Figure and Ground

https://patents.google.com/patent/US4627622A/en

Because we live on land, we tend to make maps in which oceans are afterthoughts, mere spaces between the continents. In 1986 oceanographer Athelstan Spilhaus sought to remedy this with a cartographic puzzle in which seven pieces can be combined in various ways, each presenting “a different, but equally valid, viewpoint of the features of the earth.”

Above, they’re arranged to show that “the land masses of North and South America, on the one hand, and those of Europe, Asia, and Africa on the other, are maintained in associated groupings, while the vastness of the Pacific Ocean has been set off to the left of the map.”

But the same seven pieces might be rearranged to illustrate the fact that “the Pacific Ocean widely separates Asia from the Americas.”

In 1942 Spilhaus had also devised a world map in which the oceans take the forefront, reminding us that Earth is “a water planet, with a single great ocean covering nearly three-quarters of its surface.”

| Science & Math

In a Word

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:August_Friedrich_Albrecht_Schenck_-_Anguish_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

orbity
n. a bereavement by loss of parents or children

reme
v. to cry out in grief or pain; to lament

philostorgy
n. parental love

asperous
adj. harsh to the feelings; bitter, cruel, severe

Of August Friedrich Schenck’s 1878 painting Anguish, one critic wrote in Figaro, “All the world today regards Schenk as one of our first animal-painters. He is one of those originals, of a species not yet extinct, who prefer dogs to men, and find more sweetness in sheep than in women.”

“It is a little drama, this picture, and as poignant as if it had men for actors and victims.”

| Art · Language

Efficiency

http://www.bikeboom.info/efficiency/

In a 1973 Scientific American article on bicycle technology, Oxford engineering lecturer S.S. Wilson showed that a man on a bicycle “improves his efficiency rating to No. 1 among moving creatures and machines”:

“When one compares the energy consumed in moving a certain distance as a function of body weight for a variety of animals and machines, one finds that an unaided walking man does fairly well (consuming about .75 calorie per gram per kilometer), but he is not as efficient as a horse, a salmon or a jet transport. With the aid of a bicycle, however, the man’s energy consumption for a given distance is reduced to about a fifth (roughly .15 calorie per gram per kilometer).”

(Via Simon Kuestenmacher’s Twitter feed.)

11/18/2018 UPDATE: In 1974 the Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich wrote:

The model American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 per cent of their society’s time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent.

(Thanks, Bryan.)

| Technology

Coincidence

It had so happened for several days that Major Eckert had been out whenever the President came into the office. Coming in one day and finding the Major counting money at his desk, Mr. Lincoln remarked that he believed the Major never came to the office any more except when he had money to count. The Major declared that his being out when the President happened to come in was simply a coincidence, and this reminded him, the Major, of a story: ‘A certain tailor in Mansfield, Ohio, was very stylish in dress and airy in manner. Passing a shopkeeper’s door one day the shopkeeper puffed himself up, and gave a long blow expressive of the inflation of the conceited tailor, who indignantly turned and said: “I’ll learn you not to blow when I’m passing,” to which the shopkeeper instantly replied: “And I’ll teach you not to pass while I’m blowing.”‘ The President said that was very good — very like a story which he had heard of a man who was driving through the country in an open buggy, and was caught at night in a pouring shower of rain. He was hurrying forward toward shelter as fast as possible; passing a farmhouse, a man, apparently struggling with the effects of bad whisky, thrust his head out of the window and shouted loudly, ‘Hullo! hullo!’ The traveller stopped and asked what was wanted. ‘Nothing of you,’ was the reply. ‘Well, what in the d—- do you shout hullo for when people are passing?’ angrily asked the traveller. ‘Well, what in the d—- are you passing for when people are shouting hullo?’ replied the inebriate.

