Asleep at the Gate

In 1996, in order to demonstrate the undiscerning trendiness of postmodernism, NYU physicist Alan Sokal submitted an article “liberally salted with nonsense” to the academic journal Social Text:

As Althusser rightly commented, ‘Lacan finally gives Freud’s thinking the scientific concepts that it requires.’ More recently, Lacan’s topologie du sujet has been applied fruitfully to cinema criticism and to the psychoanalysis of AIDS. In mathematical terms, Lacan is here pointing out that the first homology group of the sphere is trivial, while those of the other surfaces are profound; and this homology is linked with the connectedness or disconnectedness of the surface after one or more cuts.

It was published even though Sokal refused to make any changes.

In 2005, MIT student Jeremy Stribling submitted a paper of computer-generated gibberish to the technology conference WMSCI:

One must understand our network configuration to grasp the genesis of our results. We ran a deployment on the NSA’s planetary-scale overlay network to disprove the mutually largescale behavior of exhaustive archetypes. First, we halved the effective optical drive space of our mobile telephones to better understand the median latency of our desktop machines. This step flies in the face of conventional wisdom, but is instrumental to our results.

It was accepted when none of three reviewers rejected it.

French twins Igor and Grichka Bogdanov insist that their papers on the Big Bang are genuine contributions to physical cosmology, but mathematician John Baez calls them “a mishmash of superficially plausible sentences containing the right buzzwords in approximately the right order.” That battle is still raging.

| Hoaxes

Limerick

There was a young man from Darjeeling
Who got on a bus bound for Ealing;
It said at the door:
“Don’t spit on the floor,”
So he carefully spat on the ceiling.

— Anonymous

| Humor

King Bed

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Drawn_by_Bt_Henry_Shaw_in_the_year_1832.jpeg

Shakespeare, Byron, and Ben Jonson all refer to the Great Bed of Ware, an enormous luxury bed built by Hertfordshire carpenter Jonas Fosbrooke at the end of the 16th century. Measuring 10 feet by 11, it was said to fit 12 comfortably; Sir Henry Chauncy tells how six couples once contrived to sleep in it so that no man lay next to any woman but his wife: “six should lie at one End of the Bed and six at the other, after this Manner, first a Man and his Wife, next a Woman and her Husband, next him a Man and his Wife; then the other three Couple should lie in the same Order at the Feet.”

After centuries as an “inn wonder,” it resides today in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

| Oddities

A Logic Oddity

Opinion polls taken just before the 1980 election showed the Republican Ronald Reagan decisively ahead of the Democrat Jimmy Carter, with the other Republican in the race, John Anderson, a distant third. Those apprised of the poll results believed, with good reason:

— If a Republican wins the election, then if it’s not Reagan who wins it will be Anderson.
— A Republican will win the election.

Yet they did not have reason to believe

— If it’s not Reagan who wins, it will be Anderson.

— Vann McGee, “A Counterexample to Modus Ponens,” Journal of Philosophy, September 1985

| Science & Math

Home Again

Unprepossessing English town names:

  • Bishop’s Itchington
  • Brokenborough
  • Great Snoring
  • Mockbeggar
  • Turners Puddle
  • Pett Bottom
  • Twelveheads
  • Ugley
  • Nether Wallop
  • Nasty
  • Wetwang
  • Blubberhouses
  • Yelling

Charles Dickens called the chipper-sounding Chelmsford “the dullest and most stupid spot on the face of the earth.”

| Language

Pi Squared

pi magic square

This curiosity was discovered by T.E. Lobeck. The square on the left is a conventional magic square — each row, column, and long diagonal totals 65. Replacing each number with the corresponding digit of pi (for example, replacing 17 with the 17th digit of pi, which is 2) yields the square on the right, in which the rows and columns yield equivalent sums.

| Science & Math

A King’s Homework

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edward_VI_of_England_c._1546.jpg

When Edward VI succeeded to the throne at age 9, William Thomas, clerk of the council, set him 85 questions on history and policy to answer at his leisure. “For though these be but questions, yet there is not so small an one among them, as will not administer matter of much discourse, worthy the argument and debating.” Samples:

  • Whether it is better for the commonwealth, that the power be in the nobility or in the people?
  • How easily a weak prince with good order may long be maintained, and how soon a mighty prince with little disorder may be destroyed?
  • What is the occasion of conspiracies?
  • Whether the people commonly desire the destruction of him that is in authority, and what moveth them so to do?
  • How flatterers are to be known and despised?
  • How dangerous it is to be author of a new matter?
  • Whether evil report lighteth not most commonly upon the reporter?
  • Whether a puissant prince ought to purchase amity with money, or with virtue and stoutness?
  • What is the cause of war?
  • Whether the country ought not always to be defended, the quarrel being right or wrong?
  • What danger it is to a prince, not to be revenged of an open injury?
  • Whether it be not necessary sometimes to feign folly?

Thomas closes by suggesting that Edward keep the questions to himself, since it is better “to keep the principal things of wisdom secret, till occasion require the utterance.”

| History · Society

Dead Letters

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_seance.jpg

In a trance in 1926, medium Geraldine Cummins wrote out messages transmitted to her by a disembodied spirit who had died 1900 years earlier. Architect Frederick Bligh Bond transcribed, punctuated, and arranged the messages. When Bond published these in a newspaper, Cummins sued him. This raises an interesting legal question: Who holds the copyright?

In an extempore judgment, Justice J. Eve wrote that, although all parties agreed that “the true originator of all that is found in these documents is some being no longer inhabiting this world,” the medium’s “active cooperation” had helped to translate them into modern language. This might make her a joint author with the disembodied spirit, but “recognizing as I do that I have no jurisdiction extending to the sphere in which he moves,” he found that “authorship rests with this lady.”

Bond had claimed that the writing had no living author, that, in Eve’s words, “the authorship and copyright rest with some one already domiciled on the other side of the inevitable river.” But “That is a matter I must leave for solution by others more competent to decide it than I am. I can only look upon the matter as a terrestrial one, of the earth earthy, and I propose to deal with it on that footing. In my opinion the plaintiff has made out her case, and the copyright rests with her.”

| Death · Society

Communiqué

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arthur_Wellesley,_1st_Duke_of_Wellington.jpg

One day the elderly soldier [Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington] chanced on a small boy weeping bitterly and on asking the cause the child began to explain that he was going away to school next day … not waiting to hear more the Duke read him a severe lecture on his attitude, which was cowardly, unworthy of a gentleman and not at all the way to behave, etc. At last the little boy managed to explain he was not crying because he was going to school, but he was worried about his pet toad, as no one else seemed to care for it and he wouldn’t know how it was. The Duke, a just man, apologized to the child for having wronged him, and being human as well as just, took down the particulars and promised to report himself about this pet. In due course the little boy at school received a letter saying ‘Field-Marshal the Duke of Wellington presents his compliments to Master —– and has the pleasure to inform him that his toad is well.’

— G.W.E. Russell, Collections and Recollections, 1963

| History