The Two Cultures

Tennyson’s poem “The Vision of Sin” contains this couplet:

Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one is born.

When he published it in 1842, Charles Babbage sent him a note:

I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world’s population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that, in the next edition of your excellent poem, the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows:–

Every moment dies a man,
And one and a sixteenth is born.

“I may add that the exact figures are 1.167,” he added, “but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre.”

| Literature · Poems · Science & Math

Dark Science

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Tickling_the_Dragons_Tail.jpg

On Aug. 21, 1945, physicist Harry Daghlian accidentally dropped a brick of tungsten carbide into a plutonium bomb core at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The mass went critical, and Daghlian died of radiation sickness.

Exactly nine months later, physicist Louis Slotin was conducting an experiment on the same mass of plutonium when his screwdriver slipped and the mass again went critical. He too died of radiation sickness.

The mass became known as “the demon core.”

| Oddities · Science & Math

The Vanishing Debtor

Alpha approaches Beta, asking for payment of a debt.

Beta: If you had an odd number of pebbles — or for that matter an even one — and then chose to add or subtract a pebble, do you think you would have the same number?

Alpha: No.

Beta: If you had a measure of one cubit and chose to add or cut off some length of it, that measure would no longer exist, would it?

Alpha: No.

Beta: Well now, think of a human in the same way: one human is growing and another is diminishing. All are constantly in the process of change. But what by its nature changes and never stays put must already be different from what it changed from. You and I are different from who we were yesterday, and by the same argument will be different again tomorrow.

Exasperated, Alpha strikes Beta.

Beta: Why are you angry with me?

Alpha: As someone nearby just demonstrated, it was not I who hit you, not I at all, but someone else altogether.

(From a fragment by Epicharmus.)

| Science & Math

Newcomb’s Paradox

Flamdor McSqueem is a superintelligent wombat from the planet Zortag. He shows you two boxes. You can choose to take the contents of Box A or the contents of both boxes. He has privately predicted what you will do.

If Flamdor predicted you would choose Box A only, then Box A contains $1 million. If he predicted you’d choose both boxes, then Box A contains nothing. Either way, Box B contains $1,000. What should you do?

Some people reason that Flamdor is very intelligent and his predictions are usually accurate, so it would seem best to choose Box A. Others note that Flamdor has already made his prediction and can’t change the contents of the boxes now, so it seems best to take both boxes.

There’s no correct answer — decision theorists are still arguing about it. What would you do?

| Science & Math

Easy

Write down any number:

886328712442992

Count up the number of even and odd digits, and the total number of digits:

10 5 15

String those together to make a new number, and perform the same operation on that:

10515

1 4 5

And keep iterating:

145

1 2 3

You’ll always arrive at 123.

| Science & Math

Start Again

THEIR ARE THREE MISTEAKS IN THIS SENTENCE.

Well, wait, there are only two. So there was a mistake of fact. Which means that the sentence really did contain three mistakes. But that means it was true all along … in which case it’s not false … in which case it really contains only two mistakes …

| Science & Math

Arguing in Circles

Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find every one engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel — a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree’s opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: Does the man go round the squirrel or not?

— William James, Pragmatism, 1907

| Science & Math