Viewpoint

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Karl_D%C3%B6nitz.jpg

Captured by the British near the end of World War I, submarine commander Karl Dönitz was a prisoner at Gibraltar when news of the armistice came through. As he and a fellow German officer watched the celebrations “with infinitely bitter hearts,” a British captain joined them on deck.

Dönitz waved his arm in a gesture to encompass all the ships in the roads, British, American, French, Japanese, and asked if he could take any joy from a victory which could only be attained with the whole world for allies.

‘Yes,’ the Captain replied after a pause, ‘it’s very curious.’

In his memoirs, Dönitz wrote, “I will hold the memory of this fair and noble English sea officer in high regard all my life.”

(From Peter Padfield, Donitz: The Last Führer, 2013.)

| History

Parrot Talk

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Commanville_-_Souvenirs_sur_Gustave_Flaubert_-_Illustration_p._10.png

At his death in 1880, Gustave Flaubert left behind notes for a Dictionary of Received Ideas, a list of the trite utterances that people repeat inevitably in conversation:

  • accident: Always “regrettable” or “unlucky” — as if a mishap might sometimes be a cause for rejoicing.
  • Archimedes: On hearing his name, shout “Eureka!” Or else: “Give me a fulcrum and I will move the world.” There is also Archimedes’ screw, but you are not expected to know what that is.
  • bachelors: All self-centered, all rakes. Should be taxed. Headed for a lonely old age.
  • book: Always too long, regardless of subject.
  • classics: You are supposed to know all about them.
  • forehead: Wide and bald, a sign of genius, or of self-confidence.
  • funny: Should be used on all occasions: “How funny!”
  • gibberish: Foreigners’ way of talking. Always make fun of the foreigner who murders French.
  • handwriting: A neat hand leads to the top. Undecipherable: a sign of deep science, e.g. doctors’ prescriptions.
  • jury: Do everything you can to get off it.
  • metaphors: Always too many in poems. Always too many in anybody’s writing.
  • original: Make fun of everything that is original, hate it, beat it down, annihilate it if you can.
  • pillow: Never use a pillow: it will make you into a hunchback.
  • restaurant: You should order the dishes not usually served at home. When uncertain, look at what others around you are eating.
  • taste: “What is simple is always in good taste.” Always say this to a woman who apologizes for the inadequacy of her dress.
  • war: Thunder against.
  • young gentleman: Always sowing wild oats; he is expected to do so. Astonishment when he doesn’t.

“All our trouble,” he wrote to George Sand, “comes from our gigantic ignorance. … When shall we get over empty speculation and accepted ideas? What should be studied is believed without discussion. Instead of examining, people pontificate.”

(Thanks, Macari.)

| Literature · Society

Unquote

pollock

“The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.” — E.O. Wilson

| Quotations

Cover Story

https://www.google.com/patents/US2930053

Making a bed is a tiresome chore, observed inventor Richard Nowels in 1959, because so much time is spent in walking and bending: “It is necessary to pull the covers from both sides of the bed, from the bottom end of the bed, and possibly also from the top end of the bed.”

A better solution, he decided, is to hide an electric motor under the bed and connect it by cords to the edges of the bedclothes. Now when you get out of bed you can turn on the motor and draw the sheets and blankets immediately into their proper positions.

It’s handy in the middle of the night, too: “Kicked-out covers may be automatically re-tucked into place by the bed occupant merely by flipping a switch.”

| Technology

A Reflexive Rainbow

sallows color table

From Lee Sallows: The international color code is used to mark the values of electronic components such as resistors. It assigns a distinct color to each of the 10 decimal digits, as seen in the center column of the table at right: 0 = BLACK, 1 = BROWN, …, 9 = WHITE.

Lee’s table has an ingenious reflexive property. The letters in the left-hand column are associated with the values -1 to -9, and those in the right-hand column with the values 1 to 9.

Now spelling the name of each color produces a sum that matches the number represented by that color:

sallows color sums

“This is more remarkable that it may seem,” Lee writes, “because the numbers assigned to the letters are now restricted to single-digit values only.”

| Language · Science & Math

As You Were

The Galil machine gun includes a built-in bottle opener in the front handguard. Soldiers commonly damaged the lips of Uzi submachine gun magazines by using them to open bottles, so designer Yisrael Galili built a dedicated opener into his rifle.

| Oddities

Podcast Episode 98: The St. Albans Raid

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St_Albans_Raiders.gif

Seemingly safe in northern New England, the residents of St. Albans, Vermont, were astonished in October 1864 when a group of Confederate soldiers appeared in their midst, terrorizing residents, robbing banks, and stealing horses. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the story of the St. Albans raid, the northernmost land action of the Civil War.

We’ll also learn about Charles Darwin’s misadventures at the equator and puzzle over a groundskeeper’s strange method of tending grass.

See full show notes …

| History · Podcast

Lanchester’s Laws

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

In 1916 English engineer Frederick Lanchester set out to find a mathematical model to describe conflicts between two armies. In ancient times, he reasoned, each soldier engaged with one enemy at a time, so the number of soldiers who survived a battle was simply the difference in size between the two armies. But the advent of modern combat, including long-range weapons such as firearms, changes things. Suppose two armies, A and B, are fighting. A and B represent the number of soldiers in each army, and a and b represent the number of enemy fighters that each soldier can kill per unit time. Now the equations

dA/dt = -bB
dB/dt = -aA,

show us the rate at which the size of each army is changing at a given instant. And these give us

bB2 – aA2 = C,

where C is a constant.

This is immediately revealing. It shows that the strength of an army depends more on its bare size than on the sophistication of its weapons. In order to meet an army twice your size you’d need weapons (or fighting skills) that are four times as effective.

Simple as they are, these ideas shed light on the historic choices of leaders such as Nelson, who sought to divide his enemies into small groups, and Lanchester himself illustrated his point by referring to the British and German navies then at war. Today his ideas (and their descendants) inform the rules behind tabletop and computer wargames.

| History · Science & Math

Ukrania

While working at a tedious job in the summer of 1963, Jerry Gretzinger began drawing a map of an imaginary city. He added to the map fitfully for 20 years, put it aside, and then took it up again when his grandson found it in his attic. He’s now been mapping the area around “Ukrania” for more than 30 years, working an average of 20 minutes a day.

The activity is not entirely in his own hands. He draws from a special deck of cards to determine the focus of each day’s work. A given card might tell him to add a new paint color, to shuffle the deck, or to add a new “void,” a region of blankness that obliterates part of the map and incubates a new world of its own. The Ukranians can fend off the void only with a retaining wall, which they are constantly constructing. But whether they can save themselves from oblivion not even Gretzinger knows. “That’s why I keep going,” he says.

The current map covers about 1,500 square feet, representing an area of 14,400 square miles. Here’s a zoomable version.

| Art

Reading a Pitch

In 1972, Addison-Wesley published an ad for three textbooks on the back of The American Statistician magazine. The ad began with this line:

Y LUAEB H O DTYO AOOSGL

In Word Ways, David Silverman wrote, “Care to try and figure out the hidden message? Although the slogan doesn’t have the pizzazz of (say) ‘Let Esso put a tiger in your tank’, it does have the advantage of universality; it can equally well be applied to the sale of shoes, ships or sealing wax (or, for that matter, floor wax).”

Click for Answer
| Puzzles