ENCYCLOPEDIA TROPICANA A REFERENCE BOOK FOR THE MODERN WORLD, VOLUME I

Miami Herald, The (FL)
May 4, 1986
Author: JOEL ACHENBACH Herald Staff Writer

The TV is on the blink. Ghosts of professional wrestlers are lurching across the Dynasty set. You play with the dials, look behind the set, trace the wires and cables from the box to the wall, lips moving as you think. But you're only pretending to discern the pattern. In your heart you know the truth: You live on the brink of the third millennium yet couldn't teach a thing to a caveman. No one expects you to be able to fix the TV set. That's for repairmen. Experts. But the shameful fact is, you don't really even know what a TV is. The basic principles elude you. You haven't a clue as to what this thing is that you stare at every day. You are glad the circuitry is hidden. You are happy to be out of touch. You are a Modern Person.

We've been thinking about your problem. A recent survey by Northern Illinois University showed 85 percent of the public to be "technologically illiterate." Only one person out of five knew how a telephone works. Four out of 10 thought rocket launchings caused major changes in the weather. We decided to do our own survey. We made up a quiz. We called some famous people in South Florida. First, the questions:

1. How does a Thermos work?

2. Why is the sky blue?

3. What makes a refrigerator cold?

4. We know things run on batteries, but what do batteries run on?

5. What are nuclear weapons?

The best answers came from a coroner. Joe Davis, Chief Medical Examiner for Dade County, displayed a macropaedic grasp of technology. To No. 3 he said, without pausing, "A refrigerator is kept cold by the evaporation of a compressed gas, Freon. Or, in the old days, they used ammonia, and also sulfur dioxide. When the pressure is released, the gas absorbs heat energy. The change in physical state from liquid to gaseous form absorbs heat through the walls of the coils in which the expansion is taking place. Then it goes back into the compressor, and electrical energy is used to compress that gas back down . . . "

And so on. He was terrifying.

Less comprehensive, but still a solid 5 for 5, were Miami Mayor Xavier Suarez and Florida Atlantic University President Helen Popovich, the latter of whom single-handedly prevented this from being a grim, grim day for the ladies.

Grand Prix promoter Ralph Sanchez eventually figured out that the blueness of the sky is related to the spectrum, but he first offered a classic piece of misinformation: "It could be a reflection from the ocean."

Super-lawyer Roy Black was surprisingly clueless. Asked about the sky, the 41-year-old defense attorney seized on a simple, unfathomable concept and couldn't let go: "It's just because of the perspective, that it's blue. Because of the perspective."

Then there was Mollie Wilmot, the Palm Beach socialite of tanker-in-the-backyard fame. Before answering questions she warned, "I'm not electronically inclined. Believe it or not I don't even know how to drive a car. When I was 17 I went to driving school, and after 10 lessons the driving instructor told me, 'Don't drive.' I never drove after that."

Mollie's game explanation of the refrigerator: "You plug the refrigerator in, and it makes a noise, and there's a motor, which apparently makes the noise, and doesn't it make the coils become cold, and therefore makes the interior of the refrigerator cold?"

Historical preservationist Barbara Capitman gave this account of battery power: "It's a material that leaks out of the battery, some kind of chemical, that has a positive association with a piece of lead."

The prize for novel thought would have to go to Dade Commissioner Beverly Phillips. "The sky," she said, "isn't blue. There's something between us and the atmosphere that makes it look blue."

And batteries, Bev? What makes them go?

"That black stuff that's in 'em."

Despite the clear evidence that most people, including the leaders of our community, don't have the slightest grip on what is happening around them, there was still a major argument against producing an Encyclopaedia Tropicana: They don't care. So why tell 'em? Isn't it permissible to be technologically stupid? Didn't someone once say that ignorance is bliss?

Bliss, we would answer in our most serious voice, is for late nights and the afterlife, if you're lucky. Ignorance is dangerous. The failure to grasp the working of the telephone corresponds to an ignorance of the more complex and politically significant technologies of our time--genetic engineering, nuclear weapons, Star Wars laser shields. Fools make for a bad democracy. Power retreats to the masters of technique, to the manipulators of truth, to the invisible few with their private understanding and their private agenda of influence and profit.

Almost without exception the great discoveries of human history have been acts of tremendous courage, rebellions against conventional wisdom, statements of heresy. The Established Powers killed Socrates, rebuked Copernicus, exiled Galileo, hounded Darwin. People died for knowledge that enriches us all. We repay the debt by abdicating all responsibility for the comprehension of ordinary things. If this stupefaction weren't so general it would be an outrage.

