Author: Greg Ross
One Two Three
This is in my notes with the words “ridiculous escape”: An 1889 article in Charles Dickens’ All the Year Round tells how Italian humanist Celio Secondo Curione outsmarted the Inquisition:
In my new prison I had been confined for a week, with huge pieces of wood chained to my feet, where I was favoured with a sudden inspiration from Heaven.
As soon as the young man who acted as my keeper entered my chamber, I begged and prayed of him to release one of my feet from its encumbrances. It would be sufficient security, I said, that I should still by the other foot be fastened to an enormous log. As he was a humane sort of fellow, he consented, and set one foot free. A day, two days passed, during which I applied myself to work. Taking off my shirt, and also the stocking from the leg which was at liberty, I made them up into a dummy resembling a leg, on which I put a shoe. I was in want of something, however, to give it consistency, and was anxiously looking about in all directions, when I caught sight of a cane-stick lying under a row of seats. Seizing it joyfully, I inserted it into the sham limb, and concealing the true one under my cloak, waited the result of my stratagem. When my young keeper made his appearance next morning, he asked me how I was. ‘I should do pretty well,’ I said, ‘if you would be good enough to put my fetters on the other leg, so that each may have a rest in turn.’ He assented; and, without perceiving it, attached the log to the dummy.
“At night, when their loud snores informed him that his gaolers were asleep, Curion threw aside the false leg, resumed his shirt and stocking, and opened noiselessly the prison door, which was fastened by a simple bolt. Afterwards, though not without difficulty, he scaled the wall, and got away without interruption.”
All Roads
From Martin Gardner: Shuffle a deck of cards and start dealing them face up one at a time into a pile, counting down from 10 as you go — that is, say “10” as you deal the first card, “9” as you deal the second, and so on. As soon as you say a number that matches the value of the card you’re dealing, stop dealing and start a new pile. Face cards count as 10. If you count down to 1 without finding a match, “kill” the pile by putting a card face down on top of it.
Repeat this procedure until you’ve dealt four piles. (If all four piles are “killed,” which is very unlikely, shuffle the whole deck and start over.) When the four piles are finished, add the values of the cards at the top of each “living” pile. Call that sum k. Now deal k cards from the remainder of the deck, and then count the cards that remain.
There will always be eight.
(Martin Gardner, “Curious Counts,” Math Horizons 10:3 [February 2003], 20-22.)
A Gettysburg Reunion
William Milford of Company H, Twenty-third Pennsylvania, while lying in the breastworks at Culp’s Hill, on the morning of July 3d [1863], picked up the head of a penny which some one had cut out, probably to make a stickpin. Some months afterwards while on reserve picket under Lieutenant Vodges of F Company, talking over campaigns, told of a relic he found at Gettysburg, and pulling it out showed it to the lieutenant.
‘Why, Milford, you are the man I have been looking for,’ and pulling out of his pocket a ring or rim of a penny, it was found the two pieces fitted together. The lieutenant stated that he had found the ring when the regiment went over from Culp’s Hill to the left of Meade’s headquarters, on the afternoon of July 3d. He gave the relic to Milford, and when the regiment erected its monument at Culp’s Hill, Gettysburg, in 1886, Milford had the relic go in with others that are now in the box sunken in the lower base of the monument.
— History of the Twenty-Third Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, Birney’s Zouaves, 1904
Teamwork
During the Falklands War in 1982, the RAF airfield closest to the action was on Ascension Island near the equator, thousands of miles away. Tasked with destroying the runway at Port Stanley, the RAF organized a complicated relay in which 11 tankers accompanied a single bomber (mauve), refueling it and each other in midair to support its journey of 3,400 nautical miles to the target. The attacking Vulcan bomber was refueled four times on the way out and once on the way back, using more than 220,000 gallons of aviation fuel altogether.
At the time this was the longest-ranged bombing raid in history — the return journey alone took 16 hours. It put one crater in the runway, which was repaired within 24 hours, but it discouraged the Argentinians from using it more heavily.
See The Jeep Problem. (Thanks, Tom.)
Podcast Episode 184: Lateral Thinking Puzzles
Here are six new lateral thinking puzzles — play along with us as we try to untangle some perplexing situations using yes-or-no questions.
