A Bird Meme

In the early 1900s, blue tits and robins had easy access to cream from the tops of open milk bottles left on humans’ doorsteps. After World War I, the humans began to seal the bottle tops with aluminum foil. But remarkably, by the 1950s the entire blue tit population of the United Kingdom had learned pierce the foil to reach the cream, while the robins hadn’t.

The difference lay in cultural transmission: A blue tit can learn a new behavior by observing another bird performing it. Robins generally can’t do this — while an individual robin might learn to pierce the foil, it has no way to pass on this discovery to other robins. Young blue tits are reared in flocks in which they can observe one another, which is an advantage; robins are territorial and have fewer such opportunities.

| Science & Math

Red or Black

Six sheets are set out in a room. Each identifies a different date in the same month. Weekdays are printed in black and Sundays in red. Six people will enter the room, one by one. Before the first one enters, one sheet is turned face down. Candidate 1 is then asked if she can deduce the color of the inverted sheet by examining the other sheets. Her answer, yes or no, is written on the back of the inverted sheet, followed by her number, 1. When 1 departs, a second sheet is turned face down. Candidate 2 enters and is asked whether she can deduce the color of the second sheet by considering her predecessor’s answer and the four face-up sheets. Her answer is noted in its turn, and this process continues — when the sixth candidate enters, she sees six face-down sheets, the first five of which bear the answers of the first five candidates. If all five of these answers are no, can Candidate 6 answer yes?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Surface Matters

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Studiolo_from_the_Ducal_Palace_in_Gubbio_MET_DT237370.jpg

Created by Giuliano da Maiano in the 15th century, the walls of the studiolo from the ducal palace in Gubbio, Italy, feature elaborate trompe-l’œil illusions. The wall shown above is flat — the images of the bench, the open cabinets, their contents, and even the shadows are all meticulously fashioned from inlaid walnut (see below).

The perspective is carefully arranged, with a consistent horizon line and vanishing points. The illusion works best for a viewer 1.68 meters tall standing at a prescribed point along the entrance of the window niche. “When the studiolo’s doors were closed and the main window was covered by a pair of now-lost shutters, the viewer would have been surrounded by an illusionary but convincing space based on four converging perspectives.”

(From Olga Raggio, Federic da Montefeltro’s Palace at Gubbio and Its Studiolo, 1999.)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Studiolo_from_the_Ducal_Palace_in_Gubbio_MET_DT213911.jpg

| Art

Podcast Episode 215: The Lieutenant Nun

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Catalina_de_Erauso_contra_Mapuches_-_por_Subercaseaux.JPG

In 1607, a 15-year-old girl fled her convent in the Basque country, dressed herself as a man, and set out on a series of unlikely adventures across Europe. In time she would distinguish herself fighting as a soldier in Spain’s wars of conquest in the New World. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the story of Catalina de Erauso, the lieutenant nun of Renaissance Spain.

We’ll also hunt for some wallabies and puzzle over a quiet cat.

See full show notes …

| History · Podcast · Society

Black and White

vielväter problem

In 1949 R.J. Darvall presented this position with a simple question: Who wins?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

On the Quiet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WBH-Troy_disaster_codes.jpg
Image: Wikipedia

To avoid alarming their visitors, hospitals typically alert their staff to emergency situations by announcing “codes” over the public address system. Alberta uses these:

Code Red: Fire
Code Blue: Cardiac arrest/medical emergency
Code Orange: Mass casualty incident
Code Green: Evacuation
Code Yellow: Missing patient
Code Black: Bomb threat/suspicious package
Code White: Violence/aggression
Code Brown: Chemical spill/hazardous material
Code Grey: Shelter in place/air exclusion
Code Purple: Hostage situation

These haven’t been standardized; a few other systems are listed here. One common variation is “Paging Dr. Red” or “Paging Dr. Firestone” to alert staff of a fire. Sometimes “Code Clear” is announced when the emergency has been dealt with.

For similar reasons, airlines refer to dead bodies as “Jim Wilson.” American Airlines’ help desk for funeral homes is called the American Airlines Jim Wilson Service.

| Trivia

Self-Help

REMEDIABLENESSES word square

REMEDIABLENESSES, written in a spiral, produces a 4 × 4 word square all of whose entries appear in the Oxford English Dictionary.

IREN is a variant of iron, a DEME is an arbiter or ruler, a SESS is an assessment, the BREE is the eyelid, LEMS are lunar excursion modules, and ENES is an archaic form of once.

(Jeff Grant, “Some of My Favorite Squares,” Word Ways 40:2 [May 2007], 96-102.)

| Language

In a Word

anamnesis
n. the recalling of things past; recollection, reminiscence

alogism
n. an illogical or irrational statement or notion

eutaxy
n. good order or management

satisdiction
n. saying enough

In “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons,” a hotel manager successfully finds a man’s name in his ledger at Sherlock Holmes’ request even though he knows only the first name.

“I should like to have seen the index to that pay-list,” remarked the Holmes commentator James Edward Holroyd. “How do you enter the name of a man who has no surname? As Beppo ‘X’?”

Possibly the manager used the same indexing system as Holmes himself, who in “The Sussex Vampire” looks up the forger Victor Lynch under V in his record of old cases. “Good old index,” he tells Watson. “You can’t beat it.”

| Language · Literature

An Odd Result

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pm1234_linearity.png
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Suppose s is the infinite series 1 – 2 + 3 – 4 + …. The diagram above presents 4 copies of the series. Each white disk represents +1, and each red disk represents -1. Each pair of red and white disks annihilates to zero, and the connecting lines show that all of the disks beyond the first +1 (green) can be paired off in this way. The result is that 4s = 1 and, perversely, that 1 – 2 + 3 – 4 + … = 1/4.

(It’s not really that simple — this series doesn’t tend toward any finite limit, but any summation method that’s linear and stable does produce the sum 1/4.)

| Science & Math

Cameo

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Charter_Oak_1855-ml.jpg

This is the only known photograph of Connecticut’s Charter Oak, a famous symbol of American independence before a storm blew it down in 1856.

Curiously, the father of the country seems to appear among its branches.

| History · Oddities