The March of Progress

One thing that always puts my Google skillz to the test is when I'm trying to find out about something I don't know the title for, especially when it's an instrumental piece of music or an image. This morning, we were talking about evolution at work (for a marketing project I'm doing) and I wanted to look up that picture of apes, apemen and men walking in a straight line. What's it called? The Ascent of Man? The Descent of Man?

It's actually called March of Progress, and was commissioned by Time Life Books. According to Wikipedia, it was painted by "noted natural history painter and muralist Rudolph Zallinger."

It's a hard image to find on the Web, but if you Google "ascent of man," "descent of man," or "evolution," you're sure to see countless parodies of it, including a poorly researched anti-evolution screed from nutty Christian cartoon propagandist Jack Chick and the poster for Encino Man.

When is a billion not a billion?

In an internal business meeting today, I was joking about my dubious relationship with numbers—I mix them up easily—when I mentioned a fact that no one in the room was aware of. Until fairly recently, an American billion was not the same as a British billion. What we called a billion, they called a milliard; and what we called a trillion, they called a billion. I'm pretty sure I first heard of this years ago when I stumbled upon the following passage in the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

The American system of numeration for denominations above one million was modeled on the French system but more recently the French system has been changed to correspond to the German and British systems. In the American system each of the denominations above 1,000 millions (the American billion) is 1,000 times the preceding one (one trillion = 1,000 billions; one quadrillion = 1,000 trillions). In the British system the first denomination above 1,000 millions (the British milliard) is 1,000 times the preceding one, but each of the denominations above 1,000 milliards (the British billion) is 1,000,000 times the preceding one (one trillion = 1,000,000 billions; one quadrillion = 1,000,000 trillions).

That's still what it says now, despite the fact that, according to Wikipedia, our brothers in the UK adopted the "American" system way back in 1974.

For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the United Kingdom uniformly used the long scale, while the United States of America used the short scale, so that usage of the two systems was often referred to as "British" and "American" respectively. In 1974 the government of the UK abandoned the long scale, so that the UK now applies the short scale interpretation exclusively in mass media and official usage. Although some residual long-scale usage still continues, the terms "British" and "American" no longer represent accurate terminology.

The more accurate way to refer to these two numerical systems are long scale and short scale. The short scale (in which a billion is a thousand millions) is now used primarily by English-speaking countries (plus, for some reason, Brazil), and the long scale (in which a billion is a million millions) by the rest of the world. To keep things interesting, some countries use the short scale but keep the word "milliard" from the long scale (e.g.: Russia, Israel, Turkey, Iran), while others use a completely different numbering system all together.

China, Japan and Korea use a system based on myriads. Myriad is the Classical Greek name for the number 10,000. I remember this from my time in Japan: 20,000 yen was ni-man 'en (or two ten-thousands). In the Chinese system, which Japan and Korea use, the new denominations come every four places, instead of every three or every six. Therefore, in Japanese, 10,000 man is an oku (1,0000,0000, or what we would call a hundred million) and 10,000 oku is a chou (1,0000,0000,0000, or what we could call a trillion and a Frenchman would call a billion). Whew!

The Indian numbering system, used in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Myanmar, creates a new denomination every two decimal places after a thousand. This means that a lakh is 1,00,000 (our one hundred thousand), a crore 1,00,00,000 (our ten million) and arawb 1,00,00,000 (an American's billion or a Frenchman's milliard).

So, in a nutshell, the denominations in the various numbering systems are, for the most part, defined thusly:

Short scale: 10⁰ (one), 10¹ (ten), 10² (a hundred), 10³ (a thousand), 10⁶ (a million), 10⁹ (a billion), 10¹² (a trillion), 10¹⁵ (a quadrillion), 10¹⁸ (a quintillion)...

Long scale: 10⁰ (one), 10¹ (ten), 10² (a hundred), 10³ (a thousand), 10⁶ (a million), 10⁹ (a thousand millions, or a milliard), 10¹² (a billion), 10¹⁵ (a thousand billions, or a billiard), 10¹⁸ (a trillion)...

Chinese: 10⁰, 10¹, 10², 10³, 10⁴, 10⁸, 10¹², 10¹⁶, 10²⁰...

Indian: 10⁰, 10¹, 10², 10³, 10⁵, 10⁷, 10⁹, 10¹¹, 10¹³...

I guess the next thing to do would be to explain why in French, their word for 78 translates to "sixty-eighteen" and 92 is "four twenties and twelve." Maybe just for laughs.

Manila

So, I'm at the supply closet, thinking, "Manila folders... manila folders... why manila?"

This is why (explanation courtesy of Wikipedia):

Manila hemp, also known as manilla, is a type of fiber obtained from the leaves of the abacá (Musa textilis), a relative of the banana. It is mostly used to make ropes and it is one of the most durable of the natural fibers, besides true hemp. Other uses for manila fiber are coarse fabric and paper, including Manila envelopes and Manila papers.

It is not really a hemp, but named so because hemp was for centuries a major source for fiber, so other fibers were sometimes named after it. The name refers to the capital of the Philippines. The country is one of the main areas of cultivation of abacá.

This is my rifle/boat, this is my gun/ship.

I don't remember what got me thinking about this, but yesterday I remembered to look something up that I'd been meaning to for a while: when is a boat properly called a ship? That immediately reminded me to look up the definition of gun, because people love to correct you when you misuse any of the above words.

If you look beyond Wikipedia's boat page to the discussion page about the Ships category, you can get an idea of how seriously naval enthusiasts take the definitions of boat and ship. (In general, the discussion pages are cheap entertainment for those who enjoy watching nerds argue.) Some say that a ship is a sea-going vessel, whereas boats stick to inland waters. Others say that if you can hoist it out of the water onto a trailer, it's a boat. According to the current Wikipedia page:

A boat is a watercraft designed to float on, and provide transport over, water. Usually this water will be inland or in protected coastal areas. However, boats such as the whaleboat were historically designed to be operated from a ship in an offshore environment. In Naval terms, a boat is something small enough to be carried aboard another vessel (a ship). Boats that are notable exceptions to this concept due to their large size are the Great Lakes freighter, riverboat, and ferryboat. These examples do, however, generally operate on inland and protected coastal waters. Modern submarines may also be referred to as boats (in spite of underwater capabilities and size), but this is possibly due to the fact that the first submarines could be carried by a ship and were certainly not capable of making offshore passages on their own. Boats may have military, other government, research, or commercial usage; but a vessel, regardless of size, that is in private, non-commercial usage is almost certainly a boat.

Um... OK. About as easy as Russian grammar. If you're not planning on carrying a cheat sheet around with you the next time you go near the water, you may prefer this succinct definition from the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, linked to by someone on the aforementioned discussion page:

The Historic Ships Committee have designated a vessel below 40 tons and 40 feet in length as a boat. However, submarines and fishing vessels are always known as boats whatever their size.

Easy enough. Now how about guns? Why is a rifle not a gun, a distinction so important to the late Gny. Sgt. Hartman of Full Metal Jacket? Wikipedia say:

The term gun is often used synonymously with firearm, but this is common only for civilian usage. In military usage, the term refers only to artillery that fires projectiles at high velocity, such as naval guns (which are never referred to as cannon) or tank guns. A gunner is a member of the team charged with the task of operating and firing a gun. By military terms, mortars and all hand-held firearms are excluded from the definition of guns. The exception to this is the shotgun, which is hand-held, has a smooth bore and fires a load of shot or a single projectile known as a slug.

I didn't know before reading this entry that you could refer to a firearm's barrel as being rifled, meaning that it has "a series of grooves spiraling along the barrel."

In other news, my Australian diving teacher would like to remind you never to refer to diving masks as "goggles," or to fins as "flippers," or you owe him a dollar.

It seems the knower has become... the knowee.

My Secret Hospital teammate Michael Hartney has "tagged" me on his blog, which apparently means I have to post eight random things about myself. I'm not sure that any of you who know me don't already know these things about me, or that those of you don't know me would care, but I guess that's the point of a blog, right? I talk about myself and assume someone out there is listening. Whoever you are, prepare to have your world rocked.

