Read Online Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy by Bathroom Readers’ Institute - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
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Oliver Twist , there’s a Great Expectations boat ride, the Haunted House of Ebenezer Scrooge, a pawnshop, and a debtor’s prison. Throughout the park, hired actors pose as hungry, filthy street urchins.
LOVE LAND
The claim to fame of this park, located on Jeju Island in South Korea, is its 140 giant, sexually explicit sculptures. It’s designed to be educational; neither South Korea’s schools nor its popular culture offer much in the way of sex education, and arranged marriages are still commonplace. So this park was opened by the art department of Hongik University as a honeymoon destination. Theoretically, newlyweds are supposed to study and learn from the imposing white sculptures of giant reproductive organs and people engaged in various sexual positions. No kiddie rides here; you must be 18 or older to enter.
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World’s stinkiest bird: the Hoatzin, from Colombia. They smell like cow manure .
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SPACE JUNK
Imagine a shiny screw—just a screw—tumbling through space. Ahead is a man, oblivious, protected only by his spacesuit. He takes a break from his work to admire the view of the blue-green Earth hanging in the blackness of…WHAM!—the screw pierces the man’s leg and shoots out the other side! He screams as the oxygen is sucked from his lungs…and the blood-red screw continues on its way .
O UT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND
A vast junkyard of potentially lethal projectiles surrounds our planet, and it’s been accumulating since the 1950s. For decades, space programs in the United States, the U.S.S.R., and other nations followed a similar process: Build a satellite, attach it to a rocket, and blast it into space. Once out of Earth’s atmosphere, the satellite separated from the rocket and went into its planned orbit. But what happened to the rocket? No one gave it too much thought; after all, space is big, and rockets are tiny in comparison. And so, too, are the satellites, which had only limited battery life to begin with. So all that equipment floated in space, and there was no plan in place to dispose of it. Occasionally, leftover fuel would build up pressure in an unventilated tank and cause an explosion. When that happened, what was once a rocket transformed into a cloud of floating debris. And as more countries joined the space race, even more rockets and satellites were launched into orbit.
Today, in addition to about 900 operational satellites, there are nearly 2,500 derelict ones up there. The oldest of them is the second satellite the United States ever launched, Vanguard 1 , which has been orbiting Earth since March 17, 1958.
TOO MANY ODO’S IN THE LEO
The part of space that is most crowded with old junk is, not surprisingly, the part that’s easiest to get to and the most useful to us. More than half of all satellites—along with the International Space Station and any spacecraft that happen to be flying—circle the planet within a range of altitude called Low Earth Orbit (LEO), which stretches from about 124 to 1,240 miles up. (By comparison, the moon is more than 200,000 miles away.)
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Eeew! International Space Station astronauts change their underwear only twice a week .
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The problem with filling this most useful of altitudes with junk is that the junk doesn’t just float around harmlessly up there; it’s actually moving incredibly fast—at an orbital speed of up to 17,000 miles per hour. At speeds like that, even the smallest debris particle can cause significant damage to whatever it hits; tiny flecks of paint and pieces of grit have been shown to pit the surface of expensive satellites. And a direct collision with anything larger than about a half-inch in diameter could actually destroy a satellite—or, for that matter, a manned spacecraft.
To counter these dangers, NASA and other space agencies try to catalog and track every piece of junk they can. The United States Space Surveillance Network monitors the location of more than 19,000 individual orbital debris
LOVE LAND
The claim to fame of this park, located on Jeju Island in South Korea, is its 140 giant, sexually explicit sculptures. It’s designed to be educational; neither South Korea’s schools nor its popular culture offer much in the way of sex education, and arranged marriages are still commonplace. So this park was opened by the art department of Hongik University as a honeymoon destination. Theoretically, newlyweds are supposed to study and learn from the imposing white sculptures of giant reproductive organs and people engaged in various sexual positions. No kiddie rides here; you must be 18 or older to enter.
----
World’s stinkiest bird: the Hoatzin, from Colombia. They smell like cow manure .
----
SPACE JUNK
Imagine a shiny screw—just a screw—tumbling through space. Ahead is a man, oblivious, protected only by his spacesuit. He takes a break from his work to admire the view of the blue-green Earth hanging in the blackness of…WHAM!—the screw pierces the man’s leg and shoots out the other side! He screams as the oxygen is sucked from his lungs…and the blood-red screw continues on its way .
O UT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND
A vast junkyard of potentially lethal projectiles surrounds our planet, and it’s been accumulating since the 1950s. For decades, space programs in the United States, the U.S.S.R., and other nations followed a similar process: Build a satellite, attach it to a rocket, and blast it into space. Once out of Earth’s atmosphere, the satellite separated from the rocket and went into its planned orbit. But what happened to the rocket? No one gave it too much thought; after all, space is big, and rockets are tiny in comparison. And so, too, are the satellites, which had only limited battery life to begin with. So all that equipment floated in space, and there was no plan in place to dispose of it. Occasionally, leftover fuel would build up pressure in an unventilated tank and cause an explosion. When that happened, what was once a rocket transformed into a cloud of floating debris. And as more countries joined the space race, even more rockets and satellites were launched into orbit.
Today, in addition to about 900 operational satellites, there are nearly 2,500 derelict ones up there. The oldest of them is the second satellite the United States ever launched, Vanguard 1 , which has been orbiting Earth since March 17, 1958.
TOO MANY ODO’S IN THE LEO
The part of space that is most crowded with old junk is, not surprisingly, the part that’s easiest to get to and the most useful to us. More than half of all satellites—along with the International Space Station and any spacecraft that happen to be flying—circle the planet within a range of altitude called Low Earth Orbit (LEO), which stretches from about 124 to 1,240 miles up. (By comparison, the moon is more than 200,000 miles away.)
----
Eeew! International Space Station astronauts change their underwear only twice a week .
----
The problem with filling this most useful of altitudes with junk is that the junk doesn’t just float around harmlessly up there; it’s actually moving incredibly fast—at an orbital speed of up to 17,000 miles per hour. At speeds like that, even the smallest debris particle can cause significant damage to whatever it hits; tiny flecks of paint and pieces of grit have been shown to pit the surface of expensive satellites. And a direct collision with anything larger than about a half-inch in diameter could actually destroy a satellite—or, for that matter, a manned spacecraft.
To counter these dangers, NASA and other space agencies try to catalog and track every piece of junk they can. The United States Space Surveillance Network monitors the location of more than 19,000 individual orbital debris
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