Question: If steel + gas + rubber are made to equal race car speed, what goes into making the car safer? How do drivers today survive some really spectacular crashes?

Answer: At Daytona 2003, when Ryan Newman's car pirouetted twice, then slid across the infield and landed upside down, his major complaint was dirt in his teeth, says Diandra Leslie-Pelecky in "The Physics of NASCAR." "However, we aren't that far removed from the days when drivers didn't joke about crashes." A race car at 180 mph has 16 times the motion energy as at 45 mph. If you used that same energy to shoot a 150-pound person from a cannon, it would propel the ejectee five miles straight up!

In 2007, NASCAR started requiring six-point restraint harnesses, with two shoulder straps, two belts that wrap the legs and two lap belts that restrain the pelvis (the pelvic bone is one of the body's strongest). The harnesses work with the seat to keep the driver in the car and to distribute the forces across the body. When a driver goes from 180 mph to a stop, all his (and the car's) motion energy must be transformed into other types of energy, such as the brake force on the rotor, heat friction, sound energy and light. Crush zones extend collision time for a softer stop, front and back bumpers absorb energy, full-face helmets protect the entire head.

Still, injuries will never be eliminated entirely from motorsports. As one official put it, "If you give 43 guys, most from age 20 to 35, cars this powerful, there's only so safe you can make them."

Question: You know about upper-case and lower-case lettering, but what about those CamelCase words such as the city of SeaTac, Washington, and actress ZaSu Pitts? Where's the camel and where are the humps?

Answer: Originally called "medial capitals" (or InterCaps, CoolCaps, BumpyCase), CamelCase is the formation of compound words by capitalizing each chunk to preserve its identity, thus forming a range of "humps," says New Scientist magazine. In the 1950s and '60s, this was occasionally used for corporate names and product trademarks, such as CinemaScope, VistaVision, AstroTurf. More recently, CamelCase is surging in Web addresses, an ideal application since it's not possible to put spaces into these. So surfers encounter the very common www.OneBlockOfText.com, preserving site identity in an easy-to-read way.

Question: Do you happen to know the nationality of the guy who invented the telephone?

Answer: Which one? quips Jurgen Schmidhuber in Science magazine, drawing on "The Telephone Gambit" by Seth Shulman. The famous inventorship dispute of 1876 pitted Alexander Graham Bell vs. Elisha Gray, though a number of others actually beat the famous duo to the punch by several years: French accounts tend to emphasize Charles Bourseul's theoretical underpinnings of the phone (1854); many Italians consider Antonio Meucci to be the real inventor with his 1857 operational model; Germans cite the 1860 electric telephone by Philipp Reis. Bell is championed in his home country Scotland and his adopted home Canada and the U.S., where he became a citizen six years after filing his patent. Unlike his predecessors, Bell was able to create a successful phone company, yielding him money and the p.r. resources to promote himself as the inventor.

Apparently when the time is ripe for an invention, it tends to be pursued in many places. Yet at least in popular culture, much of the credit is bestowed on the last contributor, even when the essential original insights came from others. "As they say, Columbus did not become famous because he was the first to discover America, but because he was the last."

---

Send STRANGE questions to brothers Bill and Rich at strangetrue@compuserve.com.