Confirmed

In 1964, two students at California’s Pomona College hypothesized that the number 47 appears with unusual frequency in the world. They began to amass examples, starting a campus tradition that continues to this day:

  • The Declaration of Independence consists of 47 sentences.
  • The New Testament credits Jesus with 47 miracles.
  • Tolstoy’s novel The Kreutzer Sonata is named after Beethoven’s Opus 47.
  • Pancho Villa was killed by a barrage of 47 bullets.
  • The Pythagorean Theorem is Proposition 47 of Euclid’s Elements.
  • The tropics of Cancer and Capricorn are located 47 degrees apart.
  • Cesar proclaimed “Veni, vidi, vici” in 47 B.C.

Now the hypothesis has produced its own reality: Pomona graduate Joe Menosky became a writer for Star Trek and helped to build a universe where 47 appears oddly often:

  • The Enterprise stops at Sub-Space Relay Station 47, a character shrinks to 47 centimeters, and the crew discovers element 247.
  • On Voyager, the emergency medical holographic channel is 47.
  • On Star Trek: Generations, Scotty beams up 47 El-Aurians before their ship is destroyed.
  • According to the 2009 film, the Enterprise was built in Sector 47 of the Riverside Shipyards, and Nero’s ship, the Narada, is said to have destroyed 47 Klingon ships.

Trek producer Brannon Braga has confirmed that Voyager‘s Harry Kim lives in Apartment 4-G because G is the seventh letter in the alphabet.

| Entertainment · Trivia

Stage Fraud

The concept of forgery seems to be peculiarly inapplicable to the performing arts. It would be quite nonsensical to say, for example, that the man who played the Bach suites for unaccompanied cello and whom at the time we took to be Pablo Casals was in fact a forger. Similarly, we should want to argue that the term forgery was misused if we should read in the newspaper that Margot Fonteyn’s performance in Swan Lake last night was a forgery because as a matter of fact it was not Margot Fonteyn who danced last night, but rather some unknown person whom everyone mistook for Margot Fonteyn. Again, it is difficult to see in what sense a performance of, say, Oedipus Rex or Hamlet could be termed a forgery.

— Alfred Lessing, “What Is Wrong With a Forgery?” in Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley, eds., Arguing About Art, 1995

| Crime

Double Takes

A Yorkshire police constable sent this image to the Strand in 1907: “This photograph of dog and puppies was about to be thrown away as a failure, when on turning the picture sideways it was found that the dog’s body has the appearance of a man’s head”:

http://books.google.com/books?id=67UvAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&rview=1&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false

This undated photo seems to reveal the image of a bearded Jesus:

double takes - jesus image

And Bohemian artist Wenzel Hollar etched Landschafts-Kopf in the 17th century:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wenzel_Hollar_-_Landschafts-Kopf.jpg

Is it a portrait or a landscape?

| Art · Oddities

Self-Expression

The first few powers of 5 share a curious property — their digits can be rearranged to express their value:

25 = 52
125 = 51 + 2
625 = 56 – 2
3125 = (3 + (1 × 2))5
15625 = 56 × 125
78125 = 57 × 182

It’s conjectured that all powers of 5 have this property. But no one’s proved it yet.

| Science & Math

Mixed Blessing

I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, ‘If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?’ ‘No,’ said the priest, ‘not if you did not know.’ ‘Then why,’ asked the Eskimo earnestly, ‘did you tell me?’

— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974

| Religion

Buzz Kill

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=hDkmAAAAEBAJ&dq=5,571,247

Well! It seems you have gotten so wrapped up in piano practice that you have forgotten about KILLER BEES!

Don’t look to me for help; I’m hiding in the cellar. Happily Virginia L. Butler has got you covered — in 1996 she invented a 6×3 bag of flexible, transparent, and sting-resistant plastic, complete with a mesh-covered aperture through which you can jeer at your frustrated attackers.

“In use, one can quickly unfold the present invention when the sound of a swarm is initially heard and enter the protective chamber before the bees actually approach. Even if one or two bees enter the enclosure during the process, the number of stings and proportionate danger will be greatly reduced.”

Conveniently, the bag can be folded and carried in a lightweight pouch that “fits easily into a backpack, purse, picnic basket, or pocket.” You can keep it near the piano.

| Technology

Insult to Injury

Anthony Burgess wrote his Enderby novels under the pen name Joseph Kell. So he was amused when in 1963 the Yorkshire Post asked him to review one of them.

Sensing a practical joke by one of the editors, he submitted a scathing review. “This is in many ways a dirty book,” he wrote. “It may well make some people sick, and those of my readers with tender stomachs are advised to let it alone.”

Alas, the assignment wasn’t a joke. The newspaper published Burgess’ review — and when it discovered his double identity, “I was attacked by the editor of the Yorkshire Post on Yorkshire Television and promptly, and perhaps justly, dismissed.”

See Conflict of Interest.

| Literature

A Canceled Debt

Suppose you borrowed $10 from Tom and $10 from Bob. On your way to repaying them you are robbed of everything but the $10 you had hidden in your shirt pocket. By no fault of your own, you now face the following paradoxical dilemma:

(1) You are obligated to repay Tom and Bob.
(2) If you pay Tom you cannot repay Bob.
(3) If you repay Bob you cannot repay Tom.
(4) You cannot honor all your obligations: in the circumstances this is impossible for you. (By (1)-(3).)
(5) You are (morally) required to honor all your obligations.
(6) You are not (morally) required to do something you cannot possibly do (ultra posse nemo obligatur).

— Nicholas Rescher, Paradoxes, 2001

| Science & Math