Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, October 21, 1993 TAG: 9310200023
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Nonetheless we've gotten lots of other great questions from our readers, and in the interest of clearing off our desk we will try to hack through a few of them this week, starting with this so-dumb-it's-brilliant question from Patrick M. of Washington: "What does the inside of your nose smell like?"
Dear Patrick: You mean before or after we apply the Speed Stick?
We spoke to Charles Wysocki, a neuroscientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, and he said that you can't smell your nose because, to the extent that your nose has a smell (and it may have a smell if you have an infection), you've become adapted to it. But that's obvious. What's interesting is that no one is certain exactly how a nose can become adapted to a smell, such as the stench of a paper mill or a paint factory.
We had always heard that it takes 7 minutes to get accustomed to a smell, but that's not true. Adaptation can take mere seconds for some odors, or take months or even longer for noxious stenches like landfills. Put your nose to a freshly sliced pear: You register a lovely scent. But after about 15 seconds (the time varies from person to person) you probably can't smell much of anything.
It's not clear if this adaptation is happening in the nose or the brain. It may simply be that your olfactory receptors send signals to the brain only when they first make contact with the odoriferous compound. Or it may be that your brain itself is filtering out the information and you are simply not conscious of the smell, in the same way that you can read an entire newspaper column and come to the end and have no idea what it was that you just read. (To recap, we said, "It smells like chicken.")
Karl P. of Highland, Md., writes, "Is it entirely fortuitous that the apparent size (disk) of the sun and the moon are nearly identical from the earth, which beautifully enables us to observe the sun's corona during a solar eclipse? Or did God plan it this way?"
Dear Karl: It's a big-time coincidence. The two appear to be the same size because the sun is roughly 400 times farther away, and 400 times larger in diameter, than the moon.
The moon is, from our perspective, just a wee bit larger, which is why it blocks out the sun during most eclipses. There are occasional eclipses in which the moon's disk is smaller than the sun's, leaving a thin ring of the sun's surface visible, rather than just the corona. These "annular eclipses" (from the Latin annulus, meaning ring) are the result of the moon's elliptical orbit, which makes the distance between the moon and earth vary by about 14 percent.
The next annular eclipse in North America is May 10, 1994, we're told by the folks at Sky & Telescope magazine. (We advise you to use this information to amaze and scare people who don't follow astronomy news. Say, "Behold, I will turn the sun into a burning ring of fire!")
Amazingly, Charles J. of Norfolk, Va., has just this very second written in with a related question: "Why do objects appear smaller the farther we move from them?"
Dear Charles: Some nerds will tell you that the apparent size of objects is a function of straight-line geometry, and they'll draw diagrams of triangles and cones. They'll point out that if you double your distance from the wall clock its diameter will span half as many degrees of your field of vision as it did originally. But ignore all that. These are the '90s, an age of heroic action and positive thinking. The new rule is, when objects recede they don't get smaller - you get bigger.
James O., of Olney Md., asks, "Why do people in different sections of the country speak with regional accents?"
Dear Jim: We passed this question along to Cathy Ball, a linguist at Georgetown University, and she then sent it out on the Internet (you know, that big web of computers that spans the globe) to her colleagues in the American Dialect Society.
We learned that accents are basically a product of immigration. You had German immigrants in Pennsylvania, English and French immigrants and African slaves in the deep South, Scotch-Irish settlers in the hills of Appalachia, Scandinavians in Minnesota, and so on. Accents can mutate over time. "Members of lower socioeconomic classes often imitate the speech of those in the class above them. The class above them then adopts other features to distinguish them from the classes below them," noted Robert Wachal of the University of Iowa. (Before the Thurston Howells developed that lockjaw accent, they said "y'all" like everyone else.)
What surprised us is that almost everyone said that Americans don't actually have a great diversity of accents or dialects, at least not anymore. Accents are preserved by geographic isolation, and with the advent of mass media, many accents are melting away. Soon we'll all sound like Tom Brokaw. "The diversity of accents in the United States is fairly narrow compared to, say, the diversity of accents within just London proper," said Donald Livingston of the University of Washington.
So maybe everyone should vow, this moment, to start pronouncing words in a peculiar fashion (pronounced puh-KOOL-ya FATCH-un). Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB