Decisions

After last week’s post on Morton’s fork, reader Nick Hare sent three items. Rather than levy taxes, Athens used to task each of its wealthiest citizens to perform a liturgy, essentially a duty to finance a public project voluntarily. A citizen who was assigned this duty could avoid it by naming a citizen who was supposedly richer than he and thus better qualified to perform it. If the second man disputed this claim, the two would exchange their entire estates. The first man could hardly object to this, as by his own claim he would gain by it. This had the effect of discouraging spurious claims. The practice was known as antidosis, literally “an exchange.”

Virtue ethics meets consequentialism on Sesame Street:

And a trolley problem:

The trolley is hurtling toward Alice. Bob is on the other track.

Alice says, “Please, I don’t want to die, divert the trolley so Bob dies instead.”

Bob says, “Yes, divert the trolley onto my track — I don’t mind sacrificing myself so someone else can live.”

Should you divert the trolley?

(Thanks, Nick.)

| Society

Veritas

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:David_Teniers_d._J._-_Bauernschenke_-_5290_-_Bavarian_State_Painting_Collections.jpg

If we heard it said of Orientals that they habitually drank a liquor which went to their heads, deprived them of reason and made them vomit, we should say: ‘How very barbarous!’

— La Bruyère, “Of Opinions,” Characters, 1688

| Society

Clarity

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pur_03.jpg

In Dante’s Purgatorio, souls are surprised to see that their visitor casts a shadow and thus is not dead:

When they perceiv’d that through my body I
Gave way not for the rays to pass, their song
Straight to a long and hoarse exclaim they chang’d;
And two of them, in guise of messengers,
Ran on to meet us, and inquiring ask’d:
“Of your condition we would gladly learn.”

That’s a bit of a puzzle, note Roberto Casati and Patrick Cavanagh. “To be visible, supernatural entities must reflect light (if they do not emit it). But as a consequence they must be opaque to at least some light, and thus they should cast shadows.”

(Roberto Casati and Patrick Cavanagh, The Visual World of Shadows, 2019. Related: Why do ghosts wear clothes?)

| Literature · Science & Math

“Tracking the Fugitives”

https://archive.org/details/sim_strand-magazine_1903-12_26_156/page/732/mode/2up

From the Strand, December 1903: These tracks were left by a man in flight leading a child. “In order to throw his pursuers off the trail the man changed his means of locomotion at each of the places marked in numbers on the diagram. The problem consists in discovering the manner of locomotion between each of these stations and the next; what vehicles the man took; what happened to him in the course of his flight; and what he did with the child at the different stages of the journey.”

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Summary Advice

Full text of a memo from Winston Churchill to his War Cabinet, Aug. 9, 1940:

To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are far too long. This wastes time, while energy has to be spent in looking for the essential points.

I ask my colleagues and their staffs to see to it that their Reports are shorter.

(i) The aim should be Reports which set out the main points in a series of short, crisp paragraphs.

(ii) If a Report relies on detailed analysis of some complicated factors, or on statistics, these should be set out in an Appendix.

(iii) Often the occasion is best met by submitting not a full-dress Report, but an Aide-memoire consisting of headings only, which can be expanded orally if needed.

(iv) Let us have an end of such phrases as these: ‘It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations …’, or ‘Consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect …’. Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational.

Reports drawn up on the lines I propose may at first seem rough as compared with the flat surface of officialese jargon. But the saving in time will be great, while the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clearer thinking.

W.S.C.

He followed this up in November 1951:

BREVITY

Official papers are too long and too diffuse. In 1940 I called for brevity. Evidently I must do so again. I ask my colleagues to read what I wrote then (it is reproduced overleaf) and to make my wishes known to their staffs.

I also invite attention to the Foreign Secretary’s recent despatch to Heads of Missions about the length of telegrams.

W.S.C.

| History · Language

A Late Work

This famous adagio is commonly attributed to the 18th-century Venetian composer Tomaso Albinoni (1671–1751). In fact it was written in 1958. Musicologist Remo Giazotto said he’d found a fragment of an unfinished Albinoni trio sonata in a Dresden library shortly after World War II and composed a new one-movement work based on two thematic ideas and a figured bass. At most these are Albinoni’s only contributions to the work. In fact Giazotto never produced the manuscript fragment, and no record of its existence has been found in the library records, so it’s conceivable, though far from certain, that Giazotto invented the story of the discovery and in fact composed the whole piece himself.

| Art

Math Notes

The prime factorization of 255987 is 33 × 19 × 499.

That’s not very interesting. But when this is expressed in binary, it reads:

111110011111110011 = 1111 × 10011 × 111110011

Each side of that equation comprises the same string of digits.

| Science & Math

Black and White

expedient chess puzzle 1

I don’t know who devised this; I found it in The Batsford Chess Puzzle Book (2002). Black has only a king and a bishop, while White still has all 16 of his men. But Black threatens to take White’s knight, giving mate immediately. If each side uses every legal expedient, what will be the outcome? For a start, White can stave off mate with 1. Bh2!

Click for Answer
| Puzzles