Greenland, Statue of Liberty, emoticons all make this week's Strange But True

on February 04, 2013 at 5:59 AM, updated February 05, 2013 at 11:25 AM

statue-of-liberty.JPG Statue of Liberty  

Q: From a Parma reader: "Why is Greenland considered an island while Australia is a continent?"

A: Greenland's surface area is roughly 836,000 square miles, while Australia at 2,941,000 is 3.5 times larger, answers Dr. Matthew Edney, director of the History of Cartography Project. Moreover, Greenland is part of the North American tectonic plate, whereas Australia has its own plate, plus distinctive flora and fauna.

The real question, poses Edney, is why so many people think Greenland is of sufficient size that it should be considered a continent. The answer is that most world maps since the late 19th century have been made on the Mercator projection, but when used to map large areas on a single sheet, "it distorts areas exponentially." On the basic form used for the world map, the equator is the central axis of projection, where the scale is correct; moving away from the equator, distortion increases so rapidly that the poles cannot be shown. So Australia is shown relatively close to its proper scale, but Greenland, near the North Pole, appears greatly enlarged.

Q: What's been the greatest peril facing the Statue of Liberty since its unveiling in 1888?

A: Probably not sabotage, though a 1916 explosion set off by German agents to damage a nearby munitions dump did damage the raised arm, says Yale University materials scientist Ainissa Ramirez, as reported by Kate Greene in Discover magazine.

The 156-ton Lady Liberty, designed by French sculptor Auguste Bartholdi, is "a remarkable metallurgical success story." Its outer surface is made of copper sheeting barely a tenth of an inch thick (like two pennies pressed together) and supported by a wrought-iron skeleton designed by engineer Gustave Eiffel of Eiffel Tower fame. The copper "skin" is joined to the iron skeleton with copper braces pliable enough to endure cycles of thermal expansion and contraction. The structure's "combination of materials has allowed it to withstand more than 125 years of the harshest of environments: hot summers, cold winters, the salt spray of the surrounding sea," Ramirez says.

Although copper corrodes with exposure to salt, the corrosion forms a protective coating with a greenish hue. Over the first 30 years of the statue's life, the color gradually shifted from gold to today's iconic green. Though copper has proved a sound materials choice, over time holes have been patched and leaks plugged, with many of the iron components replaced with stainless steel.

Concludes Ramirez, who grew up in Jersey City, N.J., within sight of the statue, "It's kind of amazing to me that it's still standing. Here you have this metal in the most corrosive environment possible -- seawater -- and it's still there."

Q: Are the following true or false?

A) OMG! Emoticons R Older Than U Think!!! = -O

B) We think of emoticons as a creation of the Internet Age.

A: Both are true, though our connecting emoticons to the Internet is a flawed way of looking at it, says Sam Petulla in Wired magazine. The first Internet emoticon was quite recent, perhaps Sept. 19, 1982, when computer engineer Scott E. Fahlman posted on a Carnegie Mellon message board: "I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways. Actually it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use :-(."

But 11 years earlier, the Paris newspaper France Soir began attaching sunburst yellow smiley faces to all articles with a positive or upbeat outlook. And in 1969, the great novelist Vladimir Nabokov wrote in The New York Times that he would like to see a concave smilelike sign added to typewriters.

In 1912, author and linguist Ambrose Bierce introduced a "smiling mouth," urging its adoption. Such a smiling mouth with the full stop would be appended to every jocular or ironical sentence.

Interestingly, even medieval manuscripts from the 1400s included full figures and faces to suggest the intended emotional response.
