The Gormanston Foxes

A curious legend attends the Viscounts Gormanston of Ireland. It is said that when the head of the house dies, the foxes leave the surrounding countryside and congregate at the door of the castle. The following statements, collected at the death of Jenico William Joseph, the 14th Viscount Gormanston, on Oct. 28, 1907, appeared in the New Ireland Review of April 1908:

  • Lady Gormanston: “At the time he was dying, foxes were seen about the house and coming towards the house for some days before. His valet who was sleeping in his room heard what he thought was a dog barking, and on going over to the window found that it was a fox sitting under the window and barking. … At the death of Edward, 13th Viscount, the foxes were also there. He had been rather better one day, but the foxes appeared, barking under the window, and he died that night contrary to expectation.”
  • Lucretia P. Farrell, daughter of the 13th Viscount: “On the day before my grandfather … died, the foxes came in pairs (an unusual thing) into the demesne from all the country round; they sat under his bedroom window, which was on the ground floor, and howled and barked all night, although constantly driven away only to return. … At my father’s death, in 1876, I had nursed him till the end, and before he died I fell ill, and my family told me that the foxes appeared in the same way, but not so many. … The Preston crest is a running fox, which we were told no other family has. This is all I can tell, and very creepy it was in those days.”
  • Anthony Delahan, coachman, and Patrick White, steward: “On Monday night, the 28th October, at about 8 o’clock, I saw two foxes in the chapel ground and five or six more round the front of the house and several more in the cloisters, which were circling round in a ring, crying all the time. I saw them continuously from then till about 11 o’clock when I went to bed. I took White with me who also saw the foxes.”
  • Richard Preston: “On Wednesday, 30th October, 1907, at about 10 p.m., I went down to the chapel at Gormanston Castle to watch by the remains of my father. … About 3 a.m. I first became consciously aware of a slight noise without the chapel. … [When I opened the side door,] sitting on the gravel path within four feet of where I stood was a full-grown fox. Just in the shadow, sitting close up against the walls of the chapel, was another. I could hear several more moving quietly about within a few yards, and was almost sure that I saw some of them. … Neither of the two which saw attempted to move until I left the chapel and took a step towards them. They then walked quietly off into the shadow.”

“We venture no comment on the evidence,” the editors write. “Our readers will appreciate it for themselves. Whatever be their interpretation of the facts, they will, at least, allow that in them there is something of the marvellous.”

| Oddities

The Magic Dice Cup

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Magic_Dice_Cup_tangram_paradox.svg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

A tangram paradox from Sam Loyd’s Eighth Book of Tan (1903). Each of these cups was composed using the same seven geometric shapes. But the first cup is whole, and the others contain vacancies of different sizes.

“Of course it is a fallacy, a paradox, or an optical illusion, for you will say the feat is impossible!” But how is it done?

| Puzzles

Solvers Needed

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ricky_McCormick_note_1.jpg

On June 30, 1999, sheriff’s officers discovered the body of 41-year-old Ricky McCormick in a field in St. Louis. In his pockets were the two hand-printed documents above. Both the FBI and the American Cryptogram Association have failed to decipher the notes, so they’ve issued an appeal for help from the public.

Investigators believe the notes were written up to three days before McCormick’s death; his family says he’d used such encrypted notes since he was a boy. “Breaking the code could reveal the victim’s whereabouts before his death and could lead to the solution of a homicide,” said Dan Olson, chief of the FBI’s Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit. “Not every cipher we get arrives at our door under those circumstances.”

This is not an April Fools’ joke — the FBI’s appeal, including larger versions of the images, is here.

(Thanks, Bunk.)

| Crime

Stage Pastoral

http://books.google.com/books?id=mE4EAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false

Grant Wood’s American Gothic is a bit ersatz — the artist recruited a Cedar Rapids dentist, B.H. McKeeby, to pose as the farmer, and his sister Nan plays the woman (conceived as the farmer’s spinster daughter, not his wife).

But the setting was inspired by a real cottage in Wood’s native Iowa, and by his admiration for “the kind of people I fancied should live in that house.”

“I tried to characterize them honestly, to make them more like themselves than they are in actual life,” he said. “To me they are basically good and solid people.”

| Art

A Square Surprise

3x3 magic square

The lowly 3×3 magic square has modest pretensions — each row, column, and diagonal produces the same sum.

But perhaps it’s magicker than we suppose:

6182 + 7532 + 2942 = 8162 + 3572 + 4922 (rows)
6722 + 1592 + 8342 = 2762 + 9512 + 4382 (columns)
6542 + 1322 + 8792 = 4562 + 2312 + 9782 (diagonals)
6392 + 1742 + 8522 = 9362 + 4712 + 2582 (counter-diagonals)
6542 + 7982 + 2132 = 4562 + 8972 + 3122 (diagonals)
6932 + 7142 + 2582 = 3962 + 4172 + 8522 (counter-diagonals)

(R. Holmes, “The Magic Magic Square,” The Mathematical Gazette, December 1970)

More: Any of the equations above will still hold if you remove the middle digit or any two corresponding digits in each of the six addends.

Yet more: (6 × 1 × 8) + (7 × 5 × 3) + (2 × 9 × 4) = (6 × 7 × 2) + (1 × 5 × 9) + (8 × 3 × 4)

I think everything above will work for any rotation or reflection of the square (that is, for any normal 3×3 magic square). I haven’t checked, though.

| Science & Math

Reckoning Up

In a 1772 letter to Joseph Priestley, Ben Franklin described a method “for arriving at decisions in doubtful cases.” He would divide a sheet of paper into two columns, labeled Pro and Con, and during the course of three or four days record all the motives for and against the idea. Then he’d assign a weight to each consideration. Where he could find arguments, sometimes in combination, that counterbalanced one another, he would strike them out:

Should I enter into business with Mr. Smith?
franklin prudential algebra

(This example is from Paul C. Pasles, Benjamin Franklin’s Numbers, 2008.) This exercise would show him where the balance lay, and if after a day or two of further reflection no additional considerations occurred to him, he would come to a decision.

“Though the weight of reasons cannot be taken with the precision of algebraic quantities, yet, when each is thus considered separately and comparatively, and the whole lies before me, I think I can judge better, and am less liable to make a rash step; and in fact I have found great advantage from this kind of equation, in what may be called moral or prudential algebra.”

| History