Hobo Ethics

A code of principles proposed at the 1889 National Hobo Convention:

  1. Decide your own life; don’t let another person run or rule you.
  2. When in town, always respect the local law and officials, and try to be a gentleman at all times.
  3. Don’t take advantage of someone who is in a vulnerable situation, locals or other hobos.
  4. Always try to find work, even if temporary, and always seek out jobs nobody wants. By doing so you not only help a business along, but ensure employment should you return to that town again.
  5. When no employment is available, make your own work by using your added talents at crafts.
  6. Do not allow yourself to become a stupid drunk and set a bad example for locals’ treatment of other hobos.
  7. When jungling [camping] in town, respect handouts and do not wear them out; another hobo will be coming along who will need them as badly, if not worse than you.
  8. Always respect nature; do not leave garbage where you are jungling.
  9. If in a community jungle, always pitch in and help.
  10. Try to stay clean, and boil up wherever possible.
  11. When traveling, ride your train respectfully. Take no personal chances. Cause no problems with operating crew or host railroad. Act like an extra crew member.
  12. Do not cause problems in a train yard; another hobo will be coming along who will need passage through that yard.
  13. Do not allow other hobos to molest children; expose all molesters to authorities – they are the worst garbage to infest any society.
  14. Help all runaway children, and try to induce them to return home.
  15. Help your fellow hobos whenever and wherever needed; you may need their help someday.
  16. If present at a hobo court and you have testimony, give it. Whether for or against the accused, your voice counts!

The convention was held by Tourist Union #63, a union of hobos created in the mid-1800s. Members sought to resist anti-vagrancy laws by representing themselves as itinerant workers rather than idle miscreants.

| Crime · Society

The Fene Cellist

https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1rfhyvl/spotted_in_spain/

In 2023, the artist collective SFHIR created this nine-story mural in Fene, Galicia, for the first Perla Mural Fest. At night the instrument comes to life as the building’s stairwell is illuminated.

The mural was judged best among 50 finalists in the Street Art Cities 2023 awards.

| Art

In a Word

locodescriptive
adj. describing a particular place or places

hippocrepiform
adj. shaped like a horseshoe

elsewhither
adv. in a different direction

mirific
adj. working wonders; wonderful

The Rochester Institute of Technology contains a portal to another dimension. In 2013, student Michael Lacanilao deliberately set out to create a record of an “Escherian stairwell” on campus that forms a perpetual downward loop.

Lacanilao has long since graduated, but the stairwell is still commemorated on the school’s website.

(Thanks, Colin.)

| Hoaxes · Language · Oddities

The Blast Shadow

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Human_shadow_on_stone_by_atomic_bombing_on_Hiroshima_-_Sumitomo_Bank,_Hiroshima_branch_-_around_December_1946.png

On the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, a customer was sitting on the steps of Sumitomo Bank in Hiroshima, waiting for the branch to open, when an atomic bomb exploded over the city. The bank was only 260 meters from ground zero, and as the intense heat burned its stone face white, the customer’s body shielded one section of the steps, leaving a “shadow” in that place.

The steps are now preserved in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

In 1946, the British mission to Hiroshima and Nagasaki noted that the surfaces of asphalt roads “retained the ‘shadows’ of those who had walked there at the instant of the explosion.” It called them “objects of macabre interest and pilgrimage for visitors.”

| Death · History · Technology

The Gingerbread Game

https://picryl.com/media/nystrom-hansel-and-gretel-2-04108e

Hansel and Gretl have discovered a gingerbread cottage and are wondering whether to eat some of the tiles on its walls. A witch appears and tells them how they must go about it. “Each of you is to name a whole number between 0 and 100. Hansel’s must be odd and Gretl’s even. No conferring. Whoever chooses the lower number can eat twice that number of gingerbread tiles. Whoever chooses the higher number can eat the lower number.” So, for example, if Hansel chooses 57 and Gretl chooses 30, Hansel will get 30 tiles and Gretl will get 60.

This sounds fine, but the children have just had lessons in game theory and regard this as a non-cooperative game between rational utility maximizers. Gretl knows that Hansel will not choose 99, because 97 would leave him better off if she chose 98 and no worse off if she chose any other number. By the same reasoning, she will avoid 98 and choose 96. In her mind she can follow this train all the way to its end: Rationally, it seems, she must choose 2. Hansel, following it also, finds himself indifferent between 3 and 1. In the end he will receive a paltry two tiles and Gretl either one or four.

Is all of this sound? Gretl says, “There is something radically peculiar about trains of thought which proceed in the subjunctive. You are to work out what you would be rational to do, if I were to choose a number which I shall not choose. I am to do likewise, with each train of thought reproduced inside the other. What happens if either player derails a train by choosing in defiance of it? In that case it becomes radically unclear whether either player still has a rational choice.”

(Martin Hollis, “The Gingerbread Game,” Analysis 54:4 [October 1994], 196-200.)

| Science & Math

Centers of Attraction

In his 1908 autobiography, Francis Galton described a “beauty map” he’d compiled of the British Isles:

Whenever I have occasion to classify the persons I meet into three classes, ‘good, medium, and bad,’ I use a needle mounted as a pricker, wherewith to prick holes, unseen, in a piece of paper. … I used this plan for my beauty data, classifying the girls I passed in streets or elsewhere as attractive, indifferent, or repellent. … I found London to rank highest for beauty; Aberdeen lowest.

In 2008, psychologists Viren Swami and Eliana Hernandez set out to compile a beauty map of their own, this time focusing on London. They asked 461 residents to rate the physical attractiveness of men and women in the city’s 33 boroughs. For the record, the City of London, the City of Westminster, and Kensington and Chelsea were rated highest — which correlates with the affluence but not the health (life expectancy) of the residents in those boroughs.

| Science & Math · Society

The B List

A problem from the Eighth International Mathematical Olympiad, held in Sofia, Bulgaria, in July 1966 (contributed by the Soviet Union):

In a mathematical contest, three problems, A, B, C were posed. Among the participants there were 25 students who solved at least one problem each. Of all the contestants who did not solve problem A, the number who solved B was twice the number who solved C. The number of students who solved only problem A was one more than the number of students who solved A and at least one other problem. Of all students who solved just one problem, half did not solve problem A. How many students solved only problem B?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Limerick

Said a boy to his teacher one day,
“Wright has not written rite right, I say.”
And the teacher replied,
As the error she eyed,
“Right! Wright: Write rite right, right away!”

| Language · Poems