Strangebut - True!

Wednesday, 1st February 2012

Q. Would you rather meet Frankenstein or Dracula in a dark alley some night? How about Adam or Prince Vlad IV?

A. This one's no contest in that Frankenstein refers not to a monster or a real person but rather to Viktor Frankenstein, the scientist in Mary Shelley's 1818 novel "Frankenstein" who creates the monster, says Joey Green in "Contrary to Popular Belief." In the novel, Frankenstein names his monster Adam; in the 1931 movie, he is not given a name.

Dracula, on the other hand, was a real person and a frightening one at that. In his 1897 novel "Dracula," Irish author Bram Stoker named his fictional vampire Count Dracula after Prince Vlad IV of Walachia, the brutal tyrant who ruled the region south of the Transylvanian Alps (now part of Romania) from 1456 to 1462. During that time, the son of Vlad Dracul (Romanian for "Devil") executed thousands of people by impaling them on pointed stakes, earning him the nicknames "Vlad Tepes" ("the Impaler") and "Vlad Dracula" ("son of the Devil"). Stoker based his fictional character on the vampire legends that probably arose in reaction to Vlad IV's savage executions, Green adds. In the novel, Dracula is killed when a stake is driven through his heart.

Q. Why did the city of Florence ban the use of our modern number system in the late 13th century?

A. Italian mathematician Fibonacci had introduced the Hindu-Arabic number system to Europe and demonstrated its superiority over Roman numerals for involved calculations, says Richard Webb of "New Scientist" magazine. The use of the symbol zero as a placeholder - representing "nothing" - was revolutionary. For example, the number 302 means three hundreds plus no tens plus two ones, a notational trick that facilitated arithmetic and commerce. But governin authorities were worried about forgery, since the new system seemed easier to falsify, either by adding a zero to the end of a number or putting a tail on a zero to make it a nine.

The convenience of the new approach eventually won out, though it took until the 17th century before the concept of zero as a number and not just a notational convenience dawned on mathematicians.

Q. Who is Roy G. Biv, and what name does he go by in Great Britain?

A. That's the U.S. acronym for remembering the colors of the rainbow - Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo Violet - which has also been the title of a couple of songs, says F. Ronald Young in "Fizzics: The Science of Bubbles, Droplets and Foams." In Britain, the mnemonic is "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain." But remember that in a double rainbow, the colors of the secondary, weaker rainbow are reversed.

Best times to see a rainbow are late afternoon and early morning, when the sun is not too high in the sky. Yet rainbows are rarer than might be thought: In any one place in rainy England, there are fewer than ten bright ones in a year. Rarer still are lunar rainbows, also low in the sky, requiring enough reflected moonlight to be visible.

If you're with a crowd of people on a rainy, yet sunny day, don't be surprised to hear someone shout, "A rainbow!" and yet you see nothing. But if you turn around, you may behold the enthralling arc of refracted light in the heavens. This happens because for you to see a rainbow, you need to have your back to the sun. "Once, on an exam paper I marked," jokes Young, "the student wrote that the rainbow was on the observer's backside!"

Q. Life online is populated with birthers and deathers, Googlegangers and pancake people trapped in their filter bubbles. Translation, please.

A. This is the same crowd you might also meet in your life off-line, says Paul McFedries in "IEEE Spectrum" magazine. We now spend so much time surfing, listening, viewing, messaging, gaming and tweeting, that the Internet has quietly but decisively inserted itself into every corner of our lives.

The online equivalent of your "doppleganger" ("double-goer") is the "Googleganger," a person with the same name as you and whose online references are mixed in with yours when you "egosurf," that is, run a Google search on your own name. As playwright Richard Foreman put it, "I think we're producing a race of people who are paper-thin - almost pancake people," the kind who read broadly but without depth. Internet pundits once feared the opposite - "cyberbalkanization" - narrowly focused groups of like-minded individuals who have little patience for outsiders. Here "filter bubbles" screen people from seeing anyone with contrary interests or ideas.

And perhaps filter bubbles help explain why the Internet has been a boon to the "zombie lie" - a false statement that keeps getting repeated no matter how often it's been refuted, such as U.S. "birthers," who maintain that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States; and "deathers," who assert that health care reform will lead to more deaths, particularly among the elderly. In fact, the Web has become home to all manner of "manufactroversies" - fabricated by political idealogues using deception to make their cases - and the "nontroversy," a false or nonexistent controversy. Either can be spawned by "astroturfing," that is, the activities of fake grass-roots organizations (from a brand of artificial grass). "We have met the Internet, and it is us," McFedries concludes.