1. I speak Esperanto.
Really. I picked up a book on it when I was in Japan. It was something I'd been curious about since I first heard read about it, and having spent some time trying to learn Japanese, I was attracted to the idea of a(n almost) perfectly regular language. And it is easy to learn: check it out yourself.

What's more embarrassing—even more embarrassing than the fact that I can't spell the word embarrassing—is that I've recently picked it up again, after having lent the book to my friend Stan. "I'll just brush up, in case he wants to practice speaking with someone," I told myself, probably out loud. And now I'm studying it again. For the record, I have spent some time trying to learn the following languages (in order of how much time I spent studying them, from most to least): French (which I speak assez bien), Japanese, Esperanto, American Sign Language, Italian, Latin, Spanish, Ancient Greek, German and Indonesian.

2. I don't have any wisdom teeth, and never will.
My dentist always thought that was cool, and I agree. Something like 95% of adults have at least one wisdom tooth... or did before they were rudely ripped from their mangled gums. I am very thankful to be in the wisdom-deprived 5%.

"I guess that means you're not wise," the wiseasses quip. "Or I'm more highly evolved," I retort. Turns out the wiseasses may be right, according to Wikipedia:

In dentistry, hypodontia is the condition of naturally having fewer than the regular number of teeth. In Caucasians, the most commonly missing teeth are the wisdom teeth (25-35%), the upper lateral incisors (2%) or the lower second premolars (3%) The congenital absence of all teeth is called anodontia. Hypodontia is often familial, or associated with ectodermal dysplasia or Down syndrome.

3. I wrote the tagline to the film Erin Brockovich.
I've written lots of taglines for movies and TV shows, but that's one of the more memorable examples. "She brought a small town to its feet... and a huge company to its knees." More recently, Cinderella Man used a very similar tagline for its poster.

Some of my co-workers at the time complained that it reminded them too much of oral sex, I guess because of that famous incident where a woman forced a utility company to give her head.

4. I am related to President William Howard Taft.
...supposedly. My grandmother's maiden name was Taft, and is supposed to have been related to the Ohio Tafts who gave us the fattest president in US history.

I feel sorry for the guy. He wasn't a very good president, apparently, but he never really wanted to be president in the first place. He wanted to be on the Supreme Court, and only after leaving behind the White House and its impossibly small bathtub did he finally get his wish.

5. I was on Jeopardy! and Project Greenlight.
Lost both. (My screenplay Skeletons was in the top 50 screenplays for the latter.)

Ashley Ward, who is also on Secret Hospital with me, was on Jeopardy! too. She won.

6. I've always wanted to be in a band.
I'm sort of the same way with musical instruments as I am with languages... I fiddle with learning lots of them in a half-assed way. I started out playing clarinet, which led to bass clarinet and sax. Then, in college, I had the good sense to learn guitar, which is much better for getting girls than a saxophone, no matter what Lane Myers* thinks. In my room now, I have two guitars, a mandolin and a flute someone was getting rid of. I always dreamed of being that guy in the band who plays everything, like Brian Jones (without the dying), or one of the guys from Camper Van Beethoven.

Also, I've always wanted to name a band Midwife Crisis.

7. My grandparents had a cottage on Lake George in the Adirondacks, and as a kid I went there every summer.
I sometimes focus on the bad or weird parts of my childhood, but man, was I lucky to have had this place. Everything about it is so vivid in my memory. The smell of coffee in the morning, Grandma and Grandpa at the table doing the Jumble. Spending days swimming, waterskiing, jumping off the upper deck when we were old enough, canoeing to a nearby island for a picnic. Showering up for cocktail hour, playing pitch and munching on peanuts (my cousins and my sister and I brandishing our sophisticated Shirley Temples). Buying comic books at the tiny market, gray days playing miniature golf, Freihofer's chocolate chip cookies, Borg vs. McEnroe at Wimbledon on the TV....

I think if I had three wishes, one would be that for one week a summer, I could take whomever I wanted back to Lake George, and everything would be exactly the same.

