Microsoft is famous for asking puzzle-type interview questions, and the most famous one is “Why are manhole covers round?”. It was originally meant as a psychological assessment of how one approaches a question with more than one “right” answer, however the problem exerts a strange fascination on people, who seek to find alternate explanations, from the pragmatic and satirical to the philosophical.
A popular answer to this question is that a round manhole cover cannot fall through its circular opening, whereas a square manhole cover may fall in if it was inserted diagonally in the aperture (A Reuleaux triangle or other curve of constant width would also serve this purpose, but round covers are much easier to manufacture.). Another “right” answer could be that round tubes are the strongest and most material-efficient shape against the compression of the earth around them. Others have also suggested that round covers are easier to maneuver (you can roll them) and they need not be aligned to put them back. More creative answers include: the spherical shape of human eyes make us biased to round shapes. But my favourite has to be Richard Feynman’s:Interviewer: We are going to recommend you for immediate hiring into the marketing department.
A recent study suggests that unattractive individuals commit more crime than people who are average or good looking. Researchers from the University of Colorado and Georgia State University determined this based on a survey of 15,000 teenagers interviewed in 1994 and again in 1997 and 2002. From the Washington Post:
Cute guys were uniformly less likely than averages would indicate to have committed seven crimes including burglary and selling drugs, while the unhandsome were consistently more likely to have broken the law.
Very attractive high school girls were less likely to commit six of the seven crimes, while those rated unattractive were more likely to have done six of seven, controlling for personal and family characteristics known to be associated with criminal behavior…
Other studies have shown that unattractive men and women are less likely to be hired, and that they earn less money, than the better-looking. Such inferior circumstances may steer some to crime, (the researchers) suggest. They also report that more attractive students have better grades and more polished social skills, which means they graduate with a greater chance of staying out of trouble.
www.searchingforbigfoot.comThe released images of a hairy humanoid corpse stuffed into a freezer initially excited the hopes of many, but ultimately convinced few. The story sparked public arguments between established Bigfoot researchers and the Georgia group, who defended themselves aggressively in the face of mounting criticism and searching questions. The full story of the resulting media storm can be followed on Loren Coleman’s blog.
During a press conference held in a Palo Alto, California, hotel on 15 August, attended by nearly 100 press and TV reporters and a man in a gorilla suit who shouted questions, Dyer – a former corrections officer who also runs a ‘Bigfoot tours’ business – said: “There’s a lot of comment being made that it looks fake, or it looks like a suit, but these people weren’t there when I was sweating, pulling this thing through the woods.” The conference was arranged by Tom Biscardi, a Californian Bigfoot promoter, who three years earlier in 2005 had claimed to be party to the capture of a creature, and only on the eve of being exposed on George Noory’s Coast to Coast radio show, did he excuse himself as having been “scammed by a woman in Nevada”.
Back to the present, and the press conference did not go well for the good old boys from Georgia. As the bubble of the first, uncritical exposure on national and international media burst, the ridicule began and the prospects of making money from their pictures, film and freezer ‘tableau’ rapidly dwindled. Biscardi, who had gone to Atlanta to see the latest ‘corpse’, did not help when he told reporters: “I touched it. This is ‘Eureka!’ man.”
Then Dyer’s press-conference partner Matthew Whitton, a police officer on sick leave, had to acknowledge that he had created suspect videos for YouTube, in one of which his brother posed as a scientist, and another in which he seems to admit that the body is a fake. He then said it was made “to throw off” their critics (whom he called “psychos” and “stalkers”), by which he seemed to mean anyone in the cryptozoology camp who had made overtly sceptical comments about the object in the freezer. When asked how much money they hoped to make, Biscardi chipped in with: “As much as we can”. He was certainly charging viewers of his website premium rates to watch dubious video footage.
The dénouement to this unsavoury saga came quickly, but not before Biscardi bought the ‘corpse’ from Dyer and Whitton for an “undisclosed sum”. Only then (on 17 August) did he send a colleague, self-styled ‘Sasquatch detective’ Steve Kulls, to examine it more closely. As the block of ice was thawed, Kulls took samples of hair and burned them; he was surprised to find they melted. As the feet were exposed, Kulls reached into the freezer to feel them. They were made of rubber!
On 19 August, Fox News revealed publicly what everyone now suspected: the ‘body’ was a widely-available hire costume that had been stuffed with road kill and then frozen, possibly inspired by the ‘look and smell’ of the famous ‘Minnesota Iceman’ that had so impressed cryptozoology’s founders Dr Bernard Heuvelmans and Ivan Sanderson. Kulls reported the bad news to Biscardi, but by the time he got to Dyer and Whitton’s hotel the pair had already checked out. Without any sense of irony, Biscardi said he would be seeking legal redress.
The exasperated groans of serious cryptozoologists, who had seen such wild claims before, could be heard across the web. Coleman told FT that the public interest in this “Piltdown of Sasquatchery” was so great that possibly 85 per cent of the “server’s forums, websites, and blogs [concerning Bigfoot] crashed and had to be rebuilt from 12 August through 18 August”. The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, the oldest group of its kind – which had distanced itself from the Georgia group early on – acknowledged that this hoax will linger for a long time, awakened by each Google search for ‘Bigfoot’. In time, though, they hoped, serious research into North American manimals would recover and continue, much as ufology did after the ‘Alien Autopsy’ hoax.
Wired, 15 Aug; Fox News, 19 Aug; Newsweek, 25 Aug 2008.
