The Straight Dope 04/06/2007

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

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THE STRAIGHT DOPE 04/06/2007

Dear Cecil:

Last year the Nobel Prize committee in Stockholm once again overlooked
you in the categories of medicine, physics, and literature. Clearly
their judgment is faulty, and it makes me wonder about other mistakes
they may have made. Aside from the subjective peace and literature (and
economics?) prizes, has anyone been awarded a Nobel for work that has
later turned out to be wrong? What happens to the prize (and the money)? 
--Your student, Dr. Z, Connecticut

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Cecil replies:

Eh, I don't let the Nobel thing bother me. Orson Welles never got a
best-director Oscar, either.

Several Nobel Prize awards have been controversial, but in the hard
sciences none has involved work later shown to be flat-out wrong. There
are several reasons for that, the most obvious being that the Nobel
folks aren't idiots and their screening process is pretty thorough.
Equally important, a long interval typically separates the discovery
from the award   more than 20 years in the case of the 2004 physics
prize   by which time most nagging doubts have been resolved. Still,
looking back on at least a few awards must make the Nobel committee
cringe.

Years ago I wrote about prefrontal lobotomy, one of the horror stories
of 20th-century medical practice. In 1949 Antonio Egas Moniz was awarded
the Nobel Prize in medicine for . . .

For more, see:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/070406.html

STAFF REPORT

Dear Straight Dope:

I've got a question for you that involves my mailbox. Even though I went
into Wal-Mart, bought the thing with my own money, and installed it on a
post out by my fence, do I own it or does the U.S. government own it? I've
been told that it's not mine and that my neighbors, or anyone for that
matter, can put their outgoing mail in it. Is this true? Also, can I give
my out-going mail to, say, 7-11, and by law they have to mail it for
me?--Dee Aye

In their attempt to fill me in on the world's troubles, my parents once
impressed me with this lesson: it is against the law to leave anything
in someone's mail box. That box is only for use by the postal service,
so I can't put an envelope there for anybody. I'm not sure if they said
I'd go to jail, but it was definitely illegal. Were my parents correct
that it's against the law to leave something in a mail box?--Stan

SDSTAFF Gfactor replies:  

Dee, the best answer is that you own your mailbox and the federal
government regulates it. However, I can see where you'd get the idea your
mailbox was federal property--the U.S. Postal Service itself says so:
"Mailboxes are considered federal property, and federal law (Title 18,
United States Code, Section 1705), makes it a crime to vandalize them (or
to injure, deface or destroy any mail deposited in them)." That's a bit of
a stretch. The statute says, "Whoever willfully or maliciously injures,
tears down or destroys any letter box or other receptacle intended or used
for the receipt or delivery of mail on any mail route, or breaks open the
same, or willfully or maliciously injures, defaces or destroys any mail
deposited therein, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more
than three years." There's nothing in there about the mailbox being
federal property.   

The statute does demonstrate a federal interest in protecting mailboxes.
Chapter 508, Section 3.1.1 of the Domestic Mail Manual declares that
"every letterbox or other receptacle intended or used for the receipt or
delivery of mail on any city delivery route, rural delivery route, highway
contract route, or other mail route is designated an authorized depository
for mail within the meaning of 18 USC 1702, 1705, 1708, and 1725." Section
1702 makes it a crime to remove mail from an authorized depository with
"design to obstruct the correspondence." Section 1708 makes it a crime to
steal, take, or abstract mail from an authorized depository.

For more, see: 
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mmailbox.htm

STRAIGHT DOPE CLASSIC - 07/26/1991

Dear Cecil: 

As kids we were taught in art class that the primary colors were red,
blue, and yellow. By mixing these primary colors, we were told, we could
come up with any color of the rainbow. Experiment seemed to bear this
out.  

Now that we are older and in the age of video, we have been told
that color TV monitors use red, blue, and green as primary colors. The
obvious questions are, how do you mix red, green, and blue to get
yellow? And why can't I replicate the feat with my daughter's crayons?
--Kevin May, Plano, Texas

Dear Kevin:  

When I was a little sprite this bugged me, too, so I asked Mr. Grayson
the science teacher about it. His response was to bring in a power drill
with a red, green, and blue color wheel attached to the tip. When he
pulled the trigger the colors on the spinning wheel merged into a sort
of light gray. Nobody in class had the faintest idea what this was
supposed to prove. However, it did have the effect of making Mr.
Grayson, a bespectacled, slightly buck-toothed fellow, look like Flash
Gordon on acid. So we considered it an afternoon well spent.  

It was only later that the significance of the color wheel
demonstration dawned on me. It turns out there are two ways of creating
colors--the additive method and the subtractive method. 

For more, see:
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_344.html

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