Except that I could drink real cocktails.

8. I don't have any tattoos, but I often think about what tattoo I would choose.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not against them per se. I've gotten as close as going into a parlor and leafing through the books. The two things that stop me are that I have no idea what I would want on me forever, and that I'm not all lean and muscled. And also that my entire body is covered in freckles and moles. What if I got a mermaid and a big mole appeared in the middle of her face? People would be all, "Why did you you get a tattoo of a mermaid with cancer?"

I think, if I had to get a tattoo now, it would be of Drinky Crow. I love love love Tony Millionaire's comic strip Maakies, and Drinky is one of those characters you just want to draw again and again in your notebook during a boring lecture. And, for some reason, I find pathetic alcoholics really funny. Sorry, pathetic alcoholics.

I had a neat idea recently. I was looking at my back and thinking how there are way too many freckles for me to get a tattoo. It's like a starry sky at night. Then I imagined Drinky Crow and Uncle Gabby at the bottom of my back, looking up at the stars. Or Uncle Gabby would be looking at the stars, anyway. Drinky would be drinking. Or holding a gun to his head. And no, that would not count as a "tramp stamp."


I'm done! Those are my eight random facts. Now I have to tag eight people with blogs, which for me is hard. (Do I even know enough people with blogs?) I tag Sarah, Rob, Annie, Michele, Glennis, Erika, Jen, and, what the heck... Jonathan Coulton. I predict a 12.5% rate of return.

*John Cusack's character from Better Off Dead. And anyway, you can totally tell that a) his fingers are not in the right position for him to be playing that saxophone, and b) you're really hearing a synthesizer on the "sax" setting.

Of Sinecures and The Bangles

Wow. I have really been slacking when it comes to writing this blog (which actually means either that I have been slacking less, or that I have found other ways to waste time, such as solving the 5 x 5 "Professor's" Rubik's Cube several times a day.)

I've decided that I need to write shorter, more frequent entries to this blog—not everything has to be a complicated mystery that needs to be solved. It could just be the dozens of things I look up on any given day.

For example, today I have looked up that a sinecure is, according to Webster's, "an office or position that requires little or no work and that usually provides an income." (Something I could use right now, incidentally.) It comes from from the medieval Latin sine cura, or "without cure of souls," apparently referring to ecclesiastical offices, the officeholders of which do not have the ability to, er, cure souls.

Also, my girlfriend was right: The Bangles did not write most of their big hits. (I've recently been enjoying two of their earlier songs, which appear on the Children of Nuggets compilation...one performed as The Bangles and one as The Bangs.) I knew "Manic Monday" was written by Prince (under the pseudonym "Christopher"), and that "Hazy Shade of Winter" was a Simon & Garfunkel song. I was willing to hope, though, that they'd written some of the other big ones. Turns out...no.

"Walk Like an Egyptian" was written by Liam Sternberg, a veteran of the Akron, Ohio "scene" which gave us Devo and The Waitresses. He offered the song to Toni Basil, but she turned it down. (This, in turn, led me to look up something I've been wondering since high school. Yes, it was the same Toni Basil responsible for "Mickey" who choreographed David Byrne in the "Once in a Lifetime" video.)

"Eternal Flame" and "In Your Room"? Written by Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly, two songwriters I'm just hearing about now. These hit machines also wrote Madonna's "Like a Virgin," Cyndi Lauper's "True Colors," Whitney Houston's "So Emotional," The DiVinyls' "I Touch Myself" and Heart's "Alone," and co-wrote The Pretenders' "I'll Stand By You" with Chrissie Hynde.

Even earlier, pre–Top 40 singles were written by others: "Hero Takes a Fall" was a cover of a 1966 single by The Grass Roots, and "Going Down to Liverpool" was a cover of a Katrina and the Waves song. (I was horrified to learn that Kimberley Rew, who wrote "Liverpool" and the execrable "Walking On Sunshine" was the guitarist for my beloved Soft Boys. Hate? Meet Adoration.)