That's just how we feel. So we had to ask ourselves: If we don't explain to Herald readers the facts of modern life . . . who will? Do we want them to just hear about it on the street? In alleys or something? Do we want to be responsible when our once-reputable readers wind up in the seedy back rooms of taverns, flipping through black-and-white diagrams of the insides of a Thermos? No, it would be too ugly. Read this, read it in public, with pride. Walk tall. Get with it. Do it for Socrates.

AIR

Air is made up of tiny particles, called molecules, which are of different makes and models, with the most common, the Ford Escort of molecules, being "nitrogen." There also is a fair amount of "oxygen," plus some "carbon dioxide," and tiny traces of other gases, like "argon," "xenon" and, particularly in the Art Deco district, "neon." Scientists have recently become worried about the ingredients of the air. The burning of coal and oil causes an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a problem made worse by clear-cutting in the huge Amazon jungle, where vegetation cranks out a lot of oxygen. If the carbon dioxide gets too high, the atmosphere will begin to capture more of the sun's heat, and warm up, and melt the polar ice caps, and ruin crops, and plummet the planet into a period of turmoil and decay. But probably not in your lifetime.

AIRPLANE

Ever notice how a fast runner seems to glide over the ground, barely touching it, while a big plodding jogger seems to make the ground shake? Air acts the same way. The faster it is moving, the less pressure it exerts. Remember that. It will be important later.

Now we've got a plane knifing through the air. Air molecules are just standing there, minding their own business, chatting with their neighbors, when suddenly they are sliced apart by this wing. Air molecules react in a strange way when this happens. They race desperately along the top and bottom of the wing, looking for each other.

The top of the wing is curved; the bottom is straight. So the air at the top has a longer distance to travel than the air on the bottom. But, driven by some primal atmospheric instinct (actually, by a nearly incomprehensible law of fluid dynamics) they arrive at the same time. How did they do this? The air on the top of the wing moved faster than the air at the bottom!

Faster air above the wing, slower air below the wing. That means there is more pressure under the wing than above it, and the wing rises, carrying the plane with it.

BATTERY

The battery works for the same reason that fillings hurt when you bite into aluminum foil. (see FILLINGS, why they hurt . . . )

BLUE, WHY SKY IS

You must first understand what "blue" is. Blue is a color, one which, like pornography, defies easy definition, though we sure know it when we see it. Scientists can measure blue. It is what "light" looks like when it is coming at us in a particular wavelength (OK, you nerds, it's 480 nanometers). Wavelength, we rush to say, is not a word to be feared. It is not even in the same league as, for example, Stakhanovism (see, Names to Impress Your Date). A wavelength is just what it sounds like. A wave. Of a certain length. Blue has shorter wavelengths, red longer. The sunlight, a mixture of lights of all sorts of wavelengths, comes bounding into the clear sky from deep space. It hits the air molecules and starts ricocheting all over the place. With every skip, every bounce, many of the longer light waves--red--get soaked up by the molecules. But the blue keeps bouncing around. (This is a function of the shape and shimmy of air molecules.) By the time the light zigzags into our eyes, it's mostly blue.

This is when dust comes into the picture. Dust has a different shape from air molecules, a different shimmy. It soaks up the blue light. The less dust in the sky, the bluer it is. At dawn and dusk the sunlight comes in at a low angle, and must wade through gobs and gobs of dust hovering close to the Earth. So the sky turns orange, and then red.

BOMB, HYDROGEN--how to build.

We are going to tell you the secret of the hydrogen bomb. The secret is a substance as familiar as your morning cup of coffee.

Now keep all this stuff to yourself: Inside a hydrogen bomb is an old-fashioned atom bomb that looks just like a soccer ball. It's the trigger. That's how mean hydrogen bombs are. They use atom bombs just to get them started. Below the atom bomb is a carrot-shaped container of nuclear fuel- -various types of hydrogen atoms. The theory is this: Blow up the soccer ball, and the pressure will cause the carrot to compress, fusing the hydrogen atoms together. This simulates the events in the center of the sun. As two hydrogen atoms become one helium atom, they lose some of their weight. The lost weight, or mass, is converted to pure energy. KABLAMM!