Blind Spot
Given the premises No fruit-picker is a sailor and All Ruritanians are fruit-pickers, it’s fairly easy to deduce that No Ruritanian is a sailor. But what logical conclusion can be drawn from these premises?
All members of the cabinet are thieves.
No composer is a member of the cabinet.
Many people decide that no conclusion can be drawn. “Almost without exception that is the answer you will get, after some serious reflection, from intelligent people,” notes Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini in Inevitable Illusions.
But there is one: Some thieves are not composers (or There are thieves who are not composers). It’s logically impossible for the premises to be true and for this conclusion not to be true, and yet most people find the conclusion difficult to see.
Why? Princeton psychologist Philip Johnson-Laird thinks it’s because of the number and complexity of “mental models” that we have to build to elaborate our reasoning about such syllogisms. Unlike the case of the Ruritanian sailors, “The case of the cabinet ministers and composers requires … three distinct, and mentally separate, arrays of obligatory couplings: cabinet ministers and thieves, composers and cabinet ministers, and thieves and composers,” Piattelli-Palmarini explains.
“The result for all of us is a prohibitive difficulty in ‘seeing’ that there are necessarily false couplings between thieves and composers.”
01/04/2018 A number of readers have pointed out the existential fallacy in Johnson-Laird’s syllogism. Piattelli-Palmarini notes, “[O]ne has to avoid the situation in which these sets are empty. Rephrasing the premises as ‘all the ministers’ and ‘all the composers’ may aptly reinforce in the subjects the assumption that there are ministers and that there are composers. As the distinguished logician George Boolos of MIT has put it, the sentence ‘All deserters will be shot’ can be true also if there are, in fact, no deserters. In these cognitive tests, one wants to avoid such limited cases. For a further and accurate account of this problem, the reader is referred to Philip Johnson-Laird’s Mental Models, Chapter 6, and to his exchange with George Boolos in the journal Cognition in 1984.” (That’s Cognition 17:2, 181-182; Johnson-Laird’s reply is in 17:2, 183-184.)
Simplicity
In The Pleasures of Counting, T.W. Körner asks, “How long would you expect a paper reporting a crucial experiment in physics to be and how would you expect it to be written? Here in its entirety is a paper entitled ‘Interference Fringes With Feeble Light’ written by G.I. Taylor in 1909 (to be found in his collected works).”
A Bloody Bargain
During Henry Stanley’s 1886 Emin Pasha Relief Expedition to the interior of Africa, naturalist James S. Jameson allegedly paid a group of cannibals to kill and eat a young girl so that he sketch the act. According to his interpreter, Assad Farran, Jameson afterward took the sketches to his tent, finished them in watercolors, and then “showed these and many other sketches to all the chiefs.”
Jameson protested the accusation, but his own diary describes the killing:
I told him that people at home generally believed that these [accounts of cannibalism] were only ‘travellers’ tales,’ as they are called in our country, or, in other words, lies. He then said something to an Arab called Ali, seated next him, who turned round to me and said, ‘Give me a bit of cloth, and see.’ I sent my boy for six handkerchiefs, thinking it was all a joke, and that they were not in earnest, but presently a man appeared, leading a young girl of about ten years old by the hand, and I then witnessed the most horribly sickening sight I am ever likely to see in my life. He plunged a knife quickly into her breast twice, and she fell on her face, turning over on her side. Three men then ran forward and began to cut up the body of the girl; finally her head was cut off, and not a particle remained, each man taking his piece away down to the river to wash it. The most extraordinary thing was that the girl never uttered a sound, nor struggled, until she fell.
In his 1889 account of the expedition, Heroes of the Dark Continent, James William Buel presents the images above as copies of Jameson’s sketches.
Another of Stanley’s men claimed that Jameson had spoken freely of the incident at the time, and only realized “the seriousness” of his actions much later. “Life is very cheap in Central Africa,” he wrote. “Mr. Jameson forgot how differently this terrible thing would be regarded at home.”
“Concerning Love”
I wish she would not ask me if I love the Kitten more than her.
Of course I love her. But I love the Kitten, too; and it has fur.
— Josephine Preston Peabody, The Book of the Little Past, 1908