In August 1945, about 500 Manhattan Project alumni founded the Association of Los Alamos Scientists to educate the public about nuclear energy.
They stressed the first syllable of the acronym.
Society
A King’s Homework
When Edward VI succeeded to the throne at age 9, William Thomas, clerk of the council, set him 85 questions on history and policy to answer at his leisure. “For though these be but questions, yet there is not so small an one among them, as will not administer matter of much discourse, worthy the argument and debating.” Samples:
- Whether it is better for the commonwealth, that the power be in the nobility or in the people?
- How easily a weak prince with good order may long be maintained, and how soon a mighty prince with little disorder may be destroyed?
- What is the occasion of conspiracies?
- Whether the people commonly desire the destruction of him that is in authority, and what moveth them so to do?
- How flatterers are to be known and despised?
- How dangerous it is to be author of a new matter?
- Whether evil report lighteth not most commonly upon the reporter?
- Whether a puissant prince ought to purchase amity with money, or with virtue and stoutness?
- What is the cause of war?
- Whether the country ought not always to be defended, the quarrel being right or wrong?
- What danger it is to a prince, not to be revenged of an open injury?
- Whether it be not necessary sometimes to feign folly?
Thomas closes by suggesting that Edward keep the questions to himself, since it is better “to keep the principal things of wisdom secret, till occasion require the utterance.”
Dead Letters
In a trance in 1926, medium Geraldine Cummins wrote out messages transmitted to her by a disembodied spirit who had died 1900 years earlier. Architect Frederick Bligh Bond transcribed, punctuated, and arranged the messages. When Bond published these in a newspaper, Cummins sued him. This raises an interesting legal question: Who holds the copyright?
In an extempore judgment, Justice J. Eve wrote that, although all parties agreed that “the true originator of all that is found in these documents is some being no longer inhabiting this world,” the medium’s “active cooperation” had helped to translate them into modern language. This might make her a joint author with the disembodied spirit, but “recognizing as I do that I have no jurisdiction extending to the sphere in which he moves,” he found that “authorship rests with this lady.”
Bond had claimed that the writing had no living author, that, in Eve’s words, “the authorship and copyright rest with some one already domiciled on the other side of the inevitable river.” But “That is a matter I must leave for solution by others more competent to decide it than I am. I can only look upon the matter as a terrestrial one, of the earth earthy, and I propose to deal with it on that footing. In my opinion the plaintiff has made out her case, and the copyright rests with her.”
Glorious Union
The high point of the Buckingham Palace switchboard operator’s day is when she puts the Queen through to the Queen Mother. ‘Your Majesty? Her Majesty, Your Majesty.’
— Jerrold M. Packard, The Queen & Her Court: A Guide to the British Monarchy Today, 1981
Underpaid
Early one morning [George III] met a boy in the stables at Windsor and said: ‘Well, boy! What do you do? What do they pay you?’
‘I help in the stable,’ said the boy, ‘but they only give me victuals and clothes.’
‘Be content,’ said George, ‘I have no more.’
— Beckles Willson, George III, 1907
The Monster Study
In 1939, University of Iowa graduate student Mary Tudor began an experiment with local orphans, warning them that they were showing signs of stuttering and lecturing them whenever they repeated a word. The children became acutely self-conscious, and many began to stutter, fulfilling the theory that “the affliction is caused by the diagnosis.”
Sixty years later, when Tudor was 84, she received a letter from one of the orphans. It was addressed to “Mary Tudor Jacobs The Monster.”
“You destroyed my life,” it ran. “I could have been a scientist, archaeologist or even president. Instead I became a pitiful stutterer. The kids made fun of me, my grades fell off, I felt stupid. Clear into my adulthood, I still want to avoid people to this day.”
“I didn’t like what I was doing to those children,” Tudor told the San Jose Mercury News in 2001. “It was a hard, terrible thing. Today, I probably would have challenged it. Back then you did what you were told. It was an assignment. And I did it.”
