Free Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader by Bathroom Readers’ Institute

of tasks that result in the same reward, such as taking a long, circuitous route through a maze or the shortest, most direct route to a piece of cheese, rats instinctively seek out the choice that requires the least amount of effort.
     
    Concept: Gresham’s Law (Economics)
    What It Means: Where coins minted from precious metals like silver and gold are concerned, “bad money will drive out good.” If, for example, the value of the silver in a $1 coin rises above $1, speculators will remove the coins from circulation to melt down the silver and sell it at a profit, leaving only coins whose metal content is worth less than their face value. Now that precious metals are no longer used in coins, the theory no longer applies.
     
    Concept: Fallibilism (Philosophy)
    What It Means: It’s the doctrine that nothing can be known with absolute certainty, although imperfect knowledge is still possible. Fallibilism is widely believed to be true…but can we really know for sure?

EVACUATE NOW!
    No, it isn’t an article on Ex-Lax. These are the stories of some of the
most famous and infamous mass evacuations of people in history.

DUNKIRK, FRANCE
    Trapped! In May 1940, nine months into World War II, several German Panzer divisions tore into France, then swooped north, and in just days reached the English Channel. In the mayhem, hundreds of thousands of British, French, and Belgian troops were trapped in a pocket around the harbor town of Dunkirk, France, surrounded by a much larger and better-equipped German army. If they were killed or captured, said British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, “the whole root, core, and brain of the British Army” would be lost, setting the stage for a Nazi invasion of Great Britain.
    Evacuate! British leaders decided to evacuate as many soldiers as possible. They put out a call to all English citizens for private vessels—and more than 700 responded. On the night of May 26, an armada of 200 destroyers, along with the 700 fishing boats, yachts, barges, sloops, and private ships of every kind, poured across the English Channel. Those “little boats of Dunkirk,” as they were later called, motored up to the shoreline, loaded soldiers aboard, and ferried them to the waiting destroyers. This went on for nine days, all amidst the din (and danger) of artillery fire from land and strafing bullets and bombs from Luftwaffe airplanes. When it was over, an astounding 338,226 soldiers had been carried safely back to England. The evacuation of Dunkirk was hailed as a “miracle,” proved to be a huge morale-booster for the British, and may have thwarted the German invasion of Britain.

MISSISSAUGA, ONTARIO
    Trapped! Minutes before midnight on November 10, 1979, an axle on a 106-car freight train in Mississauga, just outside Toronto, broke, derailing 23 cars. Their cargo: explosive and toxic chemicals. The derailment immediately caused several propane tanker cars to explode and spilled the contents of several more—caustic soda, styrene, and toluene—onto the tracks. The fire from the
propane tanks ignited vapors from the chemicals, causing a massive explosion with a fireball nearly 5,000 feet high. (People 50 miles away saw it.) Among the derailed cars, officials found a tanker carrying 81 tons of chlorine. And it was leaking. If it blew up, it could create a cloud of chlorine gas that could wipe out the entire city.
    Evacuate! The entire city—including six nursing homes and three large hospitals—would have to be evacuated. Thousands of police, firefighters, emergency medical technicians, doctors, nurses, bus drivers, and other volunteers worked around the clock driving people to makeshift evacuation centers outside of town. When it was over, more than 218,000 people were moved in less than 48 hours, and not a single life was lost. Until the much less successful post-Hurricane Katrina operation, it was the largest peacetime evacuation in North American history. (It took five days to get the site under