When Do Fish Sleep? Read Free

Bathroom?
     
    This Imponderable was sent in by reader Jane W. Brown in a letter dated May 12, 1986. Jane was clearly a discerning seer of emergent popular culture trends:
     
Staying in less than deluxe lodgings has led me to wonder why, and how, the custom of folding under the two outside corners on a roll of bathroom paper was begun. This operation creates a V on the last exposed edge of the tissue. I first noticed this bizarre sight in a LaQuinta Motor Inn. Then I stayed in some Holiday Inns while on a business trip. There, too, the bathroom paper had been tediously tucked in on the outside edges, the large V standing out, begging for attention. Recently, I upgraded my accommodations and spent several nights in a Marriott and an Intercontinental. Right: the bathroom paper was also arranged in this contorted fashion. Why?
     
    Jane, enterprisingly, included an audiovisual aid along with her letter, as if to prove she wasn’t crazy: a specimen of the mysterious V toilet paper. Since Jane wrote her letter, the folded toilet paper trick has run rampant in the lodging industry.
    We contacted most of the largest chains of innkeepers in the country and received the same answer from all. Perhaps James P. McCauley, executive director of the International Association of Holiday Inns, stated it best:
     
Hotels want to give their guests the confidence that the bathroom has been cleaned since the last guest has used the room. To accomplish this, the maid will fold over the last piece of toilet paper to assure that no one has used the toilet paper since the room was cleaned. It is subtle but effective.
     
    Maybe too subtle for us. Call us sentimental old fools, but we still like the old “Sanitized for Your Protection” strips across the toilet seat.
     
Submitted by Jane W. Brown of Giddings, Texas.
     
     
    Why Do Gas Gauges in Automobiles Take and Eternity to Go from Registering Full to Half-full, and Then Drop to Empty in the Speed of Light?
     
    On a long trek down our illustrious interstate highway system, we will do anything to alleviate boredom. The roadway equivalent of reading cereal boxes at breakfast is obsessing about odometers and fuel gauges.
    Nothing is more dispiriting after a fill-up at the service station than traveling sixty miles and watching the gas gauge stand still. Although part of us longs to believe that our car is registering phenomenal mileage records, the other part of us wants the gauge to move to prove to ourselves that we are actually making decent time and have not, through some kind of Twilight Zone alternate reality, actually been riding on a treadmill for the last hour. Our gas gauge becomes the arbiter of our progress. Even when the needle starts to move, and the gauge registers three-quarters’ full, we sometimes feel as if we have been traveling for days.
    How nice it would be to have a gauge move steadily down toward empty. Just as we are about to give in to despair, though, after the gauge hits half-full, the needle starts darting toward empty as if it had just discovered the principle of gravity. Whereas it seemed that we had to pass time zones before the needle would move to the left at all, suddenly we are afraid that we are going to run out of gas. Where is that next rest station?
    There must be a better way. Why don’t fuel gauges actually register what proportion of the tank is filled with gasoline? The automakers and gauge manufacturers are well aware that a “half-full” reading on a gas gauge is really closer to “one-third” full, and they have reasons for preserving this inaccuracy.
    The gauge relies upon a sensor in the tank to relay the fuel level. The sensor consists of a float and linkage connected to a variable resistor. The resistance value fluctuates as the float moves up and down.
    If a gas tank is filled to capacity, the liquid is filled higher than the float has the physical ability to rise . When the float is at the top of its stroke, the gauge will always