“A Geographic Question”

A maiden once, with eyes of blue,
And mischief a suggestion,
Propounded all her friends unto
A geographic question.
“Why all degrees of latitude
Were longer at th’ equator?”
Their answers brought beatitude
And highly did elate her:

For Mr. Smithson talked to her–
With knowledge was he sated–
“‘T was due to a parabola,”
He wisely demonstrated;
And Mr. Whyte, he murmured much
Of “radial defections,”
While Robinson, with dainty touch,
Discoursed of conic sections;

Then Mr. Browning flowery grew,
And filled himself with glory
By telling much more than he knew–
It was a wondrous story!

But all sit now disconsolate,
And cut a woful figure–
They’ve learned, when it was all too late,
Degrees down there aren’t bigger.

— Anonymous, in A.C. McClurg, The Humbler Poets, 1910

| Poems

Too Much Glory

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hommage_%C3%A0_le_Bon_Roy_Louis_XIV.jpg

When Louis XIV asked, “What time is it?”, he was told, “Whatever time your majesty desires.”

When Louis comforted the duke of Saint-Aignan on the death of his son, Roger de Rabutin wrote, “It is only near him that a parent can find some pleasure in losing his children.”

When Louis asked Boileau’s opinion of his verses, the poet said, “Ah, sire, I am convinced that nothing is impossible to your majesty. You desired to write some poor rhymes, and you have succeeded in making them positively detestable.”

During a lecture on chemistry, Louis Jacques Thénard told Charles X, “These gases are going to have the honor of combining before your majesty.”

The subjects of James I expressed the wish that he might reign over them as long as the sun, moon, and stars should endure. “I suppose, then,” muttered the king, “they mean my successor to reign by candlelight.”

| Society

Art History

In 1989, a Philadelphia financial analyst visited a flea market in Adamstown, Pa., spotted an old painting whose frame he liked, and purchased it for $4.

When he removed the frame, he found a folded document between the picture canvas and the wood backing. And the document appeared to be the Declaration of Independence.

It was. He had discovered an original printing of the Declaration from its first printing in 1776. Sotheby’s auctioned it for $2.42 million in 1991, then again for $8.14 million in 2000.

“This was how Congress voted to disseminate the news of independence,” said Sotheby’s vice chairman David Redden. “So it was printed up from Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration and then sent around by couriers to the armies in the field, to the newly independent colonies, to the committees of public safety, and surely to the British, too.”

How it got into the painting is unknown.

| History · Oddities

Economical

economical chess puzzle

An anonymous puzzle from the British Chess Magazine, 1993. White to mate in half a move.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Modern Ills

“Twelve Ways to Commit Suicide,” from the American Medical Journal, reprinted in the Manhattan and de la Salle Monthly, 1875:

  1. Wearing of thin shoes and cotton stockings on damp nights and in cold, rainy weather. Wearing insufficient clothing, and especially upon the limbs and extremities.
  2. Leading a life of enfeebling, stupid laziness, and keeping the mind in an unnatural state of excitement by reading trashy novels. Going to theatres, parties and balls in all sorts of weather, in the thinnest possible dress. Dancing till in a complete perspiration, and then going home without sufficient over-garments through the cold, damp air.
  3. Sleeping on feather-beds, in seven-by-nine bedrooms, without ventilation at the top of the windows, and especially with two or more persons in the same small, unventilated bedroom.
  4. Surfeiting on hot and very stimulating dinners. Eating in a hurry, without masticating your food, and eating heartily before going to bed every night, when the mind and body are exhausted by the toils of the day and the excitement of the evening.
  5. Beginning in childhood on tea and coffee, and going from one step to another, through chewing and smoking tobacco and drinking intoxicating liquors, and physical and mental excesses of every description.
  6. Marrying in haste and getting an uncongenial companion, and living the remainder of life in mental dissatisfaction. Cultivating jealousies and domestic broils, and being always in a mental ferment.
  7. Keeping children quiet by giving paregoric and cordials, by teaching them to suck candy, and by supplying them with raisins, nuts, and rich cake. When they are sick, by humoring their whims, indulging their fancies, and pampering their appetites, with the mistaken notion of being extra kind to them.
  8. Allowing the love of gain to absorb our minds, so as to leave no time to attend to our health. Following an unhealthy occupation because money can be made by it.
  9. Tempting the appetite with bitters and niceties when the stomach says No, and by forcing food when nature does not demand and even rejects it. Gormandizing between meals.
  10. Contriving to keep in a continual worry about something or nothing. Giving way to fits of anger.
  11. Being irregular in all our habits of sleeping and eating, going to bed at midnight and getting up at noon. Eating too much, too many kinds of food, and that which is too highly seasoned.
  12. Neglecting to take proper care of ourselves, and not applying early for medical advice when disease first appears. Taking celebrated quack medicines to a degree of making a drug shop of the body.
| Society

