QUESTION: Why was there a war in 1812?
ANSWER: This was the most boring war in American history. If you can even name the principal combatants we will send you a free toaster. (And if "Treaty of Ghent" pops to mind, you also get the Why Things Are board game, as soon as we invent it.)The war was dull because one of the two major combatants, the United States, did not have a military. An astonishing oversight! Actually we had about 10,000 soldiers, but figure that if every one of them had a musket you would have had the equivalent firepower of a single Miami drug dealer. The U.S. Navy also had 20 ships, which compares favorably to such tourist attractions as Cypress Gardens, Fla. Several major "sea battles" were actually on LAKES, like Lake Erie and Lake Champlain and, for all we know, the little pond in Central Park with the radio-controlled boats. So pitiful was this war that when tunesmith Francis Scott Key watched the bombs bursting in air over Fort McHenry, he was appalled that they couldn't even knock out that one little flag.
The bad guys were the British, just like the previous war. President James Madison declared war in 1812 because the British were impinging on our foreign trade, hassling merchant ships and yanking British-born sailors off American boats; also they were supposedly sending arms to the Indians in the Western territories. There's a school of thought that the War Hawks in the U.S. Congress wanted the war with Great Britain so we could steal more Indian land. So like most wars there's an underlying real estate motive.
In any case, since we didn't have much of a military, and since the British were more interested in fighting the French in Europe, the War of 1812 became a scattershot affair, with conflicts popping up here and there in strange places, like semi-pro basketball franchises. At one point the Americans invaded Canada across the Detroit river, but we absent-mindedly brought only 2,000 men to do the entire job, and they succeeded in running back to Detroit and getting captured, along with Detroit itself. The real low moment for the United States came when the British sauntered into Washington, D.C., and burned down the Capitol and the White House. (Where are the Redcoats now, when we really need them?) Eventually the United States had some naval wins, thanks to free-lance ship captains hired to fight the war for us. Ultimately, everyone got tired and went home.
In December 1814 the Treaty of Ghent allowed both sides to claim victory and stop fighting, except that there was no way to communicate in those days, except by shouting, and so on Jan. 8, 1815, there was yet another battle, this one in New Orleans. The Americans won, but it was too late, because the fight had already been declared a draw.
QUESTION: Why don't we see the world upside down even though the image is flipped by the lenses of our eyeballs?
ANSWER: Check any anatomy textbook. The lens of the eyeball inverts the entering light, so the image of the world is projected upside-down on the back of the retina. If you are walking down the street, the image of the sidewalk shines on the top of the retina, and the image of the clouds overhead shines on the bottom of the retina.
So why do we see the world right side up? One ophthalmologist told us rather feebly that the brain "readjusts" the image. This is not so. The brain makes no correction whatsoever. The fact is, we do see the world upside down, sort of. We just don't realize it. We define "up" as that which hits the bottom of our retina, and "down" as that which hits the top. Moreover, "down" and "up" are merely social conventions that we learn as we grow up. We are told that "down" is the direction of gravitational pull. If we were told that gravity pulled us "up" to the ground "over our feet" then we'd be content with that, too. This is because there is no up and down in nature.
Confused? Try this: Pretend you are, in fact, upside down. Pretend the world around you is constructed on the underside of a table that is accelerating through space in the direction of your head, creating the equivalent of gravity at your feet. What do you notice? That nothing is different.
Now let's go to the scientific literature. There have been several experiments in which people wore funny goggles equipped with inverting prisms, causing the ground to hit the lower part of the retina and the sky to hit the upper part. The goggle-wearers were initially discombobulated. They didn't feel upside down, exactly, because all their visual cues were still lined up correctly - and gravity still pulled them toward the ground at their feet. But they still had a sense of unreality.
A Japanese study in 1980, published in Kyushu Neuro-psychiatry, stated that over the course of a week, two goggle-wearers gradually adjusted to the inverted world, but never became completely comfortable. They never managed to read and write, and they lacked dexterity. A similar study by the Soviets, published in the September 1974 issue of the journal Voprosy Psikhologii, said it took eight days for the subjects to become accustomed to the inverted world. When the prisms were removed, it took another couple of days to set things straight again. The experiments indicate that, over time, it doesn't matter whether the light is inverted when it hits the retina, because the right-side-up nature of the world is something we learn, not an objective reality.
The bottom line is that in a world without an objective up or down, it doesn't matter if you're standing on the North Pole or the South Pole, you'll always feel right side up. Though we'd prefer the North Pole just in case.
THE MAILBAG: Lucia W. of Troy, Mich., sent a letter of desperation, asking if we knew the technical name for the pound sign on a telephone. Lucia, we are told by AT&T Bell Labs that it is, as you suspect, the "octothorp," although there is some question as to whether there's an "e" on the end. The word is rather controversial. Western Electric, the former AT&T subsidiary that manufactured telephones, complained in 1973 that the word "octothorp" was a contrivance of unknown origin, and that the real name for the button is the "number sign." Frankly we think it should be called the Tic-Tac-Toe button.