They did write many of the songs on their albums, though. If I'm not mistaken, the highest charting song that the band actually wrote was "Walking Down Your Street," which hit #11. And you know what? I still kind of like them. "Eternal Flame" is one of the best karaoke songs around, and "Walk Like An Egyptian" holds a special place in my heart because my friend Mike's dad, an ex-cop, couldn't wait for the DJ to play it at Mike's wedding so he could bust a hieroglyphic move. Also, I'm still kind of in love with Susanna Hoffs.

I actually came back to this blog because I got "tagged" in one of those "tell us about yourself and pass it around" Internet memes. I'll do that in the next entry... coming soon, I hope!

Mystery of the Day: Who's Shushing Me?

Our new sketch group finally has a name: Secret Hospital, a name which Michael picked. Apparently, in the Spider-Man comic books, his wife Mary Jane Parker (née Watson) had an acting gig on the oddly named soap opera Secret Hospital. Even as a kid, Michael wondered, how do you keep a hospital full of patients secret?

I couldn't find an image of Mary Jane acting on Secret Hospital online, so I decided to mock up a quick image for the MySpace page. I found a jpeg of an old postcard of the Los Angeles County General Hospital, which looked enough to me like the hospital I remembered from the opening credits of the real-life soap General Hospital. (It turned out I was right, though the hospital is now called the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center.) Then I wanted to add a picture of someone doing the "SHHH" sign, and I came up with this poster. I'd seen the image before. But I wondered: "The Ch'agua are listening?" Who exactly are the Ch'agua?

So I googled it, and one of the only things I found were these posts in a blog called Chirky. They had a contest where readers were asked to decide who the Ch'agua were. The winner said they were "composers of Latin American porno music," but I preferred the runner-up answer: the Others from Lost. No real answers, though, which is when I first started to suspect that this was not actually the real, original propaganda poster. My girlfriend mentioned that she was under the impression that this was originally a Russian poster, whereas I'd been thinking Cuban or Central American. But...why would it be in English? Is it a translation of the Spanish?

I started casting the net wider and eventually found another version of the same poster, this one apparently in Russian (or some language in a Cyrillic script). It wasn't clear from the page where I found it whether it was from the USSR or from one of the other Eastern Bloc countries. I don't speak enough Russian to know. (I can sound it out, thanks to a trip to Russia when I was 13.) I'm pretty sure it says "Don't [something]" but I try "Don't Speak," "Don't Talk" and "Don't Whisper" into an English-Russian translator, and it doesn't match up. Nye voltai.

After reaching a temporary dead end with the Russian poster, I go back to the original poster. "The Ch'agua are listening." Who are the Ch'agua? And what's that symbol in the corner, with the Yin/Yang symbol and a lightning bolt? I re-Google the slogan, look further down the page and click on a link called "Horde Toons." There, on their wallpaper, was the symbol! I realize that the page seems to be dedicated to in-joke humor about something called "The Horde." (It reminds me of when I first stumbled upon The Church of the Sub-Genius.) According to Wikipedia, a horde could refer to Communists, Mongols, Masters of the Universe characters, Warcraft faction...AHA! Then I find the culprit.

Those of you who have been to renaissance fairs (and I have not) may know of The Society for Creative Anachronism, a group of medieval and Renaissance history hobbyists who take pleasure in getting together in costume and, well, geeking out. They seem to have a sense of humor about the whole historical reenactment thing, and no matter how much research they do on the time period to which they have dedicated themselves, they never let accuracy get in the way of a good time. The group had its origins in a graduation party for a Berkeley medieval studies student in 1966 and has now grown to some 30,000 members in America and beyond.

In 1971, in the land known as the Middle Kingdom (that's Ohio, Illinois, Indiana and parts of Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan and Ontario to you), an SCA meeting was shaken by the arrival of what was basically a biker gang dressed in fleece. This was the first appearance of The Great Dark Horde, a fraternal organization (or "household") within the SCA. While others in the organization are dressing up as noblemen, princes and knights, the Horde pay homage to the more egalitarian, if still fairly brutal, Mongol empire. The members' persona, however, aren't expected to be Mongol, or to dress as if they were in the employ of Kublai Khan, a policy which is compared to the tolerance with which the Mongol Empire treated the many cultures over which it ruled.

