Life After Death

Late in life Arthur Conan Doyle pursued an interest in the possibility of spiritualism and existence beyond the grave. He was widely criticized for this, but a writer to the Graphic raised a redeeming point:

Although we may misbelieve mediums and
With doubt and suspicion our minds may be filled,
Sherlock Holmes, we must grant, reappeared in the Strand
A number of times after having been killed.

Indeed, Holmes had returned against his creator’s wishes. “I never thought they would take it so much to heart,” Conan Doyle once wrote of Holmes’ death. “I got letters from all over the world reproaching me on the subject. One, I remember, from a lady whom I did not know, began ‘You beast’.”

July 2, 2012July 1, 2012 | Literature

Last Lesson

Multiplication is mie vexation,
And Division is quite as bad,
The Golden Rule is mie stumbling stule,
And Practice drives me mad.

So wrote an anonymous English student in 1570. Matters had not progressed far in 1809, when 6-year-old Marjorie Fleming wrote in her diary: “I am now going to tell you about the horible and wretched plaege my multiplication gives me you cant concieve it — the most Devilish thing is 8 times 8 & 7 times 7 it is what nature itselfe cant endure.”

Alas, the feeling is sometimes shared. After serving four years as a teacher, D.H. Lawrence wrote:

When will the bell ring, and end this weariness?
How long have they tugged the leash, and strained apart
My pack of unruly hounds: I cannot start
Them again on a quarry of knowledge they hate to hunt,
I can haul them and urge them no more.
No more can I endure to bear the brunt
Of the books that lie out on the desks: a full three score
Of several insults of blotted pages and scrawl
Of slovenly work that they have offered me.
I am sick, and tired more than any thrall
Upon the woodstacks working weariedly.

And shall I take
The last dear fuel and heap it on my soul
Till I rouse my will like a fire to consume
Their dross of indifference, and burn the scroll
Of their insults in punishment? — I will not!
I will not waste myself to embers for them,
Not all for them shall the fires of my life be hot,
For myself a heap of ashes of weariness, till sleep
Shall have raked the embers clear: I will keep
Some of my strength for myself, for if I should sell
It all for them, I should hate them —
— I will sit and wait for the bell.

See Such, Such Were the Joys.

July 1, 2012June 30, 2012 | Poems · Society

Another Country

In 1975, radio personality Jim Everhart published a three-volume Illustrated Texas Dictionary of the English Language:

ARN: A silver-white metallic element. “Mah muscle is as strong as arn.”
TOAD: The past tense of tell. “Ah toad you never to do that.”
PRAYED: A large public procession, usually including a marching band. “That was some prayed they had downtown.”

Four years later, Chase Untermeyer contributed a “Texlexicon” of words uttered by his colleagues in the state legislature:

HARD: Employed, as “I hard him to do the job.” Also a man’s name, as “Mah wife’s a cousin of Hard Hughes.”
RULE: Nonurban, as “He comes from the rule area.”
FORCED: A large group of trees, as “Lemme showya mah pine forced.”
BAR SHUN: The termination of pregnancy, as “Bar shun is murder!”
WHORED: Difficult, as “That was a whored one.”
WON’T: To desire, as “Ah won’t to seeya tonight.”
LOWERED BARN: An English poet (1788-1824).

“The amazing thing about this is that I never had one single Texan tell me he resented it,” Everhart told the New York Times. “They have accepted it more enthusiastically than anybody else. I think they’re kind of proud of it.”

See Wine Chevver Cole Share?

July 1, 2012June 30, 2012 | Language

Togetherness

distance sums problem

What location on this line segment has the smallest sum of distances to the labeled points?

	Select Click for Answer
Consider first the endpoints, A and K: The sum of the distances to these two points will be the same for any point between them. Similarly, any point between B and J will have the same total distance to points A, K, B, and J. Proceeding in this way and taking the points in pairs, we find that every point between E and G produces the same total distance to the outermost 10 labeled points. That leaves only F. So the answer is that point F has the minimum total distance to the labeled points. Strangely, this means that we can shift the points around without affecting this result. If points A through E crowded F closely on the left, and point K were 90 light-years away on the right, point F would still yield the smallest total sum, so long as the points appeared in the order shown above.