— T.Y. Crowell, Abraham Lincoln, 1895

| Humor

Truth Pays

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2005-Penny-Uncirculated-Obverse-cropped.png

Here are a penny and a quarter. Make a statement. If your statement is true, then I’ll give you one of these coins (not saying which). But if your statement is false, then I won’t give you either coin.

Raymond Smullyan says, “There is a statement you can make such that I would have no choice but to give you the quarter (assuming I keep my word).” What statement will accomplish that?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Podcast Episode 224: Lady Death

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pavlichenko_in_the_US_with_two_other_delegates,_1942_(cropped).jpg

Lyudmila Pavlichenko was training for a career as a history teacher when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. She suspended her studies to enlist as a sniper in the Red Army, where she discovered a remarkable talent for shooting enemy soldiers. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll trace the career of “Lady Death,” the deadliest female sniper in history.

We’ll also learn where in the world futility.closet.podcast is and puzzle over Air Force One.

See full show notes …

| History · Podcast

Winners and Losers

A puzzle by the Hungarian-Canadian mathematician George Grätzer:

I’m writing an article about a round-robin tennis tournament, in which each player plays each other player once. I decide to pick one player and ask her which players she defeated (in tennis there are no ties). Then I’ll ask each of those players which players they’ve defeated. Is it possible to pick a player so that everyone in the tournament is mentioned in my article?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Pilot Program

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

For 50 years, Snoopy has been NASA’s official safety mascot. Every astronaut wears a sterling silver Snoopy pin into space and presents it personally afterward to an employee or contractor as a special commendation for outstanding achievements related to safety.

Each year, fewer than 1 percent of the aerospace program workforce receive the award; it’s the highest honour recognizing the people who work to keep astronauts safe.

| Trivia

Volume Control

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caricature_of_a_Tall_Thin_Man_Carrying_a_Book_MET_DP803932.jpg

I just thought this was interesting: In the 1970s a little spate of studies investigated why men and women carry books in stereotypically different ways. A 1976 study in Tennessee found that by junior high school males tended to carry books at their sides, with the arm relatively straight and the hand cupped under the book’s lower edge. Females cradled a book in the arm at the front side of the body, resting on the hip or pelvic bone.

A second study in the same year ruled out some theories: It found that men and women carried books of roughly equal weight, and that both had hand grips strong enough to carry their books in either position. (Also, carrying purses didn’t significantly alter the way women carried their books.)

A University of Washington study two years later replicated the earlier findings but suggested that “women with hips that extend past the comfortable fall line of the arm along the side of the body will not show the side carry typically seen in males.” (“In effect, the hip in females fills the side space that males fill with their books.”)

But a re-examination 15 years later found that the picture was changing: While 90 percent of the men still carried books at their sides, now so did 43-60 percent of the women. So perhaps it’s not correct to speak of these as intrinsically masculine and feminine styles. But that raises another question: “why … men’s carrying behavior is uniform and stable, whereas women’s behavior is more varied and changing.”

(Thomas P. Hanaway and Gordon M. Burghardt, “The Development of Sexually Dimorphic Book-Carrying Behavior,” Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 7:3 [1976], 267-270; Philip J. Spottswood and Gordon M. Burghardt, “The Effects of Sex, Book Weight, and Grip Strength on Book-Carrying Styles,” Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 8:2 (1976), 150-152; Judith D. Scheman, Joan S. Lockard, and Bruce L. Mehler, “Influences of Anatomical Differences on Gender-Specific Book-Carrying Behavior,” Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 11:1 [1978], 17-20; Evelyne Thommen, Emiel Reith, and Christiane Steffen, “Gender-Related Book-Carrying Behavior: A Reexamination,” Perceptual and Motor Skills 76:2 [1993], 355-362.)

| Literature · Science & Math

Aphorism

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arabischer_Maler_um_1210_001.jpg

The crows like to insist a single crow is enough to destroy heaven. This is incontestably true, but it says nothing about heaven, because heaven is just another way of saying: the impossibility of crows.

— Kafka

| Literature