You must participate in a three-way duel with two rivals. Each of you is given a pistol and unlimited ammunition. Unfortunately, you, Red, are the weakest shot — you hit your target only 1/3 of the time. Black is successful 2/3 of the time, and Gray hits everything he aims at.
It’s agreed that you will take turns: You’ll shoot first, then Black, then Gray, and you’ll continue in this order until one survivor remains. At whom should you shoot?
syrtic
adj. pertaining to quicksand
During the Russian revolution, the mathematical physicist Igor Tamm was seized by anti-communist vigilantes at a village near Odessa where he had gone to barter for food. They suspected he was an anti-Ukrainian communist agitator and dragged him off to their leader.
Asked what he did for a living, he said he was a mathematician. The sceptical gang leader began to finger the bullets and grenades slung round his neck. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘calculate the error when the Taylor series approximation to a function is truncated after n terms. Do this and you will go free. Fail and you will be shot.’ Tamm slowly calculated the answer in the dust with his quivering finger. When he had finished, the bandit cast his eye over the answer and waved him on his way.
Tamm won the 1958 Nobel prize for physics but he never did discover the identity of the unusual bandit leader.
— John Barrow, “It’s All Platonic Pi in the Sky,” The Times Educational Supplement, May 11, 1993
In The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain describes a remarkable automaton that he encountered at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867:
I watched a silver swan, which had a living grace about his movements, and a living intelligence in his eyes–watched him swimming about as comfortably and as unconcernedly as if he had been born in a morass instead of a jeweler’s shop–watched him seize a silver fish from under the water and hold up his head and go through all the customary and elaborate motions of swallowing it.
The swan still exists, now on display at England’s Barnard Castle. As a music box plays, the life-size creature preens, searches a flowing “stream” of rotating glass rods, spies a fish, and catches and swallows it. No one knows who designed it, but it’s certainly more than two centuries old — it’s described in a 1773 Act of Parliament.
See Watch Your Step and Daddy!
While a law student at Duke University, Richard Nixon broke in to the dean’s office with two friends to see their forthcoming grades.
“They replaced everything, took nothing, damaged nothing, and committed no indiscretions,” writes Conrad Black in his 2008 biography of the president. “Yet some Nixonophobes have suggested that this was a foretaste of felonious behavior, and of a propensity for office break-ins.”
Suppose we illustrate. You put a ball on a billiard-table, and, holding the cue lengthwise from side to side of the table, push the ball across the cloth. Here, in a rough way, the ball represents the ship, the cue the wind, only, as there is no waste of energy, the ball travels at the same rate as the cue; evidently it cannot go any faster. Now, let us suppose that a groove is cut diagonally across the table, from one corner-pocket to the other, and that the ball rolls in the groove. Propelled in the same way as before, the ball will now travel along the groove (and along the cue) in the same time as the cue takes to move across the table. The groove is much longer than the width of the table, double as long, in fact. The ball, therefore, travels much faster than the cue which impels it, since it covers double the distance in the same time. Just so does the tacking ship sail faster than the wind.
— “Some Famous Paradoxes,” The Illustrated American, Nov. 1, 1890
In 1823, American explorer Benjamin Morrell reported hunting seal along a coastline in the Weddell Sea near Antarctica. The land, he wrote, abounded in sea elephants and “oceanic birds of every description.” No one has been able to rediscover Morrell’s land, and in the 20th century it was shown conclusively to have disappeared.
In 1841 the English whaler James Stewart described a snow-covered island 5 to 6 miles long in the South Pacific. Other ships confirmed its existence in 1860 and 1886. But subsequent searches found nothing. John Davis of the Nimrod, who searched the area in 1909, wrote, “I am inclined to think Dougherty Island has melted.”
For nearly 30 years, India and Bangladesh disputed an island in the Bay of Bengal. In 2010 rising sea levels solved the problem: The island has disappeared. “What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking,” said Jadavpur University oceanographer Sugata Hazra, “has been resolved by global warming.”
(Thanks, Shrey.)
What is the sum of all the figures in the numbers from 1 to 1 million?
Hint: With the right technique, this can be done in the head.
In 1857 archaeologists unsealed an ancient house on the Palatine Hill in Rome. Inside, carved into the plaster of one of the walls, they found this inscription.
It appears to show a donkey-headed figure attached to a cross. A young man raises his hand to it, perhaps in worship. Below this is written in crude Greek, “Alexamenos worships [his] God.”
It’s believed to be one of the first representations of the crucifixion of Jesus.
The newspaper man, indeed, is a dangerous person to fool with. He is extremely ingenious in his methods of retaliation. Here is another story in point. One Bennett was city editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer somewhere in the sixties. It was Bennett’s plan, if news were scarce, to make small children–offspring of the brain only–fall from the Newport ferry-boat into the Ohio River, where they would infallibly have been drowned but for the gallant rescue of some by-stander, usually a personal friend of Bennett’s. One of these friends, Kellum by name, grew very weary after he had figured several times as a savior of drowning innocents, and requested that Bennett should desist. So, in next day’s Enquirer, Kellum read that a beautiful little girl, child of a prominent citizen in Newport, had fallen into the river, and that Mr. Kellum, who was standing near and could have rescued her, refused to render the slightest assistance. A few minutes later the maddest man in Cincinnati arrived in the Enquirer office, threatening the direst vengeance on Bennett. But Bennett calmly pulled off his coat, and said, ‘See here, Kellum, you are a good enough fellow in your way, but I can’t stand any interference with my department. If I make any statement in the Enquirer you mustn’t come round here contradicting it. That isn’t journalism.’
— William Shepard Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1892
