In 1930, British explorer Augustine Courtauld volunteered to spend the winter alone on the Greenland ice cap, manning a remote weather station. As the snow gradually buried his hut and his supplies steadily dwindled, his relief party failed to arrive. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow Courtauld’s increasingly desperate vigil on the ice.
We’ll also retreat toward George III and puzzle over some unexpected evidence.
In 1965, Polish artist Roman Opałka hung a 196 × 135 cm canvas in his Warsaw studio. In the top left corner he painted a tiny numeral 1, then a 2, and so on until he had filled the canvas with numbers. Then he put up a new canvas and continued where he had left off. He called these images “details”; all of them had the same size and the same title, 1965 / 1 – ∞.
He vowed to spend the rest of his life on the project. “All my work is a single thing,” he said, “the description from number one to infinity. A single thing, a single life. … The problem is that we are, and are about not to be.”
At the start he painted white numbers on a black background, but in 1972 he began gradually to lighten the black with each detail, saying that his goal was “to get up to the white on white and still be alive.” He expected that this would happen when he reached 7777777 … but at the time of his death, in 2011, he’d got only as far as 5607249.
In 2010 Jeremy Wood walked around the campus of the University of Warwick with a GPS device to “draw” a map at 1:1 scale. Altogether he covered 238 miles in 17 days.
“He stayed in the Maths Houses on Gibbet Hill so the line through Tocil Wood to the Mead Gallery is exceptionally dark since it was walked so many times,” the university reports. “As he worked his way across the fields towards Kenilworth he began to ‘draw’ images associated with the University, from its crest, to a mortar board, to a globe in homage to the many ‘international’ centres that he encountered in his journeys. Reported to security several times for walking in ‘a suspicious manner’ around Claycroft and Lakeside residences, he soon disappeared from view, walking the countryside that surrounds the University but which is far removed from central campus.”
“I responded to the structure of each location and avoided walking along roads and paths when possible,” Wood writes. “Security was called on me twice on separate occasions and I lost count of how many times I happened to trigger an automatic sliding door.” More at his website and at GPS Drawing.
Somewhat related: Mathematician Jerry Farrell invented a two-player coin-pushing game played on a map of Butler University, his institution. Rebecca Wahl analyzed it in Barry Cipra’s Tribute to a Mathemagician (2005), and Aviezri Fraenkel of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science revisited it the following year (PDF).
In August 1805, Lewis and Clark encountered a band of Shoshone Indians led by Chief Cameahwait. In order for Lewis to communicate with Cameahwait, the group had to speak four languages: Lewis spoke English to Private Francois Labiche, who spoke French to interpreter Toussaint Charbonneau, who spoke Hidatsa to his Shoshone wife Sacagawea, who spoke Shoshone to Chief Cameahwait. Cameahwait’s reply passed back up the chain in the opposite direction.
Amazingly, Cameahwait turned out to be Sacagawea’s brother. They had been separated for five years, ever since her abduction by Hidatsa in 1800. Overjoyed at the reunion, he gave the expedition much-needed guides and horses to help them cross the Rocky Mountains.
By 1804, English engineer George Cayley was building model gliders that were remarkably similar to modern airplanes, with fixed wings, a body, and a tail. In the 1840s he built a glider large enough to carry a 10-year-old boy, and in 1853 he launched his coachman, John Appleby, across a valley on the first heavier-than-air flight by an adult.
When the glider landed, Appleby said, “Please, Sir George, I wish to give notice. I was hired to drive, and not to fly!”
jawsmith
n. a talkative person
meropic
adj. able to speak
obmutescent
adj. speechless; remaining mute
Mr. Justice Norris, in the Calcutta High Court, recently delivered what is understood to be the shortest summing-up on record. It was as follows: ‘Gentlemen of the jury, the prisoner has nothing to say, and I have nothing to say. What have you got to say?’
— The Green Bag, October 1890
When J.M. Barrie organized his friends into an amateur cricket team in 1887, his selections weren’t based on literary eminence — “With regard to the married men, it was because I liked their wives, with regard to the single men, it was for the oddity of their personal appearance.” But the team managed to include some of the most celebrated British writers of the day, including Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, A.A. Milne, G.K. Chesterton, Jerome K. Jerome, P.G. Wodehouse, E.V. Lucas, and E.W. Hornung.
It wasn’t until they assembled for their first game that the Allahakberries (Barrie thought Allahu Akbar meant “Heaven help us”) realized the extent of their ignorance — geologist Joseph Thomson arrived wearing pajamas rather than cricket whites, and an argument arose over which side of the bat to use in hitting the ball.
