Learn about how mapmakers catch copycats with paper towns and trap streets; why people on their deathbed can probably hear their loved ones pay their last respects; and that time some woodpeckers shut down NASA’s plan to launch the space shuttle Discovery.
Learn about how mapmakers catch copycats with paper towns and trap streets; why people on their deathbed can probably hear their loved ones pay their last respects; and that time some woodpeckers shut down NASA’s plan to launch the space shuttle Discovery.
Paper Towns and Trap Streets Are How Mapmakers Catch Copycats by Reuben Westmaas
Dying loved ones can probably hear you give your last respects by Grant Currin
That Time Some Woodpeckers Shut Down A NASA Space Shuttle Launch by Joanie Faletto
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/dying-people-can-probably-hear-you-mapmakers-catch-copycats-with-paper-towns-and-how-woodpeckers-shut-down-a-nasa-launch
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about how mapmakers catch copycats; why people on their deathbed can probably hear their loved ones pay their last respects; and that time some woodpeckers shut down a NASA space shuttle launch.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
If you published a road atlas, or a city map, or a globe, how would you protect your work from copyright infringement? After all, you can’t copyright the layout of a place. So to catch copycats, mapmakers have to get creative. Get ready to learn about the weird world of paper towns and trap streets.
Imagine you’re on a cross-country road trip following your old fashioned paper map. You’re crossing Ohio and the map says the town of Goblu is coming up. Great! You’ll stop there for lunch. But when you get there, there’s nothing but an empty cornfield. Surprise! You've just wandered into a paper town — a place that exists on a map and nowhere else.
Like other made-up paper towns and trap streets, Goblu was put on your map on purpose to trap would-be copycats. If a mapmaker suspects another has simply copied their hard work instead of doing the cartography for themselves, they can confirm this by finding the fake location on the copycat’s map.
Of course, this practice is disappearing now in the era of satellite maps. And under federal law, these fictional entries aren’t even protected by standard copyrights anyway. That doesn't mean that cartographers have to leave themselves open to infringement, though. Style, presentation, selection, and order can all be used to argue against a copycat.
Most of the time, paper towns and trap streets end up going completely unnoticed. But not all. The best story about a paper town has to be the tale of Agloe, New York. In the 1930s, the director of General Drafting Co., Otto G. Lindberg, combined his initials with those of his assistant Ernest Alpers and mixed them up to form the city "Agloe,". He started including this paper town in his maps. A couple of years later, he discovered Agloe in a map printed by Rand McNally. Except a closer investigation revealed that if you actually visited the coordinates on the map, you'd find the Agloe General Store. See, there were actual people living there, who named their store after the city name they saw on the map. Be careful what you make up — it might just come true.
This next story is uncharacteristically bittersweet for Curiosity Daily. So feel free to grab some tissues. If you’ve ever had the profound experience of being there while a loved one is dying, you were probably told to go ahead and talk to them — the idea being that even if they’re unconscious, they might still be able to hear you. Well, researchers in Canada recently performed an amazing study to test that idea. Their results suggest that some people may still be able to hear even after they’ve fallen into an unresponsive state.
This experiment was the first of its kind, and it was small. Thirteen cognitively healthy patients at a hospice in Ontario agreed to spend their last moments helping scientists learn about the experience of dying.
The experiment started as soon as a new patient was admitted to the facility. The patient would lie upright in bed wearing an EEG cap, which measures electrical activity in the brain. Then the researchers played a 35-minute-long recording of short tones arranged into patterns. Most of them sounded similar, but occasionally one of the patterns would be different from the rest. When they heard the different pattern, the participant would click a mouse.
The researchers did the same with a group of college students, who acted as a control.
Later, hospice nurses alerted researchers when a patient participating in the study became unresponsive. The researchers immediately returned to the facility to perform the same procedure and collect the same type of data during what might be the patient’s last moments.
The EEG data showed that some of the patients appeared to distinguish between the patterns of tones even after they could no longer respond to people in the room. The brain activity of some of the hospice patients were similar to those of the healthy college students when they heard the unusual patterns in the recording.
It isn’t clear from this experiment whether the hospice patients could identify voices or understand what someone was saying, but the brain responses recorded by the EEGs suggest it’s a possibility.
What does all this mean? It’s hard to say because this is some of the first research done in this area. But the researchers hope these new findings will help improve how people are treated at the very end of their lives. One of the researchers said the findings back up anecdotal reports from hospice nurses and physicians who say the sound and presence of loved ones seem to comfort people who are dying. So if you ever find yourself a dying loved one’s bedside, talk to them. Even if they don’t respond, chances are they hear you.
Birds and rockets don’t mix. NASA learned that the hard way in 1995 when a flock of woodpeckers shut down an entire space shuttle launch. Mating season will do that to you, ya know? Here’s how it happened.
In June of 1995, the space shuttle Discovery was propped up on its launch pad in Cape Canaveral all ready for its big trip. Then along came a bunch of woodpeckers. They chiseled about 200 holes in Discovery's fuel-tank insulation. The damage was too great to be fixed at the launch pad, so they had to postpone the launch and wheel the shuttle back to the Vehicle Assembly Building.
These birds weren't messing around: the holes they jabbed were as big as about four inches across, or 10 centimeters. Woodpeckers peck around mating season to proclaim their territory and attract a mate. Bird specialists that were called to the scene said that these birds usually hammer into tree limbs or tin roofs to attract female attention. Pecking into a space shuttle fuel tank was quite the opportunity for a next-level mating dance.
So how did NASA prevent woodpeckers from using rockets as flirting tools? The bird specialists suggested they rig up a decoy owl near the launch pads, since owls are predators of woodpeckers. Just setting it up wasn't enough; NASA employees had to move the decoy to different spots so the woodpeckers wouldn't figure out it was fake. To top it off, they played tapes of hooting owls, just to add to the realism. NASA even set up a team known as Bird Investigation Review and Deterrent — acronym BIRD — to patrol the area and blast air horns when they saw a woodpecker coming near. And what do you know, it worked! Discovery successfully launched on July 13, no pesky little woodpeckers in sight.
Let’s recap the main things we learned today
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CODY: Today’s stories were written by Reuben Westmaas, Grant Currin, and Joanie Faletto, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. Curiosity Daily is produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!