Batter Up!

https://books.google.com/books?id=eURaAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA301

The first pitching machine was powered by gunpowder. Princeton mathematician Charles Hinton designed it for the school baseball team in 1897, hoping to spare human pitchers whose arms were giving out under the incessant demands of batting practice. At first he planned a catapult, but he found this too inaccurate. Then “it occurred to me that practically whenever men wished to impel a ball with velocity and precision, they drove it out of a tube with powder.”

The result, which he wrote up in Harper’s Weekly on March 20, was a shoulder-mounted cannon whose 4-foot barrel could send a ball across the home plate at 70 mph. With a fingerlike attachment it could even throw a curveball. That summer it pitched three innings in a game between two Princeton social clubs, allowing four hits, striking out eight batters, walking one, and throwing only one wild pitch.

The Washington Post predicted the end of the world (“There would be the base-burning, high-pressure, anti-friction catcher, and the shortstop made of aluminium and rivets and filled with cogs, cams, valves, shafts, and belting”), but Hinton praised the gun’s handiness: “It can be used so as to deliver ball after ball at the same speed in the same curve, or it can be varied from shot to shot, according to the wish or skill of the manipulator.” He took it with him to the University of Minnesota, where he worked until 1900.

| Entertainment · Technology

The Seventh Art Cinema

http://www.kaupokikkas.com/blog/2014/3/7/end-of-the-world-cinema

In the late 1990s, Frenchman Diynn Eadel set out to build an immense open-air movie theater in the desert near Sharm el-Sheikh, at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula. He arranged financing in Paris and installed projection equipment, 700 cinema seats, and a generator in the desert.

Unfortunately, the theater was shut down by Egyptian authorities before its planned opening in October 1997. The reasons aren’t clear. It was largely forgotten until Estonian photographer Kaupo Kikkas rediscovered it in 2014.

“Dynn Eadel with Seventh Art attempts to prove that tourism is not necessarily a destructive element and that The Great Theatre of Nature can reconcile us with the elements,” reads an old flyer for the project. “When will be the first Sinai International Film Festival?”

| Oddities

Roll Call

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_mounted_soldier_is_watching_the_roll-call_of_his_soldiers._Wellcome_V0048284.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

A problem from the 2002 Moscow Mathematical Olympiad:

A group of recruits stand in a line facing their corporal. They are, unfortunately, rather poorly trained: At the command “Left turn!”, some of them turn left, some turn right, and some turn to face away from the corporal. Is it always possible for the corporal to insert himself in the line so that an equal number of recruits are facing him on his left and on his right?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Tell Me, O Muse

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William-Adolphe_Bouguereau_(1825-1905)_-_Homer_and_his_Guide_(1874).jpg

Samuel Butler believed Homer was “a very young woman” living in Sicily. In his 1897 book The Authoress of the Odyssey he argues that the events in the poem fit neatly onto the province of Trapani and its islands. And a careful reading of the action, he says, reveals “jealousy for the honour and dignity of woman, severity against those who have disgraced their sex, love of small religious observances, of preaching, of white lies and small play-acting, of having things both ways, and of money.”

I have touched briefly on all the more prominent female characters of the ‘Odyssey.’ The moral in every case seems to be that man knows very little, and cannot be trusted not to make a fool of himself even about the little that he does know, unless he has a woman at hand to tell him what he ought to do. There is not a single case in which a man comes to the rescue of female beauty in distress; it is invariably the other way about.

“Moreover there are many mistakes in the ‘Odyssey’ which a young woman might easily make, but which a man could hardly fall into — for example, making the wind whistle over the waves at the end of Book ii., thinking that a lamb could live on two pulls a day at a ewe that was already milked (ix. 244, 245, and 308, 309), believing a ship to have a rudder at both ends (ix. 483, 540), thinking that dry and well-seasoned timber can be cut from a growing tree (v. 240), [and] making a hawk while still on the wing tear its prey — a thing that no hawk can do (xv. 527).” He didn’t find many supporters, but Robert Graves took up the idea in his 1955 novel Homer’s Daughter.

| Literature

Misterioso

In his 1772 Treatise on the Art of Decyphering, Philip Thicknesse suggests a scheme for hiding messages in musical compositions:

https://libraries.mit.edu/collections/vail-collection/topics/communication/cryptography/

At the bottom of the page is an example. “If a musick-master be required to play it, he will certainly think it an odd, as well as a very indifferent, composition; but neither he, or any other person, will suspect that the notes convey also the two following harmonious lines from Dr. Goldsmith’s poem The Deserted Village“:

Near yonder cops where once the garden smil’d,
And still where many a garden-flower grows wild.

Thicknesse suggests that two players might even use this scheme to carry on a conversation in real time. “It is certain that two musicians might, by a very little application, carry on a correspondence with their instruments: they are all in possession of the seven notes, which express a, b, c, d, e, f, g; and know by ear exactly, when either of those notes are toned; and they are only to settle a correspondence of tones, for the remaining part of the alphabet; and thus a little practice, might enable two fiddlers to carry on a correspondence, which would greatly astonish those who did not know how how the matter was conducted. Indeed this is no more than what is called dactlylogy, or talking on the fingers, which I have seen done, and understood as quick, and readily almost, as common conversation.”

| Language

Three of a Kind

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2005-Penny-Uncirculated-Obverse-cropped.png

This trick seems to have been invented independently by Martin Gardner and Karl Fulves. A blindfolded magician asks a spectator to lay three pennies on a table, in any arrangement of heads and tails. The magician’s goal is to put all three coins into the same state, all heads or all tails.

If the three coins already match, then the trick is done. If not, then the magician gives three instructions: Flip the left coin, flip the middle coin, flip the left coin. After each step he asks whether the three coins now match. By the third flip, they will.

“It’s no surprise that the magician can eventually equalize all the coins,” writes MIT computer scientist Erik Demaine, “but it’s impressive that it always takes at most three moves.” The technique exploits a principle used in Gray codes, which are used to reduce errors when using analog signals to represent digital data. Demaine relates a similar trick involving four coins in the November-December 2010 issue of American Scientist.

See Lincoln Seeks Equality.

| Science & Math

Sound Rhymes

Peculiarly English limericks:

There was a young lady named Wemyss,
Who, it semyss, was troubled with dremyss.
She would wake in the night,
And, in terrible fright,
Shake the bemyss of the house with her scremyss.

A pretty school-mistress named Beauchamp,
Said, “These awful boys, how shall I teauchamp?
For they will not behave,
Although I look grave
And with tears in my eyes I beseauchamp.”

There was a professor of Caius
Who measured six feet round the knaius;
He went down to Harwich
Nineteen in a carwich,
And found it a terrible squaius.

There lived a young lady named Geoghegan,
The name is apparently Peoghegan,
She’ll be changing it solquhoun
For that of Colquhoun,
But the date is at present a veoghegan. (W.S. Webb)

An author, by name Gilbert St. John,
Remarked to me once, “Honest t. John,
You really can’t quote
That story I wrote:
My copyright you are infrt. John.” (P.L. Mannock)

See This Sceptred Isle.

| Humor · Language · Poems