The Horde's symbol? The yin and yang with the lightning bolt. And one more search led me back to the page of the person who probably introduced the "Ch'agua are listening" poster to the web. According to his glossary page, Ch'agua means "outsiders." (I'm not sure if that's a creation on the Horde's part or not. I don't think it's the modern Mongolian word, though I could be wrong.)

I turn my attention back to finding the origin of the original poster, and finally find a lead on a Russian website:

The spot that will catch your attention is the eyes. The eyes are omnipresent, always strict and tenacious. Whatever position you may choose - to the left, or to the right of the poster - there is no escaping these eyes. "Don't Wag Your Tongue!" for there are enemies everywhere and they are on the alert, insists a working woman in a red scarf, with her finger pressed to her lips. And we understand that her words are meant for us. Surprisingly, this austere poster is the most popular. Today we take it in a different way, of course, with a touch of humor. But the idea itself appeals to many, especially foreigners. If for us the poster is history, for foreign connoisseurs it's an exotic fruit.

No mention of who the artist was, though. So I search "Don't wag your tongue." Nothing. I use a virtual keyboard to type in the only letters I can read in the above jpeg, and then put that into Babelfish. It's translated as "DON'T STIR." Okay! I search that and find a link from a Dig discussion to the jackpot: this amazing online collection of propaganda posters. There a section in English, but it doesn't have as much text. So I plug the Russian text underneath the poster into Babelfish.

AGITATIONAL POSTERS/THE SOVIET AGITATIONAL POSTERS "poster - this is the destructive impact, directed toward the head of class enemy, this is - the agent of mass involvement, and to it must be shown proper attention" - thus wrote artist Dmitriy stakhiyevich Moore, who drew within short June night one of the best posters of Civil War. Red Army man indicates by finger directly you: "you, he says, were written down by volunteer?" Moore said: "I assembled many conversations apropos of this poster. Some told me that they were shamed him, which it was shameful not to be written down by volunteer ". Its Red Army man was commissioner, he called people for the protection of revolution, he required determination and courage. How to calculate, how many people did convince this Red Army man, within one short night drawn by large artist? This is poster- champion. Moore correctly said: "we related to the skill as to the uprising!"

Not the best translation, obviously. And confusing, because it gave me the impression that Dmitry Moor—"Moore" or "Moor" was his pseudonym—was the painter of our "Don't Stir" poster. But after painstakingly reading his bio in Babelfish translation, I came to doubt this. Why didn't they list credits for each poster? And why is it that they have bios for every artist whose work is featured on the site, but none of them appear to have created the poster I'm looking for?

Finally, by plugging in the actual Russian words for "poster" and the slogan into Google (I know. I'm obsessive, OK?) I came up with the artist behind the poster. Nina Nikolayevna Vatolina (1915-2002), designer of such stunning if hilariously patriotic posters as Be A Metal Worker!, Glory to the Mother-Heroine!, Glory to the Heroic Soviet Woman!, Fascism: An Envy Enemy of Women, and our holy grail...1941's Do Not Chat! Glory to Nina, Heroic Propagandist and Provider of Clip Art for T-Shirt Designers and Biker Nerds!

And just for you, I typed in the entire text to the poster and got a bad but legible translation from Babelfish:

будь на чеку, в такие дни подслушивают стены недалеко от болтовни и сплетни до измены

you be to the linchpin, during such days overhear the walls not far from the chatter and gossips to the treason

Now, seriously...I've got to get back to work.

Further reading
The U.S. is still making "Loose Lips Sink Ships" posters!

What's that bridge, and which way are those trains going?

On Saturday, I was at my friend Dan's house in Astoria (Queens, for non-New Yorkers), acting in a short film he was shooting. He wanted the main characters of shot against the New York skyline for the opening credits, so we walked down to Astoria Park. I'd never been there before...it was quite pretty. The park runs along the East River, across from Randall's Island (or was that Ward's Island?), in the shadows of the Triboro Bridge and another bridge, one that Dan said was used by Amtrak trains. Standing there under the bridge, those assembled had several questions.

