Planetary economy will be a determining factor in the change of diet which the coming century must inevitably witness. Such a wasteful food as animal flesh cannot survive: and even apart from the moral necessity which will compel mankind, for its own preservation, to abandon the use of alcohol, the direct and indirect wastefulness of alcohol will make it impossible for beverages containing it to be tolerated. Very likely tobacco will follow it.
— T. Baron Russell, A Hundred Years Hence, 1905
An epitaph in the Pine Forest cemetery in Wilmington, N.C., reads:
“JIP” JONES
BORN SEPT. 24, 1894
DIED MAY 18, 1904
THIS WAS THE ONLY DOG WE EVER KNEW
THAT ATTENDED CHURCH EVERY SUNDAY
Actually, dogs commonly attended services in former times. Indeed, until the 19th century, they could be so numerous that churches employed “dog whippers” to remove unruly dogs during services. The Great Church of St. Bavo in Haarlem, the Netherlands, contains a carving of the hondenslager at work (above).
The 18th-century zoologist Carl Linnaeus used to attend mass with his dog Pompe. Linnaeus always left after an hour, regardless of whether the sermon was finished. It’s said that when he was sick Pompe would arrive at the service alone, stay for the customary hour, and depart.
“Heaven goes by favor,” wrote Mark Twain. “If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.”
“It is probable that television drama of high caliber and produced by first-rate artists will materially raise the level of dramatic taste of the nation.” — RCA president David Sarnoff, 1939
“Television? The word is half Greek and half Latin. No good can come of it.” — Manchester Guardian editor C.P. Scott, 1928
“Television won’t matter in your lifetime or mine.” — Rex Lambert, The Listener, 1936
“Television won’t last because people will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” — movie producer Darryl Zanuck, 1946
“Television won’t last. It’s a flash in the pan.” — BBC school broadcasting director Mary Somerville, 1948
“How can you put out a meaningful drama or documentary that is adult, incisive, probing, when every fifteen minutes the proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits with toilet paper?” — Rod Serling, 1974
“I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can’t stop eating peanuts.” — Orson Welles, 1956
During the filming of Planet of the Apes in 1967, Charlton Heston noted “an instinctive segregation on the set. Not only would the apes eat together, but the chimpanzees ate with the chimpanzees, the gorillas ate with the gorillas, the orangutans ate with the orangutans, and the humans would eat off by themselves. It was quite spooky.”
James Franciscus noticed the same thing filming Beneath the Planet of the Apes in 1969. “During lunch I looked up and realized, ‘My God, here is the universe,’ because at one table were all the orangutans eating, at another table were the apes, and at another table were the humans. The orangutan characters would not eat or mix with the ape characters, and the humans wouldn’t sit down and eat with any one of them.
“I remember saying, ‘Look around — do you realize what’s happening here? This is a little isolated microcosm of probably what’s bugging the whole world. Call it prejudice or whatever you want to call it. Whatever’s different is to be shunned or it’s frightening or so forth.’ Nobody was intermingling, even though they were all humans underneath the masks. The masks were enough to bring out our own little genetic natures of fear and prejudice. It was startling.”
(From Joe Russo and Larry Landsman, Planet of the Apes Revisited, 2001.)
In Mathematical Applications of Political Science, University of Minnesota political scientist William Riker describes a worrisome voting paradox that unfolded in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1956. At issue was a bill calling for federal aid for school construction; an amendment was proposed that would have offered this aid only to states whose schools were integrated. The House was divided into three interest groups:
Clearly the original bill would have passed, as the Democrats as a group preferred it to having no bill at all. But, following procedure, the House voted first on whether to accept the amendment, and here the Republicans and the northern Democrats combined to support it, since both preferred the amended bill to the original bill. The second vote addressed whether to accept the now-amended bill, and now the Republicans and the southern Democrats united to kill it, since both preferred no bill to the amended bill.
So the original bill was popular, and the proposed amendment was popular, but combining them led to the bill’s defeat. “As if it were not enough that the choice may depend on the voting order, this fact can be used to twist the outcome of the legislative process,” Riker writes. “It may be possible to create a voting paradox such that no action is taken by the legislature even though a proposed bill would have passed prior to the creation of the paradox. A legislator could introduce an amendment to create such a paradox, and if the voting order were just right, the amended proposal would then be defeated.”
Until 1911, the U.S. House of Representatives grew along with the country. Accordingly, when the 1880 census showed an increase in population, C.W. Seaton, chief clerk of the census office, worked out apportionments for all House sizes between 275 and 350, in order to see which states would get the new seats.
He was in for a surprise. The method was straightforward: Take the total U.S. population and divide it by the proposed number of seats in the House, rounding all fractions down. This would dispose of most of the seats; any leftover seats would be awarded to the states whose fractional remainders had been highest. But Seaton discovered an oddity:
If the House had 299 seats, Alabama would get 8 representatives (because its remainder, .646, was higher than that of Texas or Illinois). But if the House had 300 seats it would get only 7 (the extra representative would now go to Illinois, whose remainder had surpassed Alabama’s). The problem is that the “fair share” of a large state increases more quickly than that of a small state.
Seaton called this the Alabama paradox. A related problem is the population paradox: If the method above had been used in 1901 to reallocate 386 seats in the House, Virginia would have lost a seat to Maine even though the ratio of their populations had increased from 2.67 to 2.68:
Here, even though the size of the House has not changed, a fast-growing state receives fewer representatives than a slow-growing one.