The big problem is convincing the atomic bomb blast to squeeze the hydrogen evenly, the way you would crush a beer can, rather than just knock the whole contraption to kingdom come. The answer is to build the bomb like a Thermos (see, THERMOS) with "radiation reflectors" on the inside. A Thermos uses shiny glass, a hydrogen bomb uses super-thin sheets of Uranium-238, a metal. When the soccer ball explodes, there is a period of one millionth of a second, before the fireball can even begin to move, when invisible gamma rays and X-rays surge outward at the speed of light, bounce off the reflective casing, and pile-drive back into the carrot of hydrogen. The atoms fuse. And you get more bang for your buck. Scientists needed something that would hold the carrot in place during the rocky ride from silo to target. But it had to be a special something: Strong, yet totally unable to slow down or reflect the pressure from the atom bomb explosion. They looked and looked for the right material. Finally they got it: Styrofoam.

A one-megaton bomb, big enough to thoroughly flatten Miami, would be the size of a suitcase. It would fit under your bed.

CAMERA, POLAROID

Light peeks through the shutter, hits the film. The film is like plywood. It has layers, each coated with silver bromide. The film is designed so that the top layer reacts to blue light. The next reacts to yellow. The next, red. As the sheet of film is ejected, the camera douses it with dyes. Red dye sticks to the part of the film that reacted to the red light. Same with the blue and yellow. When the dyes soak through to the bottom layer--the layer that you will put in your photo album--blue, red and yellow dye is represented in approximately the same intensity and the same place within the picture frame as the light from the original image. We stress "approximately."

CHIP, SILICON

The breakthrough that made small, efficient computers possible.

Computers are basically machines that utilize the great speed of electricity to make millions of decisions in a matter of seconds. Computers see no grays: Every problem is reduced to a series of yes-no decisions indicated by the turning on, or off, of a current. (Question: Is the number seven a prime number? Computer's methodology: Is it evenly divisible by two? No. By three? No. By four? No. By five? No. By six? No. Answer: Yes, it is a prime number.)

This process, though fast, requires astoundingly elaborate circuitry, resembling a bafflingly complex street map, miles and miles of printed circuits forking off in all sorts of directions, wherever the options and alternatives take it. Original computers did this with wires and solder, and all of the circuitry required them to be the size of a 7-Eleven.

The silicon chip is a fingernail-sized slab which can be mass-produced and upon which tens of thousands of tiny, discrete circuits can be etched.

CLOCKS, DASHBOARD--How they work

They don't.

CORK, HOW IT GETS INTO CHAMPAGNE BOTTLES

The mushroom-shaped cork is steam-heated until it is very spongy, and then it is crammed into the bottle with a cramming tool. OK, so if it is so warm and mushy and slides in so easily, why doesn't it pop right back out from the pressure of the gas? Because at the time it is corked, champagne is flatter than Alfalfa singing Lady of Spain. It earns its bubbles later, through fermentation in the bottle. By that time, the cork is dry and fat and holding fast.

DATE, NAMES TO IMPRESS YOUR

Bruno, Giordano--In 17th Century he conceived of the universe as being infinite in time and space, filled with suns surrounded by planets. For this revelation he was accused of heresy and burned at the stake.

Condamine, Charles Marie de la--Went to South America in 1735 to measure curvature of the Earth. Instead he discovered rubber.

Ham--First American chimpanzee in space. Emerged from capsule snarling, tried to bite photographers.

Semmelweis, Ignaz--Hungarian physician in 1847 discovered concept of germs. Suggested doctors wash their hands once in a while. Infant mortality plummeted.

Stakhanov, Aleksei--A miserable Russian coal miner who worked so hard and so efficiently he yanked out seven times as much coal as the average miserable coal miner. In 1935 the Soviet government announced the start of "Stakhanovism," a system in which workers are encouraged to increase production, which no doubt sent a big thrill through the shafts. Tull, Jethro--English agriculturist, brought horseshoe to England from France in early 18th Century.

DETERRENCE

The U.S. and the Soviet Union at present have enough nuclear weapons to drop more than 100 hydrogen bombs (each one a thousand times more destructive than the bomb that obliterated Hiroshima) on every one of the 100 largest cities in the enemy nation. Chattanooga, blam! Shreveport, zak! Orlando, phfftt! The Russians would get all the way down the list to places like Pensacola.

We can't do anything once the bombs are launched. President Reagan, like his predecessors, has had to come to the uncomfortable realization that the Russians can touch a button and destroy all life in the United States, except, for complex biological reasons, cockroaches and certain species of vermin.

