Stump Me Questions Answered in August 2001

Legend tells of a powerful magician who persuaded a Bolsover blacksmith to shoe the Devil. The blacksmith, however, drove a nail into the Devil's foot. Howling with rage, the Devil took flight towards Chesterfield. Skimming over the Church, he lashed out in agony, caught the spire and twisted it out of shape. Or did Lucifer sit on the Church and spitefully let his massive weight crush its elegant spire?

Local people, of course, have their own explanation.  Rumor had it that a virgin was getting married at the church, and the spire, never having seen a virgin bride before, leaned over to have a closer look. Should the event ever happen again, the spire will think it commonplace and straighten up.

There are, of course, more mundane explanations. 

Historians tell us of the outbreak of the Black Death in Chesterfield in 1349 - around the time that the spire was being built. Did too many skilled craftsmen fall to the Plague? Architects note the lack of cross-bracing in the 8 sides of the structure, and remind us of the weight of those lead tiles which cover the wooden spire - all 32 tons of them! 

The rest of the damage is blamed on sun, rain, wind and, according to one expert, bell-ringing!

Thanks to John M. for the answer.

"We appreciate your interest in Mr. Clean. His full name is Veritably Clean.
(He doesn't use his first name often but he won it in a contest many years ago!)

Stephanie
USA Mr. Clean Team"

2)  The rivets were a substandard material grade.  The extreme cold temperature of the water caused the rivets to become brittle.  When the ship collided with the iceberg, the rivets fractured causing gaps in the plates. These gaps allowed water in, thus sinking the ship.  Thanks to an unnamed visitor who provided me with the answer.

2)  None.  I live in an apartment.

Before clocks were invented, day and night were divided into 12 hours each.  This division wasn't practical since the length of the two periods differs as the seasons change.

The Romans also had a holiday around November 1st which was in honor of the goddess Pomona.  Nuts and apples were roasted before great bonfires.  The modern version of Halloween is believed to be a combination of the Druid and Roman festivals.

The reasons that I've been able to track down (and believe me, the Army doesn't want to talk about this) are essentially the same as when the Army started racially integrating: 1) troop morale and 2) concern over how the soldiers will react during combat.  Additionally, motherhood is often cited as a primary obstacle to full equality in the military.

2)  None, especially since this century just started.

One of the reasons they participated naked was because the Greeks thought it made the sports safer and reduced the chances of cheating.  Also, in the event of a conflict,
naked participants were easier to control because they had no weapons hidden in their clothes.

By the way, participants in the Heraea, the women's Olympics, performed in tunics.

The following is a reply from Pallv B.:

Your answer to this question is just full of CRAP. I think you just made that answer up.
And also you have NO PROOF. Here it is the real answer. 
---------------
Yes, ancient Greeks did participate in the Olympics naked after a certain date ancient Greeks participated nude in the Olympics. There are two theories as to how
nudity happened.

During the race in 720 B.C., a participant intentionally lost his shorts enabling him to
run better. Clothing was then banned from the Olympics. The other theory is that the
Spartans introduced nudity to the games in the 8th century B.C.

Here its is the PROOF.

Ancient Olympics
http://www.hickoksports.com/history/olancien.shtml
(scroll down to the 11th paragraph)

University of Pennsylvania
http://www.upenn.edu/museum/Olympics/olympicorigins.html
(scroll down to "nudity at games")

My follow-up after contacting my source, Frederick J. Kluth of http://junior.apk.net/~fjk/olympic.html:

"The fact is that it became customary.  It was not done because the Greeks were homosexuals.  Comments such as ones that I make about the fact that athletes are easier to control are truisms that help understand why nudity may have become customary but cannot be proved.  The fact is that it was customary and a part of the Greek identity.  People who held other views were regarded as barbarian.  Both the sites that you sent contain reliable information.  I do not consider them to be in conflict with what I said."

2)  In the United States, the only crimes that could result in lethal injection are capital crimes (murder).  And even then it depends on the state since not every state chooses to execute its criminals via lethal injection.

3)  If you believe the Bible or in creationism, the chicken came first.  If you believe in evolution, there had to be something to evolve to a chicken to be able to lay the egg.  Thanks to Chris D. for the help in answering this one.

There is a common assumption that a kilobyte is 1,000 bytes and a megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes, but (strangely enough) this is just not so.  And advertisers of computer accessories, i.e. RAM, play on this assumption so the average person may think they are getting more than they are.

You see way back in the early days of computers, computer scientists naturally had to come up with measures for computer-stored information, and this comes in powers of 2 (which is logical as computers are binary).  There are 8 bits in a byte; there are 1,024 bytes in a kilobyte (2 to the power of 10); and there are 1,024 kilobytes in a megabyte. So you can see that there are 8 * 1,024 * 1,024 bits in a megabyte which comes out as 8,388,608 bits.

2)  In 1937, Japan created the Yamato (built by Jure) and the Musashi (built by Mitsubishi) which were 72,800 ton ships, armed with 18.1-inch guns.  These were the largest battleships in history.

3)  There's no simple way of answering this since it there was no clear definition of what a computer was back then (calculators were considered to be computers).  So here's the best answer I could come up with:

The Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, also called the Mark I, was completed in 1944 after six years of development with Harvard University.  It was the first machine that could execute long computations automatically.  Later in the decade, IBM introduced the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (1948) as 
the company's first large-scale digital calculating machine, the successful 604 Electronic Calculating Punch (1948) - 5,600 of which were built in a 10-year period - and the Card-Programmed Electronic Calculator (1949), the first IBM product designed specifically for computation centers.

IBM signaled its commitment to electronic computing when it introduced the IBM 701, the company's first production computer and a watershed in the computing industry. Designed primarily for scientific calculations, the 701 featured the IBM-invented tape drive vacuum column, an innovation which paved the way for magnetic tape to become a popular storage medium. 

Scientists remain divided on why people have different urinary responses to eating asparagus.  One camp thinks only about half of the population have a gene enabling us to break down the sulfurous amino acids in asparagus into their smellier components.  Others think that everyone digests asparagus the same way, but only about half of us have a gene that enables us to smell the specific compounds formed in the digestion of asparagus.

A recent study found that all asparagus eaters excrete the odorous methyl mercaptan; it is the ability to detect its odor that varies from person to person.  The sulfur-containing amino acid methionine is suspected as the precursor in asparagus.

Disney's death certificate shows that he was cremated two days after his death.  The name, license number, and signature of the embalmer appearing on the death certificate are those of a real embalmer who was employed at the Forest Lawn mortuary at the time.

2)  John Mantagu was the fourth Earl of Sandwich in 1748.  Any time he could get away from his offices for an hour or two he would go out and gamble.  Since his time was usually limited, he often directed a servant to bring him roast beef between slices of bread so he could eat at the gambling table.  He wasn't the first eat a sandwich, but he was the only world leader to do it frequently in public.  As a result, his royal title was attached to the name of the meal.

This is from Angus M.:  Sandwich is an Old English name deriving from sand "sand" and wic (pronounced "witch") meaning "landing place" or "port". Wic appears in other place names such as Greenwich ("the green (grassy) port") and Norwich ("north port"). It is said that the "sand" of Sandwich, however, was not on the beach but was instead in the soil of the area, making it agriculturally rich. Anyhow, though Sandwich was once on the coast, it is now two miles inland.

To help prevent this mistake from happening, families would place the "dead" person on a table (or sometimes in a coffin) and would sit and watch over the body for a few days, in case he/she awoke.