Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, December 9, 1993 TAG: 9312090084
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A: There have been many power nappers through the ages: Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison, Winston Churchill, Bob Hope, the Why staff, Norman Schwarzkopf. (We know, we know, in a list of great American heroes "Bob Hope" jumps out at you as incongruous.)
Naps may seem quaint and kindergartenish, but in fact they are a matter of intense scientific scrutiny. As you know from faithfully reading this column, sleep is a mysterious behavior, since it exposes the sleeper to peril and has no easily understood neurological benefit. We know only that most every creature sleeps. What's new is the realization that humans also have a natural inclination to nap. We're supposed to nap. That mid-afternoon lull you experience is genetically programmed, it's not just because your life is tedious or your professor uses the word "dichotomy" too often.
Not napping is what's unnatural. Only in work-obsessed societies, such as the United States, do people forgo the daily nap.
"Right now if you get caught napping in your office you're considered a joke if not a failure. We've got to do something to turn that perception around," says David Dinges, author of "Sleep and Alertness: Chronobiological, Behavioral and Medical Aspects of Napping" (soon to be a major motion picture starring Daniel Day-Lewis).
Dinges and his colleagues think that there's an epidemic of drowsiness- related accidents. As many as 40 percent of automobile accidents are due to inattention, he says. Dinges says people in some professions should use "prophylactic napping." Airline pilots, for example.
No one yet knows precisely why a nap works so well. We know that when you get sleepy your brain patterns become more variable, slower. "Microsleeps," brief moments when your brain exhibits the patterns we associate with being asleep, intrude into your wakefulness.
The next time you are at a boring dinner party and someone accuses you of nodding off, just say, "Excuse me. Prophylactic microsleep." Q: Why did
the Susan B. Anthony dollar bomb?
A: If the government asked you to design a dollar coin, you'd probably sit right down and make a list of design objectives, starting with:
1. Don't make it look anything like a quarter.
Unfortunately the government didn't seek your assistance, and thus America has been blessed with the professionally designed Susan B. Anthony dollar, which, although slightly larger than a quarter, doesn't seem to be 75 cents larger than a quarter. (Though we have to admit we are taking that from memory, since the Anthony dollar is nearly extinct in the wild, surviving only on the graces of grandmothers who understand that grandkids deserve big shiny coins.)
In 1990 the U.S. General Accounting Office concluded that the "Susan B" failed for several reasons, including the quarterish design. But the big mistake, said the GAO, was the failure to be brutal with the public: The dollar bill should have been eliminated.
Canadians, for example, have accepted their new dollar coin, but only because the old bill is gone. People prefer bills to coins, generally, because coins are bulkier and heavier. Americans in particular are fond of the good ol' greenback. It has symbolic resonance that exceeds its face value. The U.S. Treasury in 1979 wanted to replace the dollar bill with the Anthony coin, but Congress decreed, stupidly, that the paper and coin dollars should try to coexist.
The Mint stopped making Anthony dollars in 1982. Almost half of the 857 million Anthony dollars are still in government storage.
This doesn't mean that the Treasury Department has abandoned its dollar coin ambitions. Deficit-minded bureaucrats know that the United States would save money if it replaced the bill with the coin. Although the cost of making a dollar coin is several times the cost of making a dollar bill, a coin lasts about 30 years, while a typical dollar bill lasts only about one year and four months.
(We found out, incidentally, that the federal government has an Office of Mutilated Currency. Did you just discover that there's a secret pocket of your bluejeans with a twenty-dollar bill inside, barely recognizable after 79 trips through the laundry? The Office of Mutilated Currency will examine your money under a microscope if necessary to determine that it's the genuine article. Say your thanks tonight for the Office of Mutilated Currency.)
Anyway, a few years ago some lawmakers pushed the idea of creating a new dollar coin commemorating Christopher Columbus. Critics pointed out that Columbus was what you might call a foreigner. (Why not just put Yeltsin on a coin? Why not Saddam?) The main obstacle, however, was still the old dollar bill. Your average congressperson may be a dessicated old greedhead but he's not so stupid as to think his constituents want their dollar bills literally taken away and replaced with a mere coin.
And there was one final thing wrong with the Columbus dollar: The size. You'd think they'd make it bigger than the Susan B. Anthony, right? Nope. Same size. Another quarterish dollar. For financial and technical reasons the Mint didn't want to make a bigger coin.
The motto in the U.S. government is, if at first you don't succeed, fail, fail again. Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB