Do Elephants Jump? (12 page)
Read Do Elephants Jump? Online
Authors: David Feldman
If the first sign of wisdom is knowing what you don’t know, then many of the physicians we contacted could put owls to shame. This is precisely the kind of Imponderable that we often have trouble answering. Patients don’t run to doctors demanding that their eye rubbing be eliminated; doctors don’t learn about eye rubbing in medical school — it’s not a clinical problem. Researchers don’t receive grants from the government to research eye rubbing. Somehow, it was reassuring to hear so many doctors respond honestly, with “I don’t know.” More than one offered a speculation with the proviso, “Please don’t quote me on it.”
Of course, rubbing the eyes isn’t good for you. At best it does no harm. At worst, it can infect or damage your cornea. Adults know this, which might be one reason why babies and small children seem to rub their eyes more often than adults. The tendency of even the youngest babies to rub their eyes when tired indicates that eye rubbing is not a learned response.
Our medical experts were in three main camps:
RUBBING SLOWS DOWN YOUR METABOLISM AND HELPS YOU GET TO SLEEP
If you rub your eyes, you apply pressure to the rectus muscles that control eyeball movement, which in turn stimulates the vagus nerve, the long parasympathetic nerve that supplies motor and sensory fibers to much of your body. By stimulating the vagus nerve, you actually lower your heart rate and metabolism, making it easier to sleep. Electrical stimulation of the vagus nerve is used to treat some medical problems, particularly epilepsy and psychological disorders, in order to calm the body.
But when we’re already sleepy, why do we need to rub our eyes to slow down our system even more? We’re more sympathetic with this camp:
RUBBING IS AN ATTEMPT TO WAKE YOU UP
Most babies aren’t exactly guilt-ridden about catching some shuteye, but sometimes try valiantly to stay awake, and this is one time when they’re prone to rub their eyes. Are adults any different? Look at adults in a library, trying to study, and clearly headed toward torpor. Many of them take off their glasses and rub their eyes, valiantly (often futilely) trying to jerk their eyes, their brain, into refocusing. Dr. Arif Khan, associate professor of ophthalmology at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, concurs:
Sorry, there is no “scientific” explanation for this phenomenon. I could say that the reason is to provide stimulation to the sleepy eyes to keep them from going to “sleep.” But this is just an educated guess.
RUBBING HELPS KEEP CIRCADIAN
RHYTHMS ON AN EVEN KEEL
“Circadian” refers to our daily cycles, and one of the most important “Circadian rhythms” is the ebb and flow of our metabolism that promote or discourage sleep. One part of the brain that controls our sleep-wake cycles is the “suprachiasmatic nucleus.” One expert we consulted, Lenworth N. Johnson, a neuro-ophthalmologist at the Mason Eye Institute in Columbia, Missouri, offers a theory that might embrace and encompass the two above:
Not everyone rubs the eyes when tired. Nonetheless, there are neurons (nerve cells) in the retina of our eyes that are involved in transmitting information on light-dark conditions. These are important in sleep-wake cycles, with projection of these nerve cells to the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the brain. I suspect rubbing the eyes may help to manipulate this signal.
In other words, the casual rub might be our attempt to micromanage our Circadian rhythms, as futile as that pursuit might be.
| Submitted by Christopher T. Doody of Shortsville, New York. Thanks also to Wayne Good of Madison, Alabama; Aaron Burke of Saranac Lake, New York; and Ronit Amsel and Avi Jacobson of Montreal, Quebec. |
If the defense of Rome was dependent upon the stability of its chariots, no wonder the mighty empire fell. The Romans may have been decadent, but they weren’t dumb: the chariot was far from a potent weapon of war.
Chariots were created almost two thousand years before the Roman Empire, and were suitable only for flat terrain. Earlier, ancient armies used them only because horses were not bred large and strong enough to withstand the weight of an armored soldier with weapons. The Roman legions rode on horseback, and reserved chariots for ceremonies and games such as the infamous Roman circus. According to military historian Art Ferrill, author of
The Origins of War,
Caesar’s troops were amazed by the British use of them. For all practical purposes, chariots were last used in ancient Near Eastern warfare by the Assyrians.
