Challenge: SystemATic Review of Randomised Controlled Trials’.

  by G.C.S. Smith and J.P. Pell (published in British Medical Journal, 2003)

  ‘Parachuting for Charity: Is It Worth the Money? A 5-Year Audit of Parachute Injuries in Tayside and the Cost to the NHS’

  by C.T. Lee, P. Williams, and W.A. Hadden (published in Injury, 1999)

  Send in the clown insurers

  Clown insurance is for clowns, not for persons potentially afflicted by them. Insurance companies offer it to clowns because clowns – no matter what you may thoughtlessly think of them – are people, and bad things can happen to anyone. Consider this story, shared by ‘Posadaclown’ on a popular online clowning forum in 2005:

  Just had the worst night of my clowning career last night. Took it up seriously a couple of years ago, joined a local troupe who would perform around my locality (Northumberland), and things were going quite well … inbetween the goat shearing and terrier racing, when I managed to spin a few plates, do a bit of slapstick incorporating a farmers daughter and managed to get some great laughs for a comedy routine where I made a rabbit ‘disappear’ before running down my trouser leg and away! Things were g
oing really well until last night when I did a performance at a local club. My family were all there, and my gorgeous new wife, who herself likes to don the red nose and baggy trousers from time to time. Anyway, I did a stunt which involved jumping off a trampoline onto a skateboard, I was supposed to shoot offstage but ended up in the front row, where I managed to land right on top of the mayor’s wife, breaking her leg. The poor woman was in agony and a few in the crowd took exception and beat me quite badly.

  Clown insurance exists, as a distinct product category, thanks to the mathematical discipline called risk assessment. Industry researchers calculate that every year enough bad things happen to enough clowns to reliably yield a profit. Clowns, as a group, perform a benefit/cost calculation; that’s why, year after year, they spend money to defend against life’s practical jokes.

  The UK boasts several suppliers of insurance for clowns. Blackfriars Insurance Brokers (www.blackfriarsgroup.co.uk/business/insuranceforclowns.html), for one, offers public liability clown insurance of up to £5 million cover. Their website boasts, not unkindly, of ‘products to meet the business and personal insurance needs of clowns’. Blackfriars also offers insurance for those who hire clowns: ‘Clowns employers liability insurance protects the policyholder in respect of your legal liability for personal injury or illness suffered by employees during the course of their employment’.

  Foreign clowns, too, can buy clown insurance. Pretty much any clown, anywhere, can join the World Clown Association (worldclown.com). The association, based in the US, offers its members liability insurance ‘with coverage of $1,000,000 per occurrence/$2,000,000 aggregate per event’.