1. What was this bridge called?
2. How could it carry Amtrak trains? There's no Amtrak service on Long Island.
3. Is that Randall's Island we're looking at, or Ward's Island?

There was a plaque under the bridge, which said it was called the New York Connecting Railroad Bridge, a delightfully creative sobriquet for a bridge that was built in the early 1900s to connect the Pennsylvania Railroad to the New Haven Railroad, linking New York and points South with New England.

Once I got back to a computer, I found out that the bridge is now called Hell Gate Bridge, named after Hell Gate, the passage it spans. According to Wikipedia, "Hell Gate" is a corruption of its original Dutch name, Hellegat (or "bright passage"). The entire East River was so named by the Dutch explorer Adriaen Block in 1614. The hellish Anglicization turned out to be appropriate: hundreds of ships had sunk in Hell Gate by 1876, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers used 50,000 lbs. of explosives to blow up the most treacherous rocks in the strait.

As for Randall's Island and Ward's Island, they are now connected by landfill. The body of water that used to separate them? Little Hell Gate.

Still no explanation, though, of what Amtrak trains were doing on Long Island. I finally had to look at maps and aerial photographs to figure out what was going on. (Pardon me if this obvious to you...I've never taken a train from New York to Boston. Only cars and Chinatown buses.) It turns out that when an Amtrak train leaves Penn Station, it goes under the East River through the East River Tunnels, just like Long Island Rail Road trains. Why? In 1901, the Pennsylvania Railroad, which then terminated in Jersey City, bought the Long Island Rail Road, which then also did not reach Manhattan. The Pennsylvania Railroad dug tunnels under the Hudson and East Rivers, built the then spectacular Pennsylvania Station, and their access to Manhattan was only rivalled by that of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, which terminated at Grand Central. (Portions of the latter are now Metro North and the Amtrak Northeast Corridor.)

The portion of the Amtrak route in Queens runs along the New York Connecting Railroad. According to Wikipedia:

Amtrak owns the line north of Sunnyside Junction, which forms part of the Northeast Corridor. South of this point, CSX is the owner.

The line begins at the Hell Gate Bridge over the East River. This is a massive span, a main span of 1,017 feet (310 m) and a total length of over 17,000 feet (5.2 km). Continuing south the line is on a high-level elevated viaduct, over Astoria and Interstate 278 (Grand Central Parkway). The line then is on an embankment and Sunnyside Junction, where Amtrak's Northeast Corridor line branches off, is here. The line heads south and parallels Interstate 278 (Brooklyn Queens Expressway) for a distance. This portion of the line was completely rebuilt in 2002. Now in the section of Elmhurst, the NYCR passes under several streets in a cut. An arched concrete viaduct over Queens Boulevard is followed by street overpasses under cut and overpasses over streets as well in Maspeth. After crossing under the Long Island Expressway (Interstate 495) and passing a few cemeteries, the line reach Fresh Pond Yard. This is the main facility for shipping freight by rail in and out of New York City and Long Island.

So, if you see a train heading northwest, away from Queens, it's actually bound for the Northeast, across the viaducts of Randall's/Ward's Island and into the Bronx. As far as I can tell, it seems that that line meets up with the Metro North New Haven line, which goes up through Harlem and stays farther from the water than the Hell Gate Amtrak section, at around New Rochelle. I'm not sure whether Amtrak uses both sections or not, though apparently, Metro North trains may use the Hell Gate Bridge some time in the near future.

By the way, if you enjoy the Hell Gate Bridge (and its dark red color, from its paint job in 1996), you will be happy to know that it may be around for a while. According to the February 2005 issue of Discover magazine, if humans disappeared, Hell Gate would be the last New York bridge to collapse: they estimate it would stand for 1,000 years.

Further reading
The History of Amtrak, or, Can you believe America actually has a nationalized industry of any kind?
A map of Queens neighborhoods