The Tempest Prognosticator

tempest prognosticator

Naturalist George Merryweather offered a gruesome new instrument at London’s Great Exhibition in 1851: He imprisoned 12 leeches in a ring of bottles, which he capped with whalebone levers. (The bottles were arranged in a circle so that the leeches “might see one another and not endure the affliction of solitary confinement.”) When a storm approached, the agitated leeches would climb the bottles, trip the levers, and ring a bell. The more agitated this “jury of philosophical councilors,” the more frequently the bell sounded, and the more likely a storm.

After a year of experiments, Merryweather claimed great success — among other feats, the “leech barometer” foretold the disastrous storm of October 1850 51 hours before it took place. “I may here observe,” Merryweather wrote, “that I could cause a little leech, governed by its instinct, to ring Saint Paul’s great bell in London as a signal for an approaching storm.”

He proposed that the government install stations around the British coast, and nominated engineer William Reid to be inspector-general of leeches and meteorologist James Glaisher his second-in-command. Inexplicably, they turned him down. “After this,” opined Chambers’ Journal, “the Snail Telegraph looks not quite so outrageous an absurdity.”

| Oddities · Science & Math · Technology

Toes Up

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Winslow_Homer_002.jpg

In logic, the contrapositive of “If A, then B” is “If not B, then not A”: “If Socrates is a man, then Socrates is human” carries the same message as “If Socrates is not human, then Socrates is not a man.”

To make this vivid for his geometry students, W.P. Cooke of West Texas State University enlisted Tex Ritter’s song “Rye Whiskey”:

If the ocean was whiskey and I was a duck,
I’d swim to the bottom and never come up.
But the ocean ain’t whiskey and I ain’t no duck,
So I’ll play Jack-O-Diamonds and trust to my luck.
For it’s whiskey, rye whiskey, rye whiskey, I cry,
If I don’t get rye whiskey, I surely will die.

In contrapositive form, Cooke said, Ritter would sing:

If I never reach bottom or sometimes come up,
Then the ocean ain’t whiskey or I ain’t a duck.
But my luck can’t be trusted or the cards I’ll not buck,
So the ocean is whiskey or I am a duck.
For it’s whiskey, rye whiskey, rye whiskey, I cry,
If my death is uncertain then I get whiskey (rye).

(American Mathematical Monthly, November 1969)

01/31/2012 Related:

Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” is constructed as a three-paragraph logical argument:

“Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime…”
(If A, then B)

“But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near…”
(Not A)

“Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew…
Now let us sport us while we may…”
(Therefore Not B)

Unfortunately, he’s trying to argue his way from “If A, then B” to “Not A, therefore not B,” which is invalid. One wonders how his coy mistress responded.

(Thanks, Cleve.)

| Science & Math

Handcraft

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:De_tolv_villender_1.jpg

He killed the noble Mudjokivis.
Of the skin he made him mittens,
Made them with the fur side inside,
Made them with the skin side outside.
He, to get the warm side inside,
Put the inside skin side outside;
He, to get the cold side outside,
Put the warm side fur side inside.
That’s why he put the fur side inside,
Why he put the skin side outside,
Why he turned them inside outside.

— George A. Strong, “The Modern Hiawatha,” in The Home Book of Verse, 1918

Ofttimes when I put on my gloves,
I wonder if I’m sane,
For when I put the right one on,
The right seems to remain
To be put on–that is, ‘t is left;
Yet if the left I don,
The other one is left, and then
I have the right one on.
But still I have the left on right;
The right one, though, is left
To go right on the left right hand
All right, if I am deft.

— Ray Clarke Rose, “Simple English,” in Wallace Rice, A Book of American Humorous Verse, 1903

“What can be more similar in every respect and in every part more alike to my hand and to my ear, than their images in a mirror?” wrote Kant in 1783. “And yet I cannot put such a hand as is seen in the glass in the place of its archetype; for if this is a right hand, that in the glass is a left one, and the image or reflection of the right ear is a left one which never can serve as a substitute for the other. There are in this case no internal differences which our understanding could determine by thinking alone. Yet the differences are internal as the senses teach, for, notwithstanding their complete equality and similarity, the left hand cannot be enclosed in the same bounds as the right one (they are not congruent); the glove of one hand cannot be used for the other.”

| Language · Science & Math

A Thawing Drawing

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2163/2454650061_83af0663ce_z.jpg
Image: Flickr

In 1917, railroad engineers at Nenana, Alaska, held a contest to guess when the Tanana River would break up. The winner won $800.

That contest has grown into an annual fundraising event. For $2.50 any Alaskan can enter; sometime in April or May a tripod will founder in the melting ice and stop a clock, and the guess that proves most accurate will win a prize. Last year the prize amounted to $279,030; in all, more than $11 million has been paid out during the contest’s 94 years.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center monitors the breakup dates as one measure of climate change in the region.

| Oddities · Science & Math

Party of One

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lonesome_George_-Pinta_giant_tortoise_-Santa_Cruz.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

The loneliest animal in the world is George, a 100-year-old Pinta Island tortoise who is thought to be the last of his subspecies. When goats overran their island in the Galápagos, George’s companions died out, and no one has discovered a Pinta female, despite a $10,000 reward. If none is found in time for George to breed, he’ll be the last of his kind.

The second loneliest animal is Khanzir, “the only pig in Afghanistan,” where pork products are illegal. Khanzir, whose name means “pig,” was one of a pair of white pigs that China donated to the Kabul zoo in 2002, but his mate has died.

See Spectacularly Bad Driving.

03/09/2018 UPDATE: George passed away in 2012, marking the extinction of the Pinta species.

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Some Mirror Puzzles

some mirror puzzles

Hold a match horizontally before a mirror. If the match’s head is to the right, then so is that of its reflection — the match is not reversed left to right. But now hold up the matchbox. Its writing is reversed. Why?

“Here is a related puzzle,” writes psychologist Richard Gregory in Mirrors in Mind (1997). “Hold a mug with writing on it to a mirror. What do you see in the mirror? The reflection of the handle is unchanged — but the writing is right-left reversed. Can a mirror read?!”

Set two mirrors together at a 60° angle and rotate the pair around your line of sight. Your image is preserved despite the mirrors’ rotation. This is not the case if the mirrors are set at 45° or 90°. Why?

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Uh-Oh

Can a fraction whose numerator is less than its denominator be equal to a fraction whose numerator is greater than its denominator? If not, how can

white fraction fallacy

In the proportion

+6 : -3 :: -10 : +5

is not either extreme greater than either mean? What has become of the old rule, ‘greater is to less as greater is to less’?

— William Frank White, A Scrap-Book of Elementary Mathematics, 1908

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