Thinking Big

Called on to give an after-dinner talk at a 1961 meeting, Los Alamos physicist Darol Froman proposed a new project “without much attention to some of the practical aspects”: What if we turned Earth into a giant spaceship and drove it around? If we built a fusion rocket and fed it the moon and some damp sand, it could (in principle) carry us out of orbit. Our atmosphere would protect us from interstellar radiation, and we’d be free of the worry of our sun’s impending death.

It might take 100 million years to make our way out of the solar system, but by accelerating smoothly and sacrificing 4 percent of the planet’s mass we might have enough fuel to travel for 8 billion years. We could harvest deuterium from the oceans to generate heat and light during the journey, which might cover 1,300 light-years, and if we can refuel (“i.e., fill an ocean or two”) at hospitable planets then we might continue in this way indefinitely, exploiting the pull of stars along our path to help with navigation.

“I predict a pleasant existence in space — we will get away from the daily grind,” he said. “Perhaps we shall not wish to join another star — life in space may be more desirable.”

(He added, “I haven’t yet figured out a good way to leave certain people behind. It has been suggested that we use them for propellant. The human body is not constituted with quite as good proportions of the elements for our propellant as is damp sand. Nevertheless, the proportions are not too bad and we can in this way take care of the problem of overpopulation.”)

(Darol Froman, “The Earth as a Man-Controlled Space Ship,” Physics Today 15:7 [July 1962], 19-23.)

| Science & Math

Right Enough

The weather was unprecedented — weeks of damp and rain and fog. Everybody talked about it. One day during that spell I was holding forth to a practical farmer on the subject of hay. Full of book learning, I was explaining (rather too glibly) the advantages of cutting hay in June. I described in detail the vitamin loss incurred by letting hay stand in the field after it has matured, and how much greater the feed value was per unit weight in early-cut hay, even though the quantity might be slightly less. The farmer was a quiet man, with big hands for curling round a scythe handle. He listened attentively. My words swirled around his head like summer flies. Finally, when I had exhausted my little store of learning and paused for a moment, he ventured a reply.

‘The time to cut hay,’ he said firmly, ‘is in hayin’ time.’

— E.B. White, “Book Learning,” 1942

| Society

DIY

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Richard.of.cirencester.forged.facsimile.jpg

Charles Bertram built his reputation as a historian on The Description of Britain, a 15th-century manuscript that he’d discovered at age 24 and that provided important new insights into British history, including an ancient map; more than a hundred names of cities, roads, and people; and information from a lost contemporary account by a Roman general. For more than a century Bertram’s discovery served as a touchstone of scholarship on Roman Britain — it was cited in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, among many other works.

After Bertram’s death in 1765 doubts began to mount, and by 1846 it was clear that The Description of Britain had been a forgery. Bertram had managed to convince a few influential librarians, and on the strength of their endorsement other historians had been willing to take the claim seriously. Bertram had never let anyone see the original manuscript, always inventing reasons why he couldn’t share it and sending instead facsimiles of the original.

The effects of the hoax took decades to eradicate — as late as 1911 the Encyclopædia Britannica was still referring to a fictitious naval base on the strength of the Description‘s account.

| History · Hoaxes

Coming and Going

Two runners start from the same point on a circular track and run at different constant speeds. If they run in opposite directions on the track, they meet after a minute. If they run in the same direction, they meet after an hour. What’s the ratio of their speeds?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Hospitality

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:N.C._Wyeth_-_Thanksgiving_with_Indians_(detail).jpg

A year ago my older son brought home a program printed by his school; on the second page was an illustration of the ‘First Thanksgiving,’ with a caption which read in part: ‘They served pumpkins and turkeys and corn and squash. The Indians had never seen such a feast!’

On the contrary! The Pilgrims had literally never seen ‘such a feast,’ since all foods mentioned are exclusively indigenous to the Americas and had been provided by [or with the aid of] the local tribe.

— Michael Dorris, “Why I’m Not Thankful for Thanksgiving,” in Bill Bigelow and Bob Peterson, eds., Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years, 1998

| History

Economy

In an office the boy owed one of the clerks threepence, the clerk owed the cashier twopence, and the cashier owed the boy twopence. One day the boy, having a penny, decided to diminish his debt, and gave the penny to the clerk, who in turn paid half his debt by giving it to the cashier, the latter gave it back to the boy, saying, ‘That makes one penny I owe you now;’ the office boy again passed it to the clerk, who passed it to the cashier, who in turn passed it back to the boy, and the boy discharged his entire debt by handing it over to the clerk, thereby squaring all accounts.

— John Scott, The Puzzle King, 1899

| Puzzles

Lexicon

Words that don’t exist but ought to, proposed by Gelett Burgess in Burgess Unabridged (1914):

cowcat: an unimportant guest, an insignificant personality
critch: to array oneself in uncomfortable splendor
edicle: one who is educated beyond his intellect, a pedant
fidgeltick: food that is a bore to eat
flooijab: an apparent compliment with a concealed sting
gloogo: foolishly faithful without reward
gorgule: a splendiferous, over-ornate object or gift
gowyop: a perplexity wherein familiar things seem strange
jip: a dangerous subject of conversation
lallify: to prolong a story tiresomely, or repeat a joke
leolump: an interrupter of conversations
oofle: a person whose name one cannot remember
paloodle: to give unnecessary advice
pooje: a regrettable discovery
spillix: accidental good luck
tashivation: the art of answering without listening to questions
uglet: an unpleasant duty too long postponed
vorge: voluntary suffering, unnecessary effort or exercise
xenogore: an interloper who keeps one from interesting things
yamnoy: a bulky, unmanageable object to be carried
yowf: one whose importance exceeds his merit

Interestingly, we owe the word blurb to Burgess — he invented it in 1906 for his book Are You a Bromide?, and it proved so useful that we’re still using it more than a century later.

| Language

Balancing Act

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Teufelstisch_Winter.JPG
Image: Wikimedia Commons

The Devil’s Table is a startling rock formation 14 meters high in Germany’s Palatine Forest. A layer of hard siliceous sandstone was deposited atop a softer sediment that then weathered away, leaving a “tabletop” that protects its pillar from further erosion. It was classified as a National Geotope in 2006.

| Oddities

Tilt

Hinchliffe’s rule, named after physicist Ian Hinchliffe, states that if the title of a scholarly article takes the form of a yes-no question, the answer to that question will be no.

In 1988 Boris Peon tested this proposition by writing a paper titled “Is Hinchliffe’s Rule True?”:

Hinchliffe has asserted that whenever the title of a paper is a question with a yes/no answer, the answer is always no. This paper demonstrates that Hinchliffe’s assertion is false, but only if it is true.

This seems to threaten the integrity of the universe. Happily, Harvard computer scientist Stuart Shieber pointed out that Hinchliffe’s rule might simply be false, in which case Peon’s title presents no problem.

Unfortunately Shieber also managed to resurrect the paradox by titling his article “Is This Article Consistent With Hinchliffe’s Rule?”

We await developments.

| Science & Math