Don’t care much for dying? Perhaps you should move to Longyearbyen
Q. It was 1960, and Goodyear had designed prototypes of translucent illuminated tires that actually changed colours. Pretty neat. What colours were they? A. Whatever colour you wanted them to be, as they had the singular capability of matching the colour the passengers happened to be wearing, reports Evan Ackerman in “IEEE Spectrum” magazine. Unfortunately, the tires never went into production because they “didn’t perform well in the rain and melted under heavy braking. Today, Goodyear does make tires that match the colour of your outfit, so long as you always wear black.” Q. The word “yellow” has a mellow ring to it. Do you know a few fun facts about the colour? A. The earliest usage of “yellow” in English appeared in “Beowulf,” an epic poem that may date back to 700-1000 A.D. The Old English spelling, “geolu” or “geolwe,” described a shield carved from new wood, said “Mental Floss” magazine. The distinctive brown trucks of the United Parcel Service (1907) might have been yellow except that a friend convinced the founder that brown would be easier to clean. Tennis, anyone? The International Tennis Federation changed the color of tennis balls from white or black to yellow in 1972 so that TV viewers could follow the match more easily.
In 2008, M&M maker Mars revealed the number of yellow M&Ms in each variety: 14% in milk chocolate, 15% in peanut, 20% in peanut butter. And look no further than yellow for “the sea’s four-leaf clover”: A yellow lobster is six times rarer than a blue lobster, meaning “the chances of finding one are 1 in 30,000,000.” Q. “Thou shalt not die,” the Norwegian village of Longyearbyen proclaims. What could they possibly mean by this and how would they enforce it? A. With a population of 1,500-2,000, the village is one of the northernmost places on Earth with permanent residents, says Dan Lewis in his book “Now I Know.” It is well within the Arctic Circle, with polar bears roaming everywhere and temperatures never reaching what people would call “warm.” “That point led to the ban on dying.”
In 1917, a number of residents died after contracting a flu strain and were buried in the town cemetery. A decade later, it was discovered that the bodies weren’t decomposing because of the extreme cold, so unfortunately, the influenza strain was still alive. “Realizing that Longyearbyen, quite isolated from the rest of the world, had no way of handling its dead —and the risk to the living — its leaders simply declared that dying was not permitted in the town.”
How to enforce this “don’t die” dictum? Largely by prevention, it seems: the cemetery was closed to burials in 1930 and the village has no elder care housing. In case of a lifethreatening illness, “the local authorities will airlift you to the nearest regional hospital two hours away.” Q. On August 21, 2017, a dramatic total solar eclipse will traverse the continental U.S., forming a syzygy in the process. What in heaven’s name does this “wyrd” word mean? A. The term, pronounced SIZ-uh-jee, comes from the Greek “suzugos,” meaning “yoked” or “paired.” More precisely, in astronomy it suggests the alignment of three celestial bodies, such as the Sun, Earth and either the moon or a planet. A total solar eclipse, like the one visible in parts of the U.S. in August, occurs when the New Moon comes between the Sun and Earth and casts the darkest part of its shadow on Earth. Much more commonly, a Sun-Earth-moon syzygy occurs at the time of a Full Moon or a New Moon.
The word also pops up in math, poetry and biology where the meaning relates to things being joined together. For all you wordlovers, “syzygy” is also the shortest word in the Eng-