What were the problems with using chariots for transportation? Let us count the ways. Carol Thomas, professor of history at the University of Washington, acknowledging research by J. G. Landels,
Engineering in the Ancient World,
which addressed these issues directly, wrote to us:
The wheels of chariots probably were not flimsy. They were either spoked (in one of a couple possible arrangements) or solid. They may well have been wobbly, though, because any of the three or four possible arrangements for attaching the wooden wheels to the wooden axles of the vehicles led to grooves being worn on the bearing surfaces, which give the components more freedom of play.
Acccording to Landels, there’s no evidence of any swiveling mechanism in two- or four-wheeling vehicles, which would have allowed a chariot to corner with all wheels turning. Thus a driver had to skid at least one wheel around a corner, which also would have added to wear on the wheel-axle joints, reduced efficiency of the use of the animal-derived motive power, and also reduced stability of the vehicle.
Lest you think that these fits and starts would be handled with the finesse of a Lexus, think again. Stanley Burstein, professor of history at California State University and former president of the Association of Ancient Historians, wrote:
My guess, for what it is worth, is that chariots were every bit as unstable as they appear, since they had no suspension systems and would react violently to any surface unevenness. They would also have been hard to control because ancient western horse harnessing techniques were extremely inefficient.
Abandoned as a war vehicle, the Romans adopted chariot racing as the ancient equivalent of a NASCAR race: the danger was half the fun.
| Submitted by Gregg Cox of Wichita, Kansas. (For more information about the harnessing systems for Roman chariots, see http://www.humanist.de/rome/rts/index.html.) |
Some things you can count on. Movies are released on Fridays. Diets start on Mondays. CDs are released on Tuesdays.
The Friday release of movies makes sense. A sizable majority of filmgoing occurs on the weekend, and studios can point toward a huge opening weekend by coordinating advertising and talk-show appearances by stars during the week. One of the reasons why Thursday night has become a battleground for young-skewing shows on the television networks is that movie studios spend huge bucks advertising their new films on that night to maximize attendance on the first weekend. The TV networks want to extract higher fees for those ads, which are based on the number of eyeballs tuning in.
Diets on Monday? The perfect time to work off the pounds you gained overindulging in food (tubs of popcorn at the movies?) and drink over the weekend. And self-sacrifice might as well coincide with the beginning of the dreaded school- or workweek.
But Tuesday seems like a colorless choice to launch new music (and videotapes and DVDs), especially when traffic in stores is highest on the weekends. Why was it picked? We had a theory, which was that the change occurred so that new releases would be given seven full days of sales history in order to attain the highest position possible on the
Billboard
charts, the bible of the music industry. But no less than the director of charts for
Billboard,
Geoff Mayfield, fingers another source:
The culprit was not our charts, but the UPS man. As more and more chain stores received their new-release shipments directly from the labels’ distributors, rather than from chain headquarters, stores at the end of a delivery route were at a competitive disadvantage to those which received their product earlier in the day on the dates when important titles came to market.
The uneven pattern of distribution occurred because UPS and other delivery services didn’t provide service on Sunday, and the big chains were leaning on distributors to get new product as early as possible on Monday. All things being equal, the record labels would prefer a Monday launch, as Nielsen SoundScan, the company that measures record sales that form the basis of the
Billboard
charts, tracks sales from Monday through Sunday.
But four different sources, independently, used the expression “even playing field” to describe the relative fairness of Tuesdays for laying down new releases, and Tuesday seems to hit the “sweet spot” of providing maximum time for new recordings to hit the charts while satisfying the demands of retailers. Jim Parham, of Jive Records, elaborates:
Most independent music stores buy from wholesalers called one-stops. The extra day, Monday, allows these wholesalers to ship to these accounts for the product to arrive on street date [i.e., Tuesday] or only one day prior. If street date were on a Monday, these stores would have to have the product delivered on the Friday before street date. When this happens, the label loses control of the release date, especially on stores not honoring street dates and selling the product early. This creates a chain reaction and you can lose a significant amount of sales that will not count toward the first-week chart position, as SoundScan sales are measured from Monday to Sunday.