Click for Answer

June 30, 2012February 5, 2013 | Puzzles

Ordained

If God makes decisions, then he has a future.

But if he’s omniscient, then he already knows that future.

Can he then have free will?

June 30, 2012June 29, 2012 | Religion

Never Mind

“Even if the propeller had the power of propelling a vessel, it would be found altogether useless in practice, because the power being applied in the stern it would be absolutely impossible to make the vessel steer.” — Sir William Symonds, Surveyor of the Royal Navy, 1837

June 29, 2012June 28, 2012 | Technology

Black and White

By Herbert I. Ladd. In A Selection of Popular Two-Move Chess Problems (1887), Orestes Augustus Brownson calls this “a gem of purest ray serene.” White to mate in two moves.

	Select Click for Answer
1. Ng6 and Black must lose by 2. Qd3#, 2. Qe5#, or 2. Qd6#.

June 29, 2012February 5, 2013 | Puzzles

Magic

From Royal V. Heath, Scripta Mathematica, June 1952:

heath magic square

In the square above, all rows, columns, and diagonals produce the same sum. And:

16 + 11 + 13 + 10 = 9 + 14 + 12 + 15
16 + 17 + 14 + 3 = 11 + 22 + 9 + 8
2 + 15 + 20 + 13 = 5 + 12 + 23 + 10
16 + 5 + 17 + 12 = 20 + 9 + 13 + 8
2 + 11 + 15 + 22 = 14 + 23 + 3 + 10
10 + 16 + 17 + 23 = 11 + 13 + 20 + 22
2 + 8 + 9 + 15 + 11 + 13 + 20 + 22 = 3 + 5 + 12 + 14 + 10 + 16 + 17 + 23

Most remarkably, everything above holds true if you square each term.

June 29, 2012June 28, 2012 | Science & Math

Being and Nothingness

Edward Lear once overheard a gentleman in a railway station saying that his children had been reading the Book of Nonsense. He maintained that Edward Lear did not exist, and said that Lord Derby had written the book.

Says I, joining spontaneous in the conversation — ‘That is quite a mistake: I have reason to know that Edward Lear the painter and author wrote and illustrated the whole book.’ ‘And I,’ says the Gentleman, says he, — ‘have good reason to know, Sir, that you are wholly mistaken. There is no such person as Edward Lear.’ ‘But,’ says I, ‘there is — and I am the man — I wrote the book!’ Whereupon all the party burst out laughing and evidently thought me mad or telling fibs. So I took off my hat and showed it, with Edward Lear and the address in large letters — also one of my cards, and a marked handkerchief: on which amazement devoured those benighted individuals and I left them to gnash their teeth in trouble and tumult.

Related: In October 1812, Trinity and St. John’s Colleges, Cambridge, ordered that students appearing in hall or chapel in pantaloons or trousers should be considered absent.

June 28, 2012June 27, 2012 | Literature

Club Med

My doctor wants to establish a dosage for a new drug, so he gives me a bottle of 48 pills and tells me to take them throughout the month of June. I can take as many or as few as I like on any given day, so long as I take at least 1 pill each day. Show that there’s a sequence of consecutive days during which I take exactly 11 pills.

	Select Click for Answer
We can solve this problem by an application of the pigeonhole principle. Get a calendar for the month of June and on each day record the running total number of pills I’ve taken so far in the month. So June 1 might read “1,” June 2 “5,” and so on. The entry for June 30 will read “48.” Write these numbers in red. Now revisit each date, add 11 to the red number, and enter the result in blue. In the example above June 1 now reads “1 12,” June 2 “5 16,” and so on. June 30 reads “48 59.” Now we’ve filled the calendar with 60 numbers, all of which fall in the range 1-59. This means that at least one number falls on two different days. In the interval between these two days I took 11 pills. By similar arguments it can be shown that intervals must exist during which I took precisely 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 pills. Adapted from Kenneth R. Rebman, “The Pigeonhole Principle (What It Is, How It Works, and How It Applies to Map Coloring),” The Two-Year College Mathematics Journal, January 1979.