In 1982 mathematicians Michel Balinski and Peyton Young showed that if each party gets one of the two numbers closest to its fair share of seats, then any system of apportionment will run into one of these paradoxes. The solution, it seems clear, is to start cutting legislators into pieces.
(These data are from Hannu Nurmi’s Voting Paradoxes and How to Deal With Them, 1999. Balinski and Young’s book is Fair Representation: Meeting the Ideal of One Man, One Vote.)
Before you are two piles of coins. One contains 4 coins and the other contains 1. If you like, you can keep the larger pile, give me the smaller, and end the game. Or you can pass both piles to me. In that case the size of each pile doubles and I’m given the same option — I can keep the larger pile and give you the smaller one, or I can pass both piles back to you, in which case they’ll double again.
We both know that the game will end after six rounds. At that point I’ll have the coins and will win 128 coins to your 32. You’d be better off stopping the game in round 5, when you’ll have 64 coins and I have 16. But, by similar reasoning, I’d prefer round 4 to round 5, and you’d prefer round 3 to round 4 … if we rely on each other to be purely rational, it seems your best opening move is to end the game at once and keep 4 coins. This is less than you’d make in round 6, but it appears that purely rational play will never reach that round.
In practice, interestingly, human beings don’t do this — almost no one stops at the first opportunity, even after several repetitions of the game. Why they do so is not clear — possibly they’re hoping that their opponent has not reasoned through the whole game, or perhaps they’re agreeing tacitly to cultivate the pot in hopes of being the first one to cash out abruptly; perhaps the satisfaction of anticipating such a victory makes the risk worthwhile.
In lab tests in 2009, economists Ignacio Palacios-Huerta and Oscar Volij found that only 3 percent of games between students ended in the first round, but 69 percent of games between chess players did so. This rose to 100 percent when the first player was a grandmaster. They conclude that the most important factor is common knowledge of the players’ rationality, rather than altruism or social preferences.
(Ignacio Palacios-Huerta and Oscar Volij, “Field Centipedes,” American Economic Review 99 (4): 1619–1635.)
In 1525, more than 100,000 German peasants demanded an end to serfdom and were massacred by the well-organized armies of the ruling class. After observing the ornate memorials with which the aristocrats congratulated themselves, Albrecht Dürer proposed a similarly baroque monument to the slain peasants:
Place a quadrangular stone block measuring ten feet in width and four feet in height on a quadrangular stone slab which measures twenty feet in length and one foot in height. On the four corners of the ledge place tied-up cows, sheep, pigs, etc. But on the four corners of the stone block place four baskets, filled with butter, eggs, onions, and herbs, or whatever you like. In the centre of this stone block place a second one, measuring seven feet in length and one foot in height. On top of this second block place a strong chest four feet high, measuring six and a half feet wide at the bottom and four feet wide at the top. Then place a kettle upside down on top of the chest. The kettle’s diameter should be four and a half feet at the rim and three feet at its bottom. Surmount the kettle with a cheese bowl which is half a foot high and two and a half feet in diameter at the bottom. Cover this bowl with a thick plate that protrudes beyond its rim. On the plate, place a keg of butter which is three feet high and two and a half feet in diameter at the bottom. Cover this bowl with a thick plate that protrudes beyond its rim. On the plate, place a keg of butter which is three feet high and has a diameter of a foot and a half at the bottom, and of only a foot at the top. Its spout should protrude beyond this. On the top of the butter keg, place a well-formed milk jug, two and a half feet high, and with a diameter which is one foot at its bulge, half a foot at its top, and is wider at its bottom. Into this jug put four rods branching into forks on top and extending five and a half feet in height, so that the rods will protrude by half a foot, and then hang peasants’ tool on it – like hoes, pitchforks, flails, etc. The rods are to be surmounted by a chicken basket, topped by a lard tub upon which sits an afflicted peasant with a sword stuck into his back.
What would that look like?
Expressions banned from use in New Zealand parliamentary debate:
1933
Blowfly-minded
1943
Retardate worm
1946
Clown of the House
Idle vapourings of a mind diseased
I would cut the honourable gentleman’s throat if I had the chance
1949
His brains could revolve inside a peanut shell for a thousand years without touching the sides
1957
Kind of animal that gnaws holes
1959
Member not fit to lick the shoes of the Prime Minister
1963
Energy of a tired snail returning home from a funeral
1966
Shut up yourself, you great ape
Snotty-nosed little boy
You are a cheap little twerp
Ridiculous mouse
1974
Could go down the Mount Eden sewer and come up cleaner than he went in
Dreamed the bill up in the bath
Frustrated warlord
The full list is here. In brighter news, saying that a fellow member “scuttles for his political funk hole” was deemed allowable in 1974.
Since demolishing 78 traffic signals and installing 80 roundabouts, the northern Indiana city of Carmel has reduced the number of accidents by 40 percent and the number of accidents with injuries by 78 percent.
“It’s nearly impossible to have a head-on or T-bone collision when using the roadways, and collisions that do happen tend to occur at much lower speeds,” noted Governing magazine. “Other benefits of roundabouts include reduced fuel consumption, due to a lack of idling, and a construction cost that is at least $150,000 less than installing traffic lights.”
“We have more than any other city in the U.S.,” says mayor James Brainard. “It’s a trend now in the United States. There are more and more roundabouts being built every day because of the expense saved and, more importantly, the safety.”
