The Straight Dope 07/29/2005

The Straight Dope -- By Cecil Adams
http://www.straightdope.com

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THE STRAIGHT DOPE 07/29/2005

Dear Cecil:

As a veteran consumer of butter, jam, and toast, I find
it a continuing source of irritation that the side of the
toast upon which I put the jam and butter is almost
always the side that hits the kitchen floor when the
toast slips off the plate. What I'm curious to know is,
is there a statistically larger chance of the toast's
falling on its buttered side rather than the plain side?
Or is it merely my mind playing "the van is always at the
corner" on me? --Hans W., Copenhagen, Denmark

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Cecil replies:

People in Denmark are just now noticing this, which has
been the subject of rueful commentary elsewhere in the
world since at least 1884? Time to get you guys up to
speed:

1. Prodigious scientific resources (seriously) have been
brought to bear on this phenomenon. Browsing through the
literature from 1995 on I count six articles and a book.

2. By far the grandest conclusions to date have been
drawn by UK physicist and science journalist Robert A.J.
Matthews, who sees in tumbling toast a demonstration of
Murphy's Law ("if anything can go wrong, it will") and by
extension the ineluctable perversity of the universe.
(Actually, he says "innate cussedness of the universe,"
which is to my mind too mild coming at the end of a paper
[European Journal of Physics, 1995] that drags in the
electronic fine structure constant, the mass of the
proton, and the speed of light.)

For more, see:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/050729.html

STAFF REPORT

Dear Straight Dope:

This is a serious question. We are not trying to be smart
alecks. Why is there such a concentration of spices in
the Spice Islands? --C. Woosley

SDSTAFF Una replies:

This is a serious answer. There isn't--that is to say,
the Spice Islands aren't home to a memorably large number
of spices. The significance of the islands lies not so
much in the variety of spices available there as in their
historical position as a source of spices that were new
to European tables during the Age of Exploration. 

The history of the Spice Islands is long, exotic,
exciting, and rich with colorful characters and stories,
nearly all of which I'm going to ignore to keep this
article as concise as possible. To learn more about the
history of the region, I strongly recommend picking up a
resource such as Spice: The History of a Temptation,
which is listed in the references.

The first step is determining what we really mean by the
name Spice Islands. Typically, the accepted use of the
term is in reference to the Moluccas, an Indonesian
archipelago (also called the Maluku Islands). However, it
also has been applied to a group of three Tanzanian
islands (Mafia Island, Pemba, and Zanzibar). At times,
people have also lumped Sri Lanka into the category of
the Spice Islands, and sometimes the term is used
collectively to describe all of the spice-producing
islands south of India. In addition, since a wide variety
of spices (such as peppercorns from the Malabar coast)
have been available from the Indian mainland since
antiquity, it would not be unusual to expect that trading
ships sent to the Spice Islands might return with a
variety of spices purchased from that region of the
world. 

For more, see: 
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mspiceislands.html

STRAIGHT DOPE CLASSIC - 06/26/1987

Dear Cecil: 

I recently came across a book by researcher Wilson Bryan
Key in which he claims to find subliminal images of sex,
death, and the occult stuck into photos in print
advertisements. They range from screaming skulls
airbrushed into ice cubes to an orgy depicted in a plate
of fried clams. My major impression is that Key is a
crackpot (he can find the letters S-E-X spelled out
anywhere there are squiggly lines), but some of his
findings seem a little too real to be coincidental.
What's the truth, Cecil? Do advertisers really hide these
images (while denying all, of course), or does Key just
have an active imagination? --Jay S., Chicago

Cecil replies:  

I won't claim no eager beaver account executive
ever slipped a subliminal message into an ad, Jayzie, but
Wilson Bryan Key is the kind of guy who could find
something suggestive in a dial tone. Revealing testimony
on this score comes to us from the Skeptical Inquirer,
one of the nation's leading antifruitcake journals.
Psychologist Tom Creed reports attending a college
lecture in 1986 in which Key described in detail the
subliminal images he'd found in a picture of a martini.
In the middle there was a man with an erect penis, in the
upper left a woman scolding the man for drinking, and in
the lower right another man, who Key somehow determined
was the woman's henpecked husband.  

Creed thoughtfully includes the suspect photo with his 
article, and by jiminy it looks like there is a man with an
erect penis in the middle. (All I see in the upper left is something
that looks vaguely like a face, and I can't make out the
alleged husband at all.) Aha, you think. Maybe there's
something to this after all. 

For more, see:
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_344.html

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