"Deterrence" is how we deal with this unpleasantness. If attacked, we can fire back. This "deters" the would-be attacker. There is one very big problem, however: Deterrence requires the president to vow to commit senseless mass murder. Senseless because, once the nukes were on the way, we would be doomed--so the only motive for firing back would be sheer insatiable thirst for vengeance. And that's un-American.

What makes this crazy psychological game even crazier is that it only works if everyone agrees to ignore how crazy it is. Both sides have to have "resolve," or else the whole thing breaks down. Deterrence, in other words, requires the president to "resolve" that in a crisis he will behave with irrational bloodlust.

The president did not like this. On March 23, 1983, he made a speech. He said he had a new idea (see Star Wars).

FACTS, UNTRUE, THAT REFUSE TO DIE

The Missing Link--Supposedly an extinct creature halfway between apes and humans on the evolutionary chart. It's not missing. Or if it is, no one's looking for it. Darwin didn't say humans evolved from apes. Both evolved from a common ancestor--an extinct ape-like creature.

Double-jointed people--No such thing. In some people, the ligaments that attach muscle to bone are more elastic.

Positive to negative flow of electricity--Wiring diagrams always show current flowing from positive to negative. But it's the other way around. The mistake was made by Benjamin Franklin after his famous experiment with the kite. Once the error was discovered there were too many books in print to change.

Columbus sailing off the edge of the world--No one was actually worried about this. Pythagoras proposed a spherical world as early as the 6th Century B.C. Then, in the second century A.D., the Roman astronomer Ptolemy proved the Earth was spherical, pointing out the round shadow of the Earth during a lunar eclipse, and the obvious fact that the masts of sailboats come into view on the horizon before the hull.

The Fifth Dimension--A '60s pop group. As far as spatial and temporal dimensions are concerned, we know of only four: length, breadth, height and time. It was the last that finished off the singing group.

What steam looks like--It looks like nothing. You can't see steam, just as you can't see any gas. What you think is steam is actually condensed water vapor. Look at the spout of a steaming kettle. There is a brief space, just outside the spout, where you cannot see anything. That's steam.

FILLINGS, why they hurt when you bite into aluminum foil

What you are feeling is the basic fact of nature that makes batteries possible. There are two kinds of substances that can conduct electricity. One kind is just dying to send its electrons off on imperialistic forays, the other is so willing to take in foreign electrons that it will accept even those with obviously faked passports. But despite all the intentions, the electrons can't go anywhere without a middleman to negotiate the passage. In your mouth, saliva serves this purpose admirably, creating a slick path from the aluminum foil to the metal alloy in your filling. There is a mass migration of electrons (an electric current), which, when it occurs in the area of your back molar, comes as something of a shock. In the typical car battery, the electron donor and recipient are carbon and zinc, and the conducting liquid is sulfuric acid.

GUILLOTINE, consciousness after use of

Named after French physician J.I. Guillotin (1738-1814), who improved upon previous designs by angling the blade, making it more of a slicer than a chopper. Because of oxygen stored in brain at any given moment, says Dade Chief Medical Examiner Joe Davis, executed person is probably conscious for up to 10 seconds after the beheading, and can probably see and hear. We checked it out with a few neurologists. They were sharply divided on the subject. HEISENBERG'S UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE

You're at a cocktail party. Clive, whom you hate, is acting superior. You make an innocuous comment to the effect that it must be 100 degrees outside. Clive says, "Of course, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle tells us that it is impossible to make a completely accurate measurement." Here's what you should say: "Fool! Dolt! Boob! Heisenberg said it is impossible to determine simultaneously and with unlimited accuracy the position and the momentum of a particle, but because Planck's Constant is so small, the Uncertainty Principle is meaningless except when discussing the motion of atomic particles, like electrons. Idiot." Hopefully this outburst will help quell future references to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

HELIUM, SOURCE OF

It sends balloons, and your voice, high. It's a naturally occurring element, but where does it occur?

In the ground.

Helium is mined from gas wells in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. The U.S. is the world's leading helium producer, and relations with Germany were sorely strained before World War II when we refused to sell the stuff to Hitler. He wanted it for his zeppelins, but he had to make do with the highly volatile hydrogen instead. Which explains why the Hindenburg blew up over New Jersey in 1937.

HUMOR, sense of

A "sense of humor" is a measurement of the extent to which you notice that you're trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how you release the anxiety you feel about this.