Parham observes that the “street date” issue isn’t as intense as it once was, as chain stores now dominate the market, and they tend to “jump the gun” less frequently than independents.
A uniform street date has other advantages. A source at Rhino Records, who preferred to remain anonymous, told
Imponderables
that the Tuesday street date allowed the production people at the label to set up systems that culminate in shipments every Friday that should hit the stores on Mondays. If there are delivery problems, a Tuesday launch schedule allows stores to resolve the issues on Monday. And letting consumers know that Tuesday is the day when new CDs are released is a way to drive traffic to retail stores during the week, according to Susan L’Ecoyer, director of communications at the National Association of Recording Merchandisers.
It must be tempting for stores to break the embargo and sell CDs that are lying around the stockroom. We were surprised to learn that the uniform laydown date is usually just a “gentleman’s agreement.” As Fred Bronson,
Billboard
’s “Chartbeat” columnist, told us, “I suppose if someone broke it consistently, suppliers could refuse to sell him any more records, which might be reason enough not to break the agreement.” In practice, we couldn’t find any evidence that any but a few scattered independent retailers were ever punished for selling product prematurely.
Many smaller music labels are quite content to have retailers stock the shelves as soon as product is delivered. For every CD that is launched with radio advertising, an in-person plug on “Total Request Live” on MTV, and a concert tour, there are many more independent label releases with no marketing budget and no prayer of ever making the
Billboard
charts.
There is little doubt that uniform laydowns work. Even if a Tuesday release loses one day of tracking by SoundScan, Geoff Mayfield observes that at the date he last wrote to us, July 9, 2003,
We’ve already had fifteen albums
debut
at number one this year [in about six months], so albums obviously don’t need a whole week to enter at number one.
By pointing all the marketing and advertising toward one day, free publicity can often be generated — the best recent example of this is not in music, but the book industry. When
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
was released at midnight on June 21, 2003, the publisher, Scholastic, attempted with great success to make the launch a media event: five million books were sold on the first day, numbers that exceeded the opening day’s dollar grosses for the first two Harry Potter movies.
Most books are put on the shelves as soon as they are processed at the bookstore, as probably more than 95 percent of all book releases receive no marketing or advertising worth coordinating, but publishers will try to orchestrate the laydown of big books. We spoke to Mark Kohut, the national accounts manager at St. Martin’s Press, who said his publisher’s strategy is typical. St. Martin’s generally will try a uniform release date with titles that have a chance to hit one of the major best-seller lists (particularly the
New York Times,
but also
Publishers Weekly, Wall Street Journal,
and
USA Today
lists), generally titles with first printings of at least 100,000 copies. St. Martin’s releases its big titles on Tuesdays for exactly the same reason as the music labels. But the
New York Times
measures sales from Sunday to Saturday, so a Tuesday launch provides only five days of sales for the best-seller lists the first week. This might be the reason why Simon & Schuster chose a Monday laydown for Hillary Clinton’s memoirs, which reportedly sold more than half a million copies on its first day of release.
The big specialty chains (e.g., Barnes & Noble, FYE) and mega-stores (e.g., Wal-Mart, Costco) are scooping up a greater share of music and book sales. Many of these retailers provide gigantic discounts and much better store placement for best-sellers. As a result, the pressure on record labels and book publishers to create instant best-sellers is more intense than ever. Although the day of release is a small part of the equation, it’s a critical part.
| Submitted by Allen Helm of Louisville, Kentucky. Thanks also to Scott Padulsky of Roselle Park, New Jersey; Christine Killius of Oakville, Ontario; Dave Frederick of Newark, Delaware; and Sam Bonham of Tellico Plains, Tennessee. |