The Calculus Diaries - Jennifer Ouellette [119]
26
I was relieved to learn her father married three times, since the thought of one woman enduring that many pregnancies boggles the mind.
27
Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton. Alas, Gus Grissom was one of three astronauts killed ten years earlier in a tragic launch-pad fire.
28
Which is not to say there isn’t considerable art involved in designing a good roller coaster. “This isn’t rocket science; it may be more complicated than that,” Space Mountain’s ride track engineer Bill Watkins recalled. “Once a rocket leaves the Earth’s atmosphere, there is little drag to contend with . . . [and] they don’t have to worry about getting a Mickey Mouse hat caught in their wheels.”
29
Many of the animatronic animals are recycled from an older, less popular attraction called “America Sings,” which closed in April 1988, because construction of Splash Mountain was already far over its $75 million budget. Sadly, the animals still sing.
30
Eureka (Greek heurēka) means “I’ve found (it),” and ever since, surprising scientific insights have been known as eureka moments. Ironically, Archimedes most likely never said that, certainly not while running naked through the streets. Blame the Roman architect Vitruvius, who first recorded the anecdote two hundred years after Archimedes’ death.
31
There is still considerable debate as to whether tulip mania constituted a true bubble market in modern economic terms. A bubble forms when investors place so much demand on a product that the price soars far beyond what that product could possibly be worth. Wikipedia offers a corollary to that definition: “For tulip mania to have qualified as an economic bubble, the price of tulip bulbs would need to have become unhinged from the intrinsic value of the bulbs.” Did this happen or not? Discuss.
32
I am cheating a little by assuming a constant rate of change.
33
This works in reverse on mortgage interest. Not all of your monthly payment goes toward paying off your principal. Most of it goes toward interest in the early years, because interest is always paid on the outstanding balance of the loan, which decreases over time as you pay down the principal.
34
See appendix 2, “Calculus of the Living Dead,” for a detailed breakdown of this type of calculus problem.
35
An alternate theory proposes that while Y. pestis is responsible for modern outbreaks of plague—and yes, there are still outbreaks around the world, mostly concentrated in Africa—the Black Death that ravaged Western Europe in the fourteenth century was caused by something like anthrax or an Ebola-like virus. The evidence is sketchy, however. An analysis of the remains of early plague victims in France showed DNA from Y. pestis and none from anthrax, for example.
36
It was discovered simultaneously by a Japanese scientist named Shibasaburo Kitasato, but the microbe is named after Yersin.
37
Yes, there really is a question mark at the end of his name. He changed it to distinguish himself from the zillions of other Robert Smiths in the world, including the lead singer of the Cure: “It’s been twenty years now and sadly his career shows no sign of drying up,” the epidemiologist laments.
38
The researchers’ model is based on the zombies as featured in Night of the Living Dead, as opposed to the modern take depicted in, say, 28 Days Later, wherein the zombies were smarter and moved faster than the lurching, drooling classic monsters whose sole purpose is to devour delicious brains.
39
The blog Southern Fried Science adapted Smith?’s models to a new scenario: pitting zombies versus vampires to determine which species would be most likely to survive. They concluded that zombies would eventually rule the earth in that scenario, unless the vampires and humans joined forces against the zombies.
40
Think you can ease that painful burning sensation by soaking it in water? Bad idea. That just makes the adult female worm release hundreds of thousands of her larval spawn, further contaminating