The Seattle God Committee
In 1962, Seattle’s Swedish Hospital began offering kidney dialysis to outpatients. Because the program could accept only 17 patients, it turned to an “admissions and policy committee” made up of largely of laypeople: a minister, a lawyer, a housewife, a labor leader, a state government official, a banker, and a surgeon.
In order to narrow the field of applicants, the committee considered whether a candidate was employed, had dependent children, was educated, had a history of achievements, and had the potential to help others. In its deliberations it would also evaluate the candidate’s personality, his personal merits, and the strengths and weaknesses of his family. “The preferred candidate was a person who had demonstrated achievement through hard work and success at his job,” wrote sociologists Renée Fox and Judith Swazey, “who went to church, joined groups, and was actively involved in community affairs.”
As word spread, observers raised questions about the ethics of the program. In spring 1963, the Seattle Times presented a picture of nine dialysis patients on its cover, with the heading “Will These People Have to Die?” A committee member protested, “We are picking guinea pigs for experimental purposes, not denying life to others.” But in 1972 Congress established federal support for anyone needing dialysis, partly in response to these concerns, and today the “Seattle experience” is remembered as a formative case in bioethics.
Fair Enough
A prisoner being called on to plead an indictment for larceny was told by the clerk to hold up his right hand. The man immediately held up his left hand. ‘Hold up your right hand,’ said the clerk. ‘Please your Honor,’ said the culprit, still keeping up his left hand, ‘I am left-handed.’
— Franklin Fiske Heard, Oddities of the Law, 1881
Veritas
What Robert Benchley learned in his first year at Harvard:
- Charlemagne either died or was born or did something with the Holy Roman Empire in 800.
- By placing one paper bag inside another paper bag you can carry home a milk shake in it.
- There is a double l in the middle of parallel.
- Powder rubbed on the chin will take the place of a shave if the room isn’t very light.
- French nouns ending in “aison” are feminine.
- Almost everything you need to know about a subject is in the encyclopedia.
- A tasty sandwich can be made by spreading peanut butter on raisin bread.
- A floating body displaces its own weight in the liquid in which it floats.
- A sock with a hole in the toe can be worn inside out with comparative comfort.
- The chances are against filling an inside straight.
- There is a law in economics called The Law of Diminishing Returns, which means that after a certain margin is reached returns begin to diminish. This may not be correctly stated, but there is a law by that name.
- You begin tuning a mandolin with A and tune the other strings from that.
“My courses were all selected with a very definite aim in view, with a serious purpose in mind,” he wrote. “No classes before eleven in the morning or after two-thirty in the afternoon, and nothing on Saturday at all. On that rock was my education built.”
Stump Trouble
The voting paradox shows that conflicting majorities can prevent a clear winner even in a fair election.
Sadly, this can be true even if the candidates specify platforms. Suppose there are two issues, x and y, each of which admits two possible positions, x and x’ and y and y’. Then a candidate can have four possible platforms: xy, xy’, x’y, and x’y’. Now suppose there are three voters, each of whom ranks her preferences in a different order:
Voter 1: xy, xy’, x’y, x’y’
Voter 2: xy’, x’y’, xy, x’y
Voter 3: x’y, x’y’, xy, xy’
If the voters could vote on the individual issues instead of having to choose a platform, Voters 1 and 2 would prefer x to x’, and Voters 1 and 3 would prefer y to y’. These are clear majorities. But in practice platform x’y’ will defeat platform xy, since it’s preferred by a majority (Voters 2 and 3).
“Thus, a platform whose alternatives, when considered separately, are both favored by a majority may be defeated by a platform containing alternatives that only minorities favor,” writes Steven J. Brams in Paradoxes in Politics. Public policy scholar Anthony Downs argues that the fact that a majority platform can be constructed from minority positions may make it rational for politicians to appeal to coalitions of minorities.