October 13, 2000

Strange But True!

Q. Lover, where’d you get that wonderful face?

A. Some 600 million years ago, the human face-to-be was little more than the leading edge of a hungry tube swimming in the sea, says anthropologist David Givens in “Love Signals.”

“Picture the business end of a vacuum-cleaner hose and you’ll understand the basic ancestral structure of the human face.” Eventually, primitive fish faces emerged, two eyes and a snout set over a mouth. We owe our basic eyes-nose-mouth architecture to fish, but the archaic fish face was expressionless and incapable of courtship.

Then little furry warm-blooded mammals took faces one step better, freeing them up and making them mobile. For the first time in evolutionary history, animals could wink, grin and leer.

Real facial liberation came with the primates, as during courtship lips compress, brows lower, ears flatten, eyes widen, teeth bare and tongues show. The zenith is the human face, seductive as a neon sign in Las Vegas. “One has only to think of Rudolph Valentino’s eyes, Marilyn Monroe’s sugary pout, the otherworldly mouth of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, and the painful last look Bergman gives Bogart in ‘Casablanca.’ We’ve come a long way from the fishes.”

Q. Know any palindromes? “Radar” and “Madam, I’m Adam” are a couple, read the same backwards or forwards. Numbers too can form palindromes, as in an amusing old party trick.

A. Take a number such as 38 and add to it its reverse: 38 + 83 = 121, a palindromic number. Try 138 + 831. The sum 969 is also a palindrome.

Sometimes the process will need to be carried out for several steps, as reported in “Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts”: 139 + 931 = 1070; then 1070 + 0701 = 1771.

But don't try starting with 196! This seems to be one exception. A Russian mathematician ran this through a computer for thousands of steps — and still no palindrome.

Previous columns:

• Strange But True!, 10-06-2000
• Strange But True!, 09-29-2000