Generally Barrie found that the more distinguished a writer was, “the worse they played.” (The exception was Doyle, whom Barrie described as “A grand bowler. Knows a batsman’s weakness by the colour of the mud on his shoes.”) Eventually he wrote a book of advice for the team, in which he asked them not practice before matches, since it would only give their opponents confidence, and advised “Should you hit the ball, run at once. Do not stop to cheer.”
Sadly, the war ended the team’s career. Barrie wrote in his diary, “The Last Cricket Match. One or two days before war declared — my anxiety and premonition — boys gaily playing cricket at Auch, seen from my window. I know they’re to suffer. I see them dropping out one by one, fewer and fewer.” He was right — in fact, one of the casualties was George Llewelyn Davies, who had helped to inspire Peter Pan.
In Under the Mask, his 1972 anthology about prejudice in America, Karel Weiss records a scene aboard the slave ship Young Hero in 1788, recounted by ship’s surgeon Ecroide Claxton before the House of Commons:
Some of the slaves on board the same ship, says Mr. Claxton, had such an aversion to leaving their native places, that they threw themselves overboard, with an idea that they should get back to their own country. The captain, in order to obviate this idea, thought of an expedient, viz. to cut off the heads of those who died, intimating to them, that if determined to go, they must return without their heads. The slaves were accordingly brought up to witness the operation. One of them seeing, when on deck, the carpenter standing with his hatchet up ready to strike off the head of a dead slave, with a violent exertion got loose, and flying to the place where the nettings had been unloosed, in order to empty the tubs, he darted overboard. The ship brought to, and a man was placed in the main chains to catch him, which he perceiving, dived under water, and rising again at a distance from the ship, made signs, which words cannot describe, expressive of his happiness in escaping. He then went down, and was seen no more.
Weiss says the idea of escaping into death was particularly prevalent among the Ibo of eastern Nigeria. Related:
In the West Indies, according to the Spanish historian Girolamo Benzoni, four thousand men and countless women and children died by jumping from cliffs or by killing each other. He adds that, out of the two million original inhabitants of Haiti, fewer than 150 survived as a result of the suicides and slaughter. In the end the Spaniards, faced with an embarrassing labor shortage, put a stop to the epidemic of suicides by persuading the Indians that they, too, would kill themselves in order to pursue them in the next world with even harsher cruelties.
— Alfred Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, 1971
Here’s something odd: a painting of a young lady riding Aristotle like a pony.
In fact what’s surprising is how thoroughly we’ve forgotten this image, which was once one of the most common artistic motifs of the Northern Renaissance, figuring in scores of paintings, sculptures, and engravings.
The woman is Phyllis, the consort of Alexander the Great, who was a pupil of Aristotle. According to a 13th-century manuscript:
Once upon a time, Aristotle taught Alexander that he should restrain himself from frequently approaching his wife, who was very beautiful, lest he should impede his spirit from seeking the general good. Alexander acquiesced to him. The queen, when she perceived this and was upset, began to draw Aristotle to love her. Many times she crossed paths with him alone, with bare feet and disheveled hair, so that she might entice him.
At last, being enticed, he began to solicit her carnally.
‘This I will certainly not do, unless I see a sign of love, lest you be testing me. Therefore, come to my chamber crawling on hand and foot, in order to carry me like a horse. Then I’ll know that you aren’t deluding me.’
When he had consented to that condition, she secretly told the matter to Alexander, who lying in wait apprehended him carrying the queen. When Alexander wished to kill Aristotle, in order to excuse himself, Aristotle says,
‘If thus it happened to me, an old man most wise, that I was deceived by a woman, you can see that I taught you well, that it could happen to you, a young man.’
Hearing that, the king spared him, and made progress in Aristotle’s teachings.
This is an exemplum, a sort of parable designed to warn the reader away from a bad practice — in this case, allowing passion to overcome reason. But it’s nice to see the lesson taught to Aristotle, who once declared that the capacity for practical reason was undeveloped in children, absent in slaves, and “without authority” in women.
(Thanks, Dan.)
Sculptor John V. Muntean writes, “Our scientific interpretation of nature often depends upon our point of view. Perspective matters.” His carving titled Riddle of the Sphinx combines three profiles in one object — a baby, an adult man, and an old man with a walking stick. With each 120 degrees of rotation, the carving’s shadow presents a different picture.
This is impressive enough when it’s carved in mahogany, but Muntean’s Knight Mermaid Pirate Ship, below, works the same trick using LEGOs.
See more of Muntean’s “magic angle sculptures” on his YouTube channel.