LIGHT BULB

You flip a switch, and, godlike, you create light. But don't bask in the glow too long. Better to give credit where it's due--the electron--a basic component of matter so filled with energy it can't sit still for an instant. Electrons usually can be found zipping around the nuclei of their atoms at unfathomable speeds, trapped by an attractive force. But given a little shove, the electrons of certain elements--notably metals--are only too happy to promiscuously bounce from nucleus to nucleus. The shove comes from a flood of free electrons produced by a generator or a battery. The flood turns into a torrent, cascading through the metal pathway--the wire--at close to the speed of light. This little drill actually produces light because not all materials carry electrons as freely as, say, copper wire. The tungsten element in the center of a 60-watt light bulb is not nearly so casual about its electrical relations. This unwelcome intrusion of three billion billion electrons a second plowing through its personal space causes a fit of apoplexy. It gets hot. White hot, in fact. It would burn itself to ash in no time, which was the slight flaw in early light bulb designs, except that the interior of the modern glass bulb is an airless vacuum. The lack of surrounding oxygen allows the filament to burn and glow in impotent rage for weeks before it loses its cool completely.

MATCH

Most tools seem complex but are actually fairly simple. Matches are the opposite. The humility of their design belies a deeper engineering genius. Consider: The common match was invented in 1805, nearly 200 years after the first telescope.

For much of the 19th Century, workers in match factories succumbed to a horrible disease called "phossy jaw." We won't describe it.

There are actually two types of matches, the "Safety Match" and the "Strike-Anywhere Match." For simplicity's sake we will refer to the latter as the "Dangerous Match." The Dangerous Match can be lit with your fingernail, or, if you're as tough as Clint Eastwood in those old spaghetti westerns, your beard. The tip is coated in a chemical called phosphorus. White phosphorus is so flammable it bursts into flame upon contact with the air. There is more than a pound of the stuff in a human body, in blood, muscles, bones and teeth. Why don't teeth burst into flame when you talk? That's for another volume of the Encyclopaedia Tropicana. Know now simply that the modern Dangerous Match uses red phosphorous, calmer than its white cousin. Rub the match on sandpaper or any rough surface and the friction heats the match to the ignition point. The flame then fires down into the match's "tinder," easy-to-burn chemicals like sulfur, potassium chlorate and charcoal, melded together with glue and wax. But there's also dirt and powdered glass down there, to keep things under control. To make things yet more comfy for all concerned, the entire stick of wood has been soaked in a chemical that prevents smoldering.

The Safety Match is a radical departure. The thinking behind the Safety Match is that although the phosphorus and the "tinder" are wild and unpredictable when stuck together, they are harmless and mediocre when solo, like Lennon and McCartney. So the phosphorous is not even on the match, it's on the box, or the "pack," what have you. You know, on that black scratchy strip. To light the Safety Match one simply has to press it against the strip, "close cover before striking," and yank, unless the match in question is the last in the pack, in which case it will not light no matter how many billion times you try.

OVEN, MICROWAVE

No doubt it will not enlighten you to hear that microwaves are a type of high-frequency electromagnetic wave that penetrates food and causes atoms to violently agitate, creating "heat."

Figure it like this. Right there in your kitchen is a radio station, KMWV. This station plays only one rock group, over and over, called Magnetron. Magnetron's music is so stupid only food can hear it. The little food molecules react by doing a dance. First the molecules line up in rigid formation. Then they suddenly flip around, facing the opposite direction. Back and forth, back and forth, kind of like the Twist or maybe even the Time Warp. They do this a couple billion times every second. It's what you call a fast dance.

An exterminator once told us that a microwave could not kill a roach. So we called an entomologist at the University of Florida to see if this was true. He did an experiment.

"There was never any reason to suspect that a microwave would not kill a cockroach. There is even less reason now," he said. "It blew up like a potato."

PERPETUAL MOTION DEVICES

Don't work.

REFRIGERATOR

You put a package of bologna into your refrigerator, and it gets cold. The question is: Where does the cold come from? The answer is: The cold doesn't come from anywhere. The heat leaves. It goes into the air around the refrigerator. Here's how it gets there.

There are pipes in your refrigerator--you can sometimes see them in the freezer compartment. Flowing through these pipes is a liquid called a "refrigerant." This is a special kind of liquid that evaporates--turns into gas--at a fairly low temperature, such as the temperature of your bologna. But to evaporate, a liquid must draw heat from somewhere. That's why when you moisten your finger and wave it in the air, it feels cooler; the water is evaporating and drawing heat from your skin.

So the refrigerant draws heat from the pipe it's in, which in turn draws heat from the air around it, which in turn draws it from your bologna.

The refrigerant now goes into a "compressor." This is the thing you hear when your refrigerator's running, and it sort of squeezes the refrigerant gas, which turns it back into a liquid. (Strange but true: If you compress a gas enough, it turns into a liquid.) The liquid, still under pressure, flows through pipes that are outside your refrigerator's cold compartment--these are the pipes you can usually see behind the refrigerator. The liquid gives off heat--the heat it got from inside your refrigerator--to these pipes, and they give it off into the room air. Your bologna is warming your house, just a little bit.

The refrigerant, now that it has given up its heat, is ready to go back and get some more. It goes through a valve--sort of a trapdoor--back into the cold part of the refrigerator. As soon as it's through the valve, it's no longer being squeezed, and so it quickly evaporates again, thus sucking up more heat, and the whole cycle repeats: get squeezed from gas back into liquid, give off heat, leave pressurized area, turn back into gas, suck up heat. The cycle continues. It would be a very boring occupation, refrigerant.

ROCKET LAUNCHES, effects on weather

Don't be stupid.

STAR WARS

The president says he wants to build a "Peace Shield." This idea, officially called the Strategic Defense Initiative, is unique, in that it is the first time any society has invested billions of dollars in an experimental technology that so far doesn't appear to work even in theory.

If approved, it'll cost somewhere between $200 billion and one trillion dollars. Maintenance, that's extra. There are a lot of scenarios floating around. Here is the latest: One morning, the Russians launch their missiles. Our early warning satellites notice this. The message is relayed to other satellites, called "Space-Based Kinetic Kill Vehicles." These start firing projectiles out of "hypervelocity guns." The projectiles are known as "smart rocks," because they can sense the heat of a missile, and bean the thing. So ends Phase One.

The thinking behind Phase Two is that Phase One won't really work. There will be too many missiles, and many will slip through. Each of these missiles carry multiple bombs, and possibly hundreds of decoys, all of which are released into separate trajectories a mere four or five minutes into the flight. "The sheer number of decoys--in the worst case, tens of thousands of warheads and hundreds of thousands of decoys--could swamp the sensors and interceptors," says Gerald Yonas, the president's chief Star Wars researcher. How to tell the real thing from the fake? One scenario for Phase Two would be to have yet another array of satellites fire ray guns at all the bombs and decoys. The bombs and decoys wouldn't be destroyed--just nudged. The heavier bombs would not move as much as the lighter decoys. Making this distinction would be the job of yet another series of satellites, called "discriminating satellites." The information would be relayed to the next layer of Kill Vehicles, which might use smart rocks, lasers, particle beams or X-ray emissions powered by nuclear explosives.

Then comes Phase Three, also known (unpromisingly, we think) as the Terminal Phase. Planes would be constantly flying around in the upper atmosphere, looking for the bombs missed by Phases One and Two. They would transmit this information to the ground-based defense missiles.

Within 10 years the Soviet Union will be able to use "fast-burn" rockets that don't leave much flame. Phase One will be phased out. We will start using ground-based laser beams that shoot up into space, hit a flexible mirror, and zap back down to the missiles, burning a hole in the side and boggling the innards. These laser beams, unfortunately, cannot go through clouds. So it will just have to be a clear day.

The satellites would have to be invulnerable to attack. So another defense network would have to be created to defend the defense system. And another to defend that.

The final decision to go beyond research, into full deployment, will probably be made in the early 1990s. Maybe the whole thing will gel into something intelligent. For now it should be remembered that, even if Star Wars could shoot down all the high-flying missiles, it can't stop low-flying submarine-launched cruise missiles, it can't stop bombs dropped from airplanes, it can't stop bombs delivered by ship or truck or briefcase. Indeed, the most ardent supporters admit that Star Wars isn't really a "Peace Shield." They say it's more an enhancement of . . . Deterrence. (see, DETERRENCE)

TELEPHONE

The incredible thing about telephones is not that people can instantly talk to each other across the continents, but that you can recognize the other person's voice. Incredible that, somewhere along the suboceanic cables, or in the empty space between microwave transmission towers, your voice doesn't become that of a robot, or a total stranger, someone from Boston, for example.

The secret is inside the phone. It's a metal plate called a diaphragm. This thing is a direct steal from nature's design of the human eardrum. You hold the phone to your mouth and say something like, for example, "Honest, the check's in the mail." The sound of your voice ripples through the air in distinctive waves, molecules knocking each other along, a chain reaction of croquet balls. Your ripple pattern is different from everyone else's; that's what makes voiceprint I.D. an accurate tool.

