“Those writers who lay on the watch for novelty, could have little hope of greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation.” — Samuel Johnson
“It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world.” — Aristotle
“What wise or stupid thing can man conceive
That was not thought of in ages long ago?” — Goethe
Without any forethought or preparation, Christopher Knight walked into the Maine woods in 1986 and lived there in complete solitude for the next 27 years, subsisting on what he was able to steal from local cabins. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the story of the North Pond hermit, one man’s attempt to divorce himself completely from civilization.
We’ll also look for coded messages in crosswords and puzzle over an ineffective snake.
In 1978, inspired by this Peanuts cartoon, Nathaniel Hellerstein invented the Linus sequence, a sequence of 1s and 2s in which each new entry is chosen the prevent the longest possible pattern from emerging at the end of the line. Start with 1:
1
Now if the second digit were also a 1 then we’d have a repeating pattern. So enter a 2:
1 2
If we choose 2 for the third entry we’ll have “2 2” at the end of the line, another emerging pattern. Prevent that by choosing 1:
1 2 1
Now what? Choosing 2 would give us the disastrously tidy 1 2 1 2, so choose 1 again:
1 2 1 1
But now the 1s at the end are looking rather pleased with themselves, so choose 2:
1 2 1 1 2
And so on. The rule is to avoid the longest possible “doubled suffix,” the longest possible repeated string of digits at the end of the sequence. For example, choosing 1 at this point would give us 1 2 1 1 2 1, in which the end of the sequence (indeed, the entire sequence) is a repeated string of three digits. Choosing 2 avoids this, so we choose that.
Admittedly, this isn’t exactly the sequence that Linus was describing in the comic strip, but it opens up a world of its own with many surprising properties (PDF), as these things tend to do.
It’s possible to compile a related sequence by making note of the length of each repetition that you avoided in the Linus sequence. That’s called the Sally sequence.
In 1996, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid set out to determine the “most unwanted” possible song, using an opinion poll of about 500 people.
Here it is — 22 minutes of cowboy music, bagpipes, accordions, opera, rap, children’s voices, tubas, drum machines, and advertising jingles.
Details are on their website. Columbia neuroscientist David Sulzer says that, if his analysis is right, “fewer than 200 individuals of the world’s total population would enjoy this piece.”
In February 1966, the Soviet Union’s Luna 9 landed safely on the moon and became the first spacecraft to transmit photographs of the moon seen from surface level.
The Soviets didn’t release the photos immediately, but scientists at England’s Jodrell Bank Observatory, who were observing the mission, realized that the signal format was the same as the Radiofax system that newspapers used to transmit pictures. So they just borrowed a receiver from the Daily Express, decoded the images, and published them.
The BBC observes, “It is thought that Russian scientists had deliberately fitted the probe with the standard television equipment, either to ensure that they would get the higher-quality pictures from Jodrell Bank without having the political embarrassment of asking for them, or to prevent the Soviet authorities from making political capital out of the achievement.”
(Thanks, Andrew.)
When Alexander Graham Bell died in 1922, it was thought that no recordings of his voice had survived. But in 2013 the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History announced that it had a fragile wax-on-cardboard disc that Bell had made as an experiment in sound recording … and that now this could be played using optical scanning technology.
The disc is dated April 15, 1885. Bell spends most of the 4-minute recording reciting figures, but he concludes with the distinct words “Hear my voice: … Alexander … Graham … Bell.” Bell biographer Charlotte Gray wrote:
In that ringing declaration, I heard the clear diction of a man whose father, Alexander Melville Bell, had been a renowned elocution teacher (and perhaps the model for the imperious Prof. Henry Higgins, in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion; Shaw acknowledged Bell in his preface to the play).
I heard, too, the deliberate enunciation of a devoted husband whose deaf wife, Mabel, was dependent on lip reading. And true to his granddaughter’s word, the intonation of the British Isles was unmistakable in Bell’s speech. The voice is vigorous and forthright — as was the inventor, at last speaking to us across the years.
Amazingly, scientists resurrected the voice of Bell’s father too — a man who had been born in 1819.
Many thanks to podcast listener Matt Taylor for this:
In 1992 British journalist James May was hired to compile the annual “Road Test Year Book” for Autocar magazine, a collection of the year’s car reviews. The task “was extremely boring and took several months,” May said, so to amuse himself he began to hide acrostics in the text. The design of the supplement called for four reviews on each two-page spread, with the first letter of each review presented as a large red capital letter. May arranged the text so that the four red letters on one spread spelled out ROAD, another spread spelled TEST, and so on.
Readers who noticed this might have been disappointed to find that the pattern didn’t continue — the four-letter phrases soon reverted to non-words such as SOYO and UTHI.
But those with the patience to put all the non-words together found a masterly 81-letter message:
SO YOU THINK ITS REALLY GOOD YEAH YOU SHOULD TRY MAKING THE BLOODY THING UP ITS A REAL PAIN IN THE ARSE
Autocar’s editors overlooked the acrostic entirely — they learned about it only when readers called in seeking a prize.
May was fired, but he went on to bigger things: He was a co-presenter of the motoring program Top Gear for 13 years.
subsannation
n. mockery or derision
quoz
n. an odd or ridiculous person or thing
cursitate
v. to run hither and thither
mattoid
adj. displaying erratic behaviour
Three men, A, B, and C, are given a test in quick thinking. Each man’s forehead is marked with either a blue or a white cross, and they’re put into an empty room. None of the three can see the color of his own cross, and they aren’t allowed to communicate in any way. Each is told that he can leave the room if he either sees two white crosses or can correctly deduce the color of his own cross.
The men know each other well, and A knows he’s just a bit more alert than the others. He sees that both B and C have blue crosses, and after a moment’s thought he’s able to leave the room, having correctly named the color of his own cross. What was the color, and how did he deduce it?
On April 12, 1961, witnesses saw a spaceship enter Earth’s atmosphere and descend to the ground in a ploughed field in the Leninsky Put Collective Farm near the Soviet village of Smelovka. At a height of 7 kilometers, a spaceman left the ship and drifted to earth on a parachute. The spaceman later reported:
As I stepped on the firm soil, I saw a woman and a girl. They were standing beside a spotted calf and gazing at me with curiosity. I started walking towards them and they began walking towards me. But the nearer they got to me the slower their steps became. I was still wearing my flaming orange spacesuit and they were probably frightened by it. They had never seen anything like it before.
‘I’m a Russian, comrades. I’m a Russian,’ I shouted, taking off my helmet.
The woman was Anna Takhtarova, wife of the local forester, and the girl, Rita, was her granddaughter.
‘Have you really come from outer space?’ she asked a little uncertainly.
‘Just imagine, I certainly have,’ I replied.
He was Yuri Gagarin, and the site would soon receive a permanent monument marking the landing place of Vostok-1.