Selflessness

Carol Shields’ 2000 short story “Absence” does not contain the letter I:

She woke up early, drank a cup of strong, unsugared coffee, then sat down at her word processor. She knew more or less what she wanted to do, and that was to create a story that possessed a granddaughter, a Boston fern, a golden apple and a small blue cradle. But after she had typed half a dozen words, she found that one of the letters of the keyboard was broken, and, to make matters worse, a vowel, the very letter that attaches to the hungry self.

She resolves to write about it: “‘A woman sat down and wrote,’ she wrote.”

| Language · Literature

The Clockwise Ant

A problem by Argentinian puzzlist Jaime Poniachik, from the February 1992 issue of Games magazine:

An ant crawls onto a clock face at the 6 mark just as the minute hand is passing 12. She begins crawling counterclockwise around the face’s circumference at a uniform speed. When the minute hand passes her, she reverses course and crawls clockwise without changing her speed. Forty-five minutes after her first encounter with the minute hand, it passes her a second time and she departs. How much time did she spend on the clock face?

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| Puzzles

A Near Thing

dufferin's ghost story

A memorably creepy ghost story is told of Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava:

One night when Lord Dufferin had accepted, in Ireland, the hospitality of a friend, he awakened suddenly, preyed upon by an indefinable restlessness. He got up, went to the window, which was lighted by the moon, and saw distinctly in the shadow below him a man bearing a large burden on his shoulder. This man was walking slowly. When he passed before the house, it became manifest that he bore a coffin; he lifted his head; his face was so repulsive that Lord Dufferin was greatly struck. His gaze followed the apparition as it drew away, and he went back to bed, where he had great difficulty in going to sleep once more.

The morning of the next day, he questioned his host, but the latter could give him no enlightenment. He knew no one corresponding to the description of the person carrying the coffin, and no burial was awaited in the village.

Some years later Lord Dufferin was appointed Ambassador to France. Determined faithfully to discharge the duties of his high position, he went, one day, to a diplomatic reception that was to be held in the Grand Hotel in Paris. His private secretary conducted him to a large lift before which there were several state officials standing respectfully in line. Lord Dufferin, passing them, bowed, and was about to step into the lift, when he gave an involuntary start. The employee who operated the cable was ugly, surly-looking, and had precisely the features of the mysterious apparition of the Irish village!

Moved by an instinctive impulse, the ambassador drew back; he retraced his steps, uttering some words of excuse, and, on the pretext that he had forgotten something, asked them to take up those who had gone on before, without waiting for him; he then went to the hotel office to make inquiries as to the person who had caused his very natural emotion. But he did not have time. At that moment a terrible crash was heard, mingled with cries of anguish. The lift, reaching a certain height, had dropped suddenly to the bottom of the shaft, crushing or mutilating those within it.

It appears that none of this is true — there was a lift accident in the Grand Hotel in 1878, but that was years before Dufferin arrived there, and the rest seems to have been made up. It’s such a striking story, though, that Dufferin himself used to relate it as a personal anecdote.

| Death

Desperate Measures

sivák chess puzzle

A joke chess problem by Bohuslav Sivák, from the Bratislavan newspaper Pravda, Dec. 29, 1972. White can mate in two moves by resorting to a drastic stratagem. What is it?

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| Puzzles

Weather Report

“The most delightful advantage of being bald — one can hear snowflakes.” — English magistrate R.G. Daniels, quoted in the Observer, July 11, 1976

| Quotations

Waste Not, Want Not

From the Journal of Belles Lettres, 1838, an anecdote about Henri François d’Aguesseau, three-time chancellor of France:

The chancellor, observing that his wife always delayed ten or twelve minutes before she came down to dinner, and being loth to lose so much precious time daily, commenced the composition of a work, which he prosecuted only whilst he was thus kept waiting. The result was, at the end of fifteen years, a book in three volumes quarto, which has gone through several editions, and is much esteemed.

D’Aguesseau seems to have been an industrious man — Voltaire called him “the most learned magistrate France ever possessed.”

| Society

A Second Act

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HOMERO-EYES.PNG

Nathanael West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust contains a character named Homer Simpson:

Except for his hands, which belonged on a piece of monumental sculpture, and his small head, he was well proportioned. His muscles were large and round and he had a full, heavy chest. Yet there was something wrong. For all his size and shape, he looked neither strong nor fertile.

In a 2012 interview with Smithsonian, Matt Groening said, “I took that name from a minor character in the novel The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West. Since Homer was my father’s name, and I thought Simpson was a funny name in that it had the word ‘simp’ in it, which is short for ‘simpleton’ — I just went with it.”

| Entertainment · Literature

The Petrie Multiplier

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Petrie_multiplier_diagram.png

This is dismaying. Suppose that men and women are equally sexist, and imagine a group that’s 80 percent men and 20 percent women. If 20 percent of people (represented as squares above) will make sexist comments to people of the opposite gender, we might expect that the women will receive four times as many sexist comments as the men. In fact they receive 16 times as many. Computer scientist Ian Gent explains:

With 20% women the gender ratio is 1:4. So there are 4 times as many men to make sexist remarks, so 4 times as many sexist remarks are made to women as to men. But there are 4 times fewer women to receive sexist remarks, so each individual woman is four times as likely to receive a given remark than an individual man is. These effects multiply, so in this example the mean number of sexist remarks per woman is 16 times the number per man. This holds in general, so with a gender ratio of 1:r, women will receive r2 times as many sexist remarks as men.

Above, after 70 sexist remarks (arrows) are made at random to members of the opposite gender, the women have received a mean of 5.6 remarks each, the men only 0.35. Gent first described the effect in 2013; the mathematical model was devised by computer scientist Karen Petrie.

| Society