Question: What would dogs or cats make of a movie at the cinema? Is their vision similar enough to ours that they might actually give "paws up" to the performance?
Answer: Depends on where they sit, since their poorer visual acuity will mean they have trouble reading the credits or subtitles from the back rows, says University of Minnesota psychologist Gordon E. Legge. "I'd recommend they sit near the front."
Cats and dogs may not appreciate the advances of technicolor, etc. Although both have some color vision, it is definitely inferior to trichromatic human color vision. So they may be content with black and white, caring little for "Fantasia" or other colorful flicks.
Because cats do better than people at low levels of illumination (a higher proportion of rods in their retina, the cells sensitive to low light), they might particularly enjoy night-time scenes or stories — maybe "Night of the Living Dead" would be a big hit. Cats are also good at seeing gradations of shading, so they'd probably like horror movies with blobs and shadowy figures.
"But since smell is likely a more salient sense for dogs (and maybe cats too), expect them to be distracted from the main feature by the hot buttered popcorn."
Question: Could a deaf person work as a piano tuner?
Answer: The very best tunings must still be done by ear, but electronic tuning devices such as the Sanderson Accu-Tuner can indicate pitch very accurately on a visible display, says University of Michigan piano technologist Robert Grijalva. Dozens of "ideal" tunings for various models of piano can be recorded, stored, then recalled at the push of a button — sometimes even tailored to specific shipping destinations. The piano is given an "exotic" tuning, which with luck results in a properly tuned piano once it arrives, perhaps thousands of miles from the factory of origin.
"So the answer would be a qualified yes."
Question: When elephants need to cross a river and can't find a bridge, what's their recourse?
Answer: Excellent swimmers, they can go for hours, says Guy Murchie in "The Seven Mysteries of Life." Faced with a strong current, elephants have been known to erect their trunk as a snorkel, then march right across rivers 12 feet deep, treading bottom.
They snorkel too while swimming. The mammoth animals are lightened greatly by body buoyancy, leading to speculations long ago that ancestral elephants may have come out of the seas. New evidence for this, from the University of Melbourne, traces early embryological features of the elephant — respiratory, reproductive, etc. — to creatures well adapted to life in an aquatic environment.
Then time came — who knows why — when they packed up their trunks and hit the beachhead.
Send STRANGE questions to brothers Bill and Rich at strangetrue@compuserve.com.