The sound hits the diaphragm inside a phone, raining down like sheets of rain. The metal plate just vibrates.

But then comes the next trick: The metal plate is attached to a pack of carbon granules, like in certain cigarette filters. These granules have an electric current running through them. When the metal plate shakes, the granules jitter about, causing surges in the juice. The better the engineering of the phone, the more accurately your voice is translated into an electrical language. Like Morse code, this electrical message races along the phone lines at close to the speed of light, directed by switches and circuits that we here at the Encyclopaedia Tropicana do not understand and do not wish to learn about. The final miracle comes on the other end, where the whole process is reversed. The phone lines lead to a magnet inside your friend's phone. As the electrical current hems and haws in the pattern of your voice, the magnet tugs at the metal diaphragm. The metal plate vibrates. Sound comes out of the phone. "Honest, the check's in the mail." Sounds like . . . you.

TELEVISION

When you watch TV, you are not watching a moving picture. You are watching a moving dot. But this is one mighty fast dot. It races back and forth in a blur, moving line by line from the top of the screen to the bottom, a total of 525 lines. It does this at roughly 21,600 miles an hour.

The dot is actually a stream of electrons projected from the back of the TV to the inner surface of the picture tube, which is coated with phosphorus. Phosphorus glows when hit by a stream of electrons; the more torrential the stream, the brighter the spot. By varying the brightness of every dot on every line on your screen, the electron beam paints a picture with strategically clustered dots, the same way those computer portraits are done at the mall. Your picture tube paints a different picture on your screen 30 times every second.

So why do you see it as The A-Team, and not a series of stills? Think of those decks of cards you got as a kid, the ones that you could riffle with your thumb to make a moving picture. Same principle. The mind fills in the gaps.

THERMOS

The question is: How come soda keeps cold and coffee keeps hot? How does the Thermos know?

The first thing to remember is that you must always capitalize the word Thermos, because it is a trademarked name for a "vacuum bottle."

Second, know that it is a container within a container. The inside container is a glass bottle. Between the bottle and the outer container is a No Man's Land, with close to zero air molecules. A vacuum, almost. Vacuums don't transfer heat very well. (If you don't care why, skip to the last paragraph.)

Heat is transferred in one of three ways: conduction, convection, and radiation. Conduction means, basically, molecules smacking into each other like dominoes, sending energy down the line. Since a vacuum means an absence of molecules, there are no molecules against which to smack, conduction doesn't happen in a Thermos. Convection is when molecules cruise through traffic on their own, weaving and darting, trying to get across town; e.g., steam bubbles rising from the bottom of a boiling pot. But the inside of a Thermos is a solid, it keeps its molecules close to the vest.

Radiation defies easy analogy. It's kind of like . . . beauty. There's a little bit of it in everything. The hotter the source, the greater the radiation. It comes at you in waves, piercing everything in its way, stone or flesh. Like light from the sun, it can leap across a vacuum. Like beauty, it can melt the coldest of hearts. There is no protection from the withering power of beauty, but with a Thermos you can put silver on the inside of the bottle, reflecting back some of the radiant energy from your coffee or soup or what have you, postponing the inevitable.

So what happens is, the vacuum and silvered side combine to prevent heat from escaping from the inner container if it's filled with something hot, and prevent heat from entering the inner container if it's filled with something cold.

TIME, LOST

The year before 1901 A.D. was, of course, 1900 A.D.

The year before 101 A.D. was, of course, 100 A.D.

So what was the year before 1 A.D.?

Zero A.D.? Was there ever a May 15, Zero A.D.?

No. Historians decided they just couldn't cope with a Zero year. The historical record leaps from December 31, 1 B.C. to January 1, 1 A.D. TOILET

The humble toilet is too often the butt of indelicate jokes. We are going to do our best to refrain from infantile humor here, except to note, as we must, that the toilet was invented by a man named Thomas Crapper.

With the possible exception of the clock, Crapper's porcelain pew is the most efficient household device that doesn't require electricity.

Here's an experiment to perform in the privacy of your own bathroom. Remove the top from your toilet tank. Now fish the curlers and tissues and hair spray and toothpaste and Comet from the bowl, where they have fallen. You should have removed them before lifting the cover. Now, look inside the tank. You'll see three main things: a rubber stopper at the bottom of the water, a big hollow float at the top of the water, and a tall post connected to the float by a long arm. When you press the handle to flush, the stopper pops up out of a hole in the bottom of the tank, and water, pulled by gravity, rushes down into the bowl. When a bowlful of water (about five gallons) has gone through, the stopper is now hanging in air, and gravity pulls it back into the hole.

