Have you ever gotten your fingers stuck to a metal ice cube tray in the freezer? They won’t come loose until you run warm water over them. Similarly, I’ve heard you’re in big trouble if you put your tongue on a cold flagpole in the winter. Yet you can eat a totally frozen Popsicle without injury. What makes human flesh stick to some frozen stuff and not others? –Mike Jones, Chicago
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Tonguing flagpoles is definitely asking for it, Michael, especially if the daddy flagpole finds out. Stick to stuff that’s breathing. The reason your fingers stick to the ice-cube tray is that the moisture on your skin freezes on contact, bonding it to the metal. Your tongue doesn’t stick to a Popsicle (for long, anyway) because the Popsicle warms up too fast. Metal is an efficient conductor of heat and can easily disperse the warmth from your fingertips, but ice isn’t and can’t. The surface of the Popsicle melts almost instantly when you lick it, whereas you have to warm up half the damn ice-cube tray before the surface under your fingertips rises above freezing. That’s one reason plastic trays have become such a popular substitute.
Ben, you amateur, stars don’t “twinkle.” They exhibit “stellar scintillation.” The Pentagon ain’t gonna fund a damn twinkle study. Whatever you call it, it’s caused by turbulence in the atmosphere, which in turn is caused by convection–clumps of warm air rising through colder stuff. Air will refract (bend) light a varying amount depending on its temperature. You can see this in exaggerated form in the waves, or striae, that ripple above a radiator, a sun-baked highway, or some other heated surface. Because of the bending, sometimes you see more starlight, sometimes less, and it looks like the star is, you know, twinkling. The planets and the moon don’t scintillate (as much, anyway) because their apparent size is so much larger that a little atmospheric refraction doesn’t greatly alter the amount of light that reaches the eye.
Unfortunately, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of southpaw was in 1848–describing a boxer’s left-handed punch. This is long before the start of professional baseball and only a few years after baseball was supposedly invented in 1839. (Actually, of course, the game’s origins go back much earlier.)