Chisholm’s Paradox

Adam and Noah exist here now. Adam lives to be 930, Noah 950. We can imagine a possible world in which they swap ages and yet retain their essential identities. But we can also imagine a further world in which they swap ages and names; another in which they swap ages, names, and hat sizes; and finally a world in which Adam and Noah have swapped all their qualitative properties.

Now isn’t Adam in our world identical with Noah in the other world? For how are they distinct? If a thing can retain its essential identity when a single property is changed, then, writes Willard Van Orman Quine, “You can change anything to anything by easy stages through some connecting series of possible worlds.”

See Spare Parts.

| Science & Math

A Hidden Message

Print our alphabet on a series of dials, like a combination lock, and you can arrange them to spell I GOT UP TO FAINT:

I GOT UP TO FAINT lettershift

In a sense this sentence is latent in our alphabet; it’s an artifact of the customary order in which we list the letters.

Further hidden messages, for what they’re worth:

  • AH ME, I AM A SERBIAN BOY!
  • I AM A FRENCH VET; I RAP MY TIN BOX.
  • OH, MY LAX FUR PEW! AS IF SHE LET ME BY A CROATIAN DAM.

In Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel Contact, an astronomer discovers that if pi is expressed in base 11, a field of 1s and 0s appears 1020 digits from the decimal point. If carriage returns are inserted at certain intervals, this field produces the image of a circle — apparently the signature of a designer who devised our mathematics itself. But even in the book, no one knows what this means.

| Language

“Singular Impression in Marble”

http://books.google.com/books?id=IvUQAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA361&lpg=PA361&dq=%22singular+impression+in+marble%22&source=bl&ots=066QIX3oqW&sig=KQF2MDgs75IzkGhhvP8kMINgrSI&hl=en&ei=o3YXTIPXDaHUlQea9sGCDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22singular%20impression%20in%20marble%22&f=false

From the American Journal of Science: In November 1829, a 30-cubic-foot block of marble was raised from a quarry northwest of Philadelphia and taken to a Norristown sawmill to be cut into slabs.

“One was taken off about three feet wide and about six feet long, and in the body of the marble, exposed by the cutting, was immediately discovered an indentation, about one and a half inches long and about five eighths of an inch wide, in which were the two raised characters” (left).

“Fortunately, several of the most respectable gentlemen residing in Norristown were called upon to witness this remarkable phenomenon, without whose testimony it might have been difficult, if not impossible, to have satisfied the public, that an imposition had not been practised by cutting the indentation and carving the letters after the slab was cut off.”

No explanation is offered. The block had been raised from a depth of 60-70 feet in the quarry.

| Oddities

“Tait Ate Late”

There was a young fellow named Tait,
Who dined with his girl at 8:08;
But I’d hate to relate
What that fellow named Tait
And his tête-à-tête ate at 8:08!

— Anonymous, in A Book of American Humorous Verse, 1917

| Poems