Question: A band of Y1Kers slip through a time-space wormhole and show up at your Y2K party. What can you expect in these people of 1,000 years ago?
Answer: Look for diminished stature, with the tallest males no more than 5'5" and thin though muscular bodies, says University of Alaska-Fairbanks anthropologist Joel Irish. The very young and the very old would be under-represented, with 40-plusers rare indeed. Anticipate cavity-filled or gap-toothed mouths in the over-30 agriculturalists, better dentition in the hunter-gatherers but still a lot of gumline stumps from the coarser foods.Enjoy the colorful clothing and hair styles, but better get the folk to a shower fast, and beware the lice and fleas, adds Memorial University of Newfoundland archeologist Peter Pope. Many 1Kers will also bear the ravages of smallpox, leprosy and tuberculosis, which scarred their flesh and even their bones.
If your guests hail from northern Europe, they will likely want to drink beer, or rather ale, all day, from breakfast on. You won't be able to convince them to drink water, because in their experience it isn't safe. For dinner, prepare some porridge or take them out to an Indian restaurant for a curry. "This," says Pope, "will resemble their food more than a plate of meat, potatoes and vegetables, which would seem very unusual to them."
Question: Could you swim all the way from the United States to Russia nonstop?
Answer: Easy, if you're geared up for cold water and can do a few miles. In the Bering Strait between Siberia and Alaska lies Little Diomede Island, part of Alaska. Two-and-a-half miles west, across the international boundary, lies
Big Diomede Island, part of Russia. A chilly swim even in summer, but not an impossible one -- it's been done -- in spite of having to dodge any ice floes. Yet however mighty your swimstroke, you still wouldn't arrive officially until the following day, due to crossing the international dateline.
Question: You're in love with a beautiful mathematician, but she won't marry you until you pass the "card shuffle ordeal": You must shuffle and reshuffle a 52-card deck back to its original order. Will your love be requited?
Answer: Forget ever tasting that first connubial kiss, for as Isaac Asimov calculates in his "Book of Facts," the number of theoretical sequences in a randomly shuffled deck is about 80 followed by 66 zeroes. Shuffling once per second, you would reach a 50-50 chance of success in 2 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years!
So better shuffle on to your next romance prospect. The calculating lady loves you not.
Send STRANGE questions to brothers Bill and Rich at strangetrue@compuserve.com