What if the Earth was a Cube?

If the earth was a perfect cube, what would the gravitational effect be at the edges? Could you casually step over the 90-degree bend onto an adjacent face?

The first thing you notice on being teleported to cubical earth is that you’re at the edge of a vast body of water we’ll call the Central Ocean. The land rises steeply away from the shore — apparently, the ocean lies in a basin. This strikes you as odd since you’d think the sides of a cubical planet would be flat. Patience. All will soon become clear.

Turning from the ocean and looking out over the land, you discover something else — you can see vast distances. On spherical earth, the horizon on average is a little over three miles away. On cubical earth you can, in theory, see to the edge of the planet, potentially a distance of thousands of kilometers.  Up the slope you’re standing on, impossibly far off, you can make out a gigantic mountain peak — one of the corners, you realize, of your cubical world.

Time to get hiking. I hope you’re in good shape since the path literally becomes steeper with every step — you’ll have the impression of climbing up the inside of a round bowl. Worse, the mountain is stupefyingly high. How high? Well, the tallest known mountain in the solar system is Olympus Mons on Mars, 22 kilometers high from base to peak. In contrast, the vertical rise from low point to high point on cubical earth is about 3 700 kilometers.

So you’ll need to bring a spacesuit — the atmosphere gets progressively thinner until there’s none at all and you’re in the blackness of space. One consolation is that your weight steadily decreases. If you weigh 200 pounds at sea level back on spherical earth, you’ll discover when you finally reach the peak that you weigh just 103.

But here you are, on top at last. You don’t have the sense of walking around 90-degree corners that you may naively imagine. Rather, the peak looks like the tip of a three-sided pyramid. The three sides fall away steeply — if you lose your footing you’ll have a wicked drop.

On the plus side, the view is like none on earth, or on any planet anywhere. You can sight down one edge of the cube to a far corner, a distance of some 10 000 kilometers away. Even more strikingly, you see all the atmosphere and water has been concentrated by gravity into a blob in the middle of each face, with the corners and edges poking out into space. You realize your cubical planet isn’t one world but six, each face’s segment of the biosphere isolated from the others by the hopeless climb.

Bizarre? Yup. Impossible, too. You may want your planet to be cubical. Just about every other force in the universe wants it round.

By Cecil Adams for The Straight Dope

Could You Buy All the Silver in the World?

In the early seventies, amidst political upheaval, inflationary pressures and stagnant economic growth, the richest family in America (at the time), the Hunt family of Texas, tried to corner the market on precious metals. As a way to hedge themselves from the rampart printing of dollars the US government was doing, the Hunts decided to accumulate large amounts of hard asset investments. Since gold could not be held by private citizens back then, the Hunt brothers focused on silver.

In 1979, the Hunt brothers, along with a group of wealthy Arabs, formed a pool buying silver and silver futures. The Hunt brothers used their positions in silver futures to acquire more of the physical metal. As cash was continually losing value due to inflation, the Hunts decided to settle their long silver futures contracts with delivery of silver, instead of cash settlement. Before too long, they had amassed over 200 million ounces of silver which was about half of the world’s supply.

Prices soon started to appreciate. When they started, the price of silver was below $5/oz. By late 1979  prices had increased tenfold and were trading near $55/oz.  As prices went higher and new buyers got into the market, the exchanges became increasingly fearful of defaulting. As the Hunts owned 77% of the world’s silver, either in physical form or futures contracts, the market had been cornered. The Hunts’ $1 billion investment was now worth around $4.5 billion. 

The U.S. government became concerned over what it saw as a clear attempt at manipulating the nation’s silver reserves.  Federal commodities regulators introduced special rules to prevent any more long position contracts from being written or sold for silver futures. This stopped the Hunts from increasing their positions by temporarily suspending the fundamental rules of the commodities market. 

The Hunt name, however, kept them afloat with easy terms on more short-term capital. The Federal Reserve then took an unusual step: it strongly encouraged banks to stop making loans for speculative activity. When it became clear that the government was after the Hunts’ scalps, their credit dried up. Concerns that the Hunts might not be able to meet margins with new loans and would go under (pulling several brokerages and banks with them), put further downward pressure on the price of silver. On March 27, 1980, the Hunt brothers finally missed a margin call and the market plunged; silver led the way, dropping to under $11 from its high of $48.70. 

Government officials considered a bailout to prevent systemic chaos. The action was vetoed, however, because the government agencies didn’t want to be seen as underwriting dangerous financial speculation. In the end, the Hunt name held true, and the brothers arranged a private bailout from a consortium of banks and companies. The Hunts were dragged in front of Congress, scolded, charged with manipulation, fined, fined again and forced into bankruptcy. It took nearly a decade for them to unwind all their silver holdings and satisfy creditors, and the final bill left them billions poorer.

Contributed by Taylor Cook

The Giftcard Economy

There is a good reason that Giftcards are known within the retail industry as a stored-value product: they store their value very well, and often permanently. The financial-services research firm TowerGroup estimates that of the $100 billion spent on gift cards in 2010, roughly $12 billion will never be redeemed — “a bigger impact on consumers,” Tower notes, “than the combined total of both debit and credit card fraud.” A survey by Marketing Workshop Inc. found that only 30 percent of recipients use a gift card within a month of receiving it, while Consumer Reports estimates that 19 percent of the people who received a gift card in 2010 never used it.

Considering that two-thirds of all holiday shoppers in 2010 planned to give someone else a gift card, you most likely received one yourself. Perhaps you are among the exceptional minority, and you have already spent it, or soon will. But the odds say that it has instead wound up in your sock drawer.

From Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt’s book Freakonomics

Breezes About Kitchener

In 1916, after much controversy, Berlin, Ontario, Canada (my hometown) was re-named Kitchener as a result of anti-German sentiment during the First World War. A revision was necessary to the popular title of the city’s souvenir pamphlet 'Breezes About Berlin'. Rather than rework the name of the pamphlet (Kicking Around Kitchener?) city leadership decided to simply create stickers that could be placed over the old phrase. 

The decision was emblematic of Kitchener's municipal decision-making over the next century, which tended to be ad-hoc, shortsighted, and to the detriment of any coherent cultural identity.

The Art of Lettuce

Edward Henry Weston (March 24, 1886 – January 1, 1958) was a 20th century American photographer. He has been called one of the most innovative and influential American photographers and one of the masters of 20th century photography. Weston is known for his richly detailed and precisely composed black-and-white images of semi-abstract nudes, landscapes, and organic forms including close-up studies of shells, vegetables, and rocks.

In 1937 Weston was the first photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, and over the next two years he produced nearly 1,400 negatives using his 8 × 10 view camera. Some of his most famous photographs were taken of the trees and rocks at Point Lobos, California, near where he lived for many years. In 1947 Weston was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and he stopped photographing soon thereafter. He spent the remaining ten years of his life overseeing the printing of more than 1,000 of his most famous images.