Author: Greg Ross
Podcast Episode 82: Stealing Abe Lincoln
In 1876, a gang of inept Chicago counterfeiters launched an absurd plot to steal the body of Abraham Lincoln and hold it for ransom. In today’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast, we’ll follow their comical attempts to carry out the bizarre scheme, and uncover the secret society that was formed afterward to protect Lincoln’s corpse.
We’ll also puzzle over an overlooked way to reduce the odds of dying of a heart attack.
Home Free
A baseball poser from Clark Kinnaird’s 1946 Encyclopedia of Puzzles and Pastimes:
“In a spring training game with the Dodgers at bat, the first man up hit a triple, the second man hit a double, the third man hit a double, the fourth man hit a single, the fifth man hit a single, the sixth man hit a single. Yet the Dodgers did not score a run in that inning. How could this have happened? These were the only men who went to bat in the inning.”
The Thought That Counts
A Mississippi soldier’s incoherent letter to his fiancée, quoted in Bell Irvin Wiley’s The Life of Johnny Reb, 1943:
I can bare the Storms of the wintery Blast for thy sake oh Miss S.J.H be thou ever Bless as Butiful as thou art and idol to my throbbing hart oh had I the mind of the poet So that I could penetrate the verry depts of my hart but I can but express my Simple thoughts I am hear but my heart is Theire, we are in four miles of the yankees … could we not enjoy ourselves better if was at home with the girles … vainley I alas thou woulds soothe the pangs I feel, fond love betrayed what hopes I can poses Death alone my greaf may heal then farewell for ever more welth I have none they Farthers care thearefore I love one on Earth that I adore my only wealth is the love I bare then farewel perhaps for ever more never forsake me I Still will faithfull be Still on thy hand every bliss I will imploy Hence duty calls me they first my only love farewell perhaps for ever more but my hopes if far different I think will again meet if nothing happens more then I expect one thought from you would cheer my dropping mind I have more in my hart then ten thousand toungs can express if I had wings of and Eagle to the I would fly me thinks I can hear in my midnight drams thy Soft and gentle voice but alas when I awake I am in a Soldier tent
He adds, “I have nothing of importance to write you at this time but I will write soon and let you know all that happens.”
Hallucii
A short animation by Goo-Shun Wang.
Expression
Eight ways to pronounce the letter X, from wordplay maven Dmitri Borgmann:
eks: x-ray
gz: exist
gzh: luxurious
kris: Xmas
ks: sex
ksh: anxious
z: xylophone
__: faux pas
He adds three more: According to Webster’s Second Edition, xeres is an alternate name for sherry wine in which the X can be pronounced either as H or as SH. And arguably the X in except is pronounced like the letter K, as “the sibilant portion of the usual X sound has fused with the sound of the C immediately following.” If we accept these, then the total rises to 11.
(Dmitri A. Borgmann, “The Ultimate Homonym Group,” Word Ways 17:4 [November 1984], 224-228.)
Surface Matters
In the 17th century, Italian mathematician Evangelista Torricelli experimented with a figure known as Gabriel’s Horn. Rotate the function y = 1/x about the x-axis for x ≥ 1. The resulting figure has finite volume but infinite surface area — it’s sometimes said that, while the horn could be filled up with π cubic units of paint, an infinite number of square units of paint would be needed to cover its surface.
English cosmologist John D. Barrow describes an infinite wedding cake in which each tier is a solid cylinder 1 unit high; the bottom tier has radius 1, the second radius 1/2, the third radius 1/3, and so on. Now the total volume of the cake is π3/6, but the area of its surface is infinite. Barrow writes, “Our infinite cake recipe requires a finite volume of cake to make but it can never be iced because it has an infinite surface area!”
Mike Steuben, a correspondent of Martin Gardner, imagined a set of boxes, each with area 1 × 1. If the height of the first box is 1, the second 1/2, the third 1/4, and so on, then the total volume of the group is 2 cubic units, but the length and the total area of the tops are infinite.
(Barrow’s example is from 100 Essential Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know About Math and the Arts, 2014.)
In a Word
calicrat
n. an ant
The ant has made himself illustrious
Through constant industry industrious.
So what?
Would you be calm and placid
If you were full of formic acid?
— Ogden Nash
Logic and Belief
A syllogism is a logical argument in which a conclusion is inferred from a set of premises:
All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
The conclusion can be valid without actually stating a true fact; to be valid it just needs to follow logically from the premises. Which of these syllogisms are valid?
No cigarettes are inexpensive.
Some addictive things are inexpensive.
Therefore, some addictive things are not cigarettes.
No addictive things are inexpensive.
Some cigarettes are inexpensive.
Therefore, some cigarettes are not addictive.
In fact both of them are valid. But, interestingly, here the first conclusion seems plausible, while the second does not. That shouldn’t matter, but it does: When Plymouth Polytechnic psychologist J. St. B.T. Evans presented a set of these arguments to subjects in 1983, he found a substantial “belief bias” — the subjects tended to judge the believable conclusions to be valid more than the unbelievable ones. If the conclusion was believable, 92% of the subjects accepted it, regardless of its validity. If the conclusion was unbelievable, 46% accepted it if it was valid, 8% if it was invalid.
Evans wrote, “These findings not only provide a challenge for existing models of syllogistic reasoning but also raise broader questions about people’s rational competence to generate and assess logical arguments in real life, whenever they have clear a priori beliefs about the subject under discussion.”
(J. St. B.T. Evans et al., “On the Conflict Between Logic and Belief in Syllogistic Reasoning,” Memory & Cognition, 11(3), 295-306.)
Tossing and Turning
Butler University mathematician Jerry Farrell has telekinesis. Here’s a demonstration. Toss a coin and enter the result (HEAD or TAIL) as 1 Across in the grid below. Then solve the rest of the puzzle:
Across Down
1 Your coin shows a ______ 1 Half a laugh
5 Wagner's earth goddess 2 Station terminus?
6 Word with one or green 3 Dec follower?
4 Certain male
