“The Roadside Littérateur”

There’s a little old fellow and he has a little paintpot,
And a paucity of brushes is something that he ain’t got,
And when he sees a road sign, the road sign he betters,
And expresses of himself by eliminating letters.

Thus THROUGH ROAD
Becomes ROUGH ROAD
And CURVES DANGEROUS
Is transformed to CURVES ANGER US
And 24-HOUR SERVICE
Turns into 24-HOUR VICE
And MEN AT WORK IN ENTRANCE
Is reduced to MEN AT WORK IN TRANCE
An SLOW DOWN BRIDGE ONE WAY
Is triumphantly condensed to
LOW DOWN BRIDE ON WAY

But the old fellow feels a slight dissatisfaction
With the uninspiring process of pure subtraction.
The evidence would indicate he’s taken as his mission
The improvement of the road signs by the process of addition.

Thus TRAFFIC LIGHT AHEAD
Becomes TRAFFIC SLIGHT AHEAD
And GAS AND OIL
Is improved to GASP AND BOIL
And simple REST ROOMS
Appear as QUEEREST ROOMS
And UNDERPASS ONE WAY
Emerges as UNDERPASS GONE AWAY
And (perhaps his masterpiece)
RIGHT
EAST BOUND
TUNNEL

Is elaborated to

FRIGHTENED
BEASTS ABOUND
IN TUNNEL

Thus we see the critical mood
Becomes the creative attitude.

— Morris Bishop

| Language · Poems

Podcast Episode 359: Stranded in Shangri-La

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 1945, a U.S. Army transport plane crashed in New Guinea, leaving three survivors marooned in the island’s mountainous interior. Injured, starving, and exhausted, the group seemed beyond the hope of rescue. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe the plight of the stranded survivors and the remarkable plan to save them.

We’ll also reflect on synthetic fingerprints and puzzle over a suspicious notebook.

See full show notes …

| History · Podcast

Triple Threat

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Designed in Belgium in 1860, the Apache centerfire revolver attracted a following in the French underworld because it combined three weapons in one: a single-action six-shot revolver, a dual-edged bayonet, and a set of brass knuckles that doubles as the revolver’s grip. The knife and the knuckle duster fold inward, so the whole apparatus can fit easily into a pocket or bag.

Without sights, trigger guard, or safety, the gun is tricky to operate, but then you probably won’t want it for long-range shootouts. “It was designed for self-defence and to be used at very close quarters,” said Charles Hartley, who auctioned off one of the few specimens in 2014. “There is no barrel to the gun so the user would have had to have had it pressed up against someone’s chest.”

Though its pinfire bullets are now obsolete, the weapon’s novelty still attracts collectors — another Apache, auctioned in 2013, drew $2,850.

(Thanks, Carlos.)

| Oddities

The Grim Reaper Paradox

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Suppose there are an infinite number of Grim Reapers. Each has an appointed time to kill Fred if it finds him alive.

The last Grim Reaper (call it #1) is appointed to do this exactly one minute after noon. The next-to-last (#2) is appointed to do it one half minute after noon. And so on: If it finds him alive, Reaper n will kill Fred exactly 1/2(n-1) minutes after noon.

Thus there is no first Reaper. For any given Reaper, there are infinitely many others who precede it by moments.

Whatever happens, we know that Fred can’t survive this ordeal — to go on with his life he must still be alive at 12:01, and we know for certain that if he lives that long then Reaper #1 will kill him. But in order to survive to 12:01 he must still be alive at 30 seconds after 12 — and at that time Reaper #2 will kill him. And so on. It appears that no Reaper will ever get the chance to kill Fred, because each is preceded by another who will rob him of the opportunity.

So it’s impossible that Fred survives, but it’s also impossible that any Reaper kills him. Must we say that he dies for certain but of no cause?

(From José Benardete’s Infinity: An Essay in Metaphysics, 1964.)

| Science & Math

Youth and Genius

Mathematician Norbert Wiener entered university at age 11 and earned a doctorate at 17, but he was 7 years old before he learned that Santa Claus does not exist. From his 1953 memoir Ex-Prodigy:

“At that time I was already reading books of more than slight difficulty, and it seemed to my parents that a child who was doing this should have no difficulty in discarding what to them was obviously a sentimental fiction. What they did not realize was the fragmentariness of the child’s world.”

In his 1909 autobiography Memories of My Life, Francis Galton remembers a boarding school to which he was sent at age 8:

“In that room was a wardrobe full of schoolbooks ready for issue. It is some measure of the then naïveté of my mind that I wondered for long how the books could have been kept so fresh and clean for nearly two thousand years, thinking that the copies of Caesar’s Commentaries were contemporary with Caesar himself.”

In Fragments of Genius, his 1989 survey of the feats of idiots savants, Michael Howe notes that a study of 8-year-olds who were exceptional chess players showed that they were perfectly normal in other spheres. “And the transcripts of interviews in which highly gifted young adults talk about their childhoods, supplemented by interviews with their parents, are full of testimonies to the extreme ordinariness of the individuals, outside their particular area of special talent.”

| Science & Math · Society

Credit

“The first author would like to acknowledge and thank Jesus Christ, through whom all things were made, for the encouragement, inspiration, and occasional hint that were necessary to complete this article. The second author, however, specifically disclaims this acknowledgement.”

— Michael I. Hartley and Dimitri Leemans, “Quotients of a Universal Locally Projective Polytope of Type {5, 3, 5},” Mathematische Zeitschrift 247:4 (2004), 663-674

| Religion · Science & Math

First Light

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I think if there’s one thing that you could truly say it the most beautiful sight you can possibly see as a human, it is watching sunrise over the Earth, because imagine, you’re looking at blackness out the window, black Earth, black space, and then as the Sun comes up, the atmosphere acts as a prism, and it splits the light into the component colors. It splits the white light of the Sun into the component colors, so you get this rainbow effect, and it starts with this deep indigo eyelash, just defining the horizon, and then as the Sun rises higher, you get these reds and oranges and blues in this rainbow. … You never got tired of looking at those.

— Astronaut Mike Mullane, quoted in Ariel Waldman, What’s It Like in Space?, 2016

| Science & Math

Looking Up

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Astronomer Clyde Tombaugh assembled his first telescope from spare parts on his family’s Kansas farm — the crankshaft of a 1910 Buick, a cream-separator base, and mechanical components from a straw spreader. He used this to make sketches of Jupiter and Mars that so impressed the astronomers at Lowell Observatory that they gave him a job there.

Years later, after he had made his name by discovering Pluto, the Smithsonian Institution asked if it could exhibit this early instrument. He told them he was still using it — he was making observations from his backyard near Las Cruces, N.M., until shortly before his death in 1997.

“Its mirror was hand-ground and tested in a storm cellar,” wrote Peter Manly in Unusual Telescopes in 1991. “It’s not the most elegant-looking optical instrument I’ve ever used, but it is one of the better planetary telescopes around. … Because of its role in the history of astronomy, I would classify this as one of the more important telescopes in the world.”

| Science & Math