Meanwhile, the air-filled float has sunk along with the water level, thereby opening a special valve (called a "ballcock") at the top of the tall post. This opening causes water to pour back into the tank from the house's water pipes, until the float rises again to the top of the tank and shuts off the water.

A very smooth system, until some object--for the sake of argument we will say a Cabbage Patch Doll--stops up the drain at the bottom of the bowl. Meanwhile, no one has informed the tank, which is continuing to flush water into the bowl, causing the water level to rise toward a disastrous spillover. Now that you know how a toilet works, you don't have to stand in helpless horror. Lunge for the float at the bottom of the tank and lift it to the closed position. Then radio for assistance.

TUNNELS, construction of

How do they dig underwater tunnels? Do they work in scuba gear? And how do they pump the water out afterwards? And how do they protect against leaks that would flood and drown people?

Easy. They dig real deep, under the riverbed.

VELCRO

Hooks and eyes. It's that simple. One strip is covered with tiny nylon hooks, the other with tiny nylon eyes. Invented by Swiss engineer Georges de Mestral in 1948 after he returned from a hunting trip and noticed thistle blossoms clinging to his pants. He looked under a microscope. The blossoms were covered with tiny hooks. Velcro comes from velours, velvet, and crochet, hook.

WORDS, PRETENTIOUS

Some capsule definitions of pompous, commonly misused terms:

Existentialism--No God, no fixed human nature. Man on his own, responsible for self. This freedom to define his own life is the source of man's dread.

Metaphysics--The big questions. What is ultimate nature of being? Are people basically good or evil? Why am I always late?

Entropy--Degradation of energy from order to disorder. The natural tendency of everything to degenerate. An ice cube, nice and symmetric, melts into a mess. So does the universe. All neatly put together with planets and stars and meteors all spinning around like clockwork, it is slowly getting messier and messier. Ultimately the galaxies will look like the floor under your refrigerator: nothing but fuzz. Things will be bleak indeed. Suffice it to say that this state is known as The Heat Death of the Universe. The good news is that you'll never have to clean under your refrigerator again.

Debenture--An IOU from a corporation to a person.

WORLD, HISTORY OF

One-celled life appeared on Earth about three billion years ago and fitfully evolved into different plants and animals. Human beings proved most adaptive, learning to control their environment as other creatures could not. After relying solely on hunting and gathering, Man started farming about 10,000 years ago. With his surplus food, he learned to sell. And shop. With his surplus time, he learned to write. So began civilizations. But civilizations were transitory, destroyed by external challenges, internecine tensions, political folly and presumptions of divinity.

The Greeks developed a remarkably modern society, replete with science, philosophy, dramatic performances, and democracy. The Greeks were routed by the Romans. The Roman empire spanned the West at the birth of Jesus, whose teachings inspired first a cult and then a revolutionary religion. Rome was sacked by barbarians, beginning a thousand years of disorder, poverty and intellectual stagnation sometimes known as the Dark Ages.

Meanwhile, in the east, a cerebral society was developing that revered age and wisdom but was slowed in its progress by a slavish devotion to custom and tradition. It was very mysterious to Westerners.

A bubonic plague called the Black Death killed a third of Europe. Papal domination subsided and monarchs consolidated their support through ambitious foreign wars and ostentatious patronage of the arts. The invention of the printing press contributed to the intellectual flowering known as the Renaissance. Mastery of ocean navigation expanded European influence to much of the world. Later, the Industrial Revolution increased wealth and dehumanized the workplace. European empires gradually declined as their colonies revolted. Shifts in the balance of power erupted in world war. Communist revolution swept through Czarist Russia. Fascist Germans, driven by master race hysteria, initiated another world war. The United States and the Soviet Union emerged as superpowers and have since fought proxy wars in poor nations. Meanwhile, in the East, China and Japan modernized, becoming less mysterious and more threatening to Western supremacy.

The accelerated development of technology in this century has led to greater leisure time, a rise in service industries, a decline in reading in favor of television viewing, a fundamental alteration and general contamination of the environment, and the construction of vast arsenals of bombs powered by the force that holds atomic nuclei together. The long-term significance of these changes has been largely ignored.

Memo: COVER STORY
Section: TROPIC
Copyright (c) 1986 The Miami Herald