The Will Rogers Phenomenon

Will Rogers allegedly said, “When the Okies left Oklahoma and moved to California, they raised the average intelligence level in both states.”

He was joking, but the effect is possible in principle. Consider two sets:

A = {1, 2, 3, 4}
B = {5, 6, 7, 8, 9}

If we move 5 to set A, the mean of both sets increases.

This produces a somewhat paradoxical effect when doctors find a better way to detect illness. Relatively healthy people are moved from the “well” category to the “ill” category, and the average health of both populations improves even before treatment takes place.

| Science & Math

High and Dry

According to legend, pearl-hunting Spaniards sailed up the Gulf of California in 1610 and became grounded in a vanishing inland sea, leaving a ship full of treasure in the California desert. Reports are curiously specific:

  • In January 1870 an Albert S. Evans told the New York Galaxy that, looking south in 1863 from the summit of the divide between Dos Palmas and the Palma Seca, he’d seen “what appeared in the distance the wreck of a gallant ship.”
  • The Sacramento Union, Oct. 6, 1870, reported that a party of four had left San Bernardino to visit the ship. “The bow and stern are plainly visible, and she is 240 miles from the Gulf of California.” The party returned six days later and set out again in November; no further details are recorded.
  • In a 1933 book, The Journey of the Flame, Antonio de Fierro Blanco tells of a young mule driver named Tiburcio Manquerna who stumbled across a lost galleon and saw a vast cargo of pearls in its hold. He was later unable to relocate it.
  • In January 1939, Desert magazine quoted a Perta Socia Tucker who said that her first husband knew of the ship’s location, “a narrow box canyon with high sheer walls, and a sandy bottom; and partially buried there, a boat of ancient appearance — an open boat but big, with round metal disks on its sides.”

In 1949 the Los Angeles Times reported that three UCLA students set out with 1910 Imperial Irrigation District maps and a story from a Cahuilla Indian who said he’d seen a “serpent-necked” canoe near the Salton Sea in 1917. The Times doesn’t report the result — but if you found a fortune in pearls, you wouldn’t tell a newspaper, would you?

| Oddities

Hark the Herald Angel

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Behold the arms of Richard Plantagenet Campbell Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, 3rd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, GCSI, PC (1823–1889).

Plutarch wrote, “He who reflects on another man’s want of breeding shows he wants it as much himself.”

| Oddities · Society

Extensive Mutation Pair

The word EXTENSION can be rearranged into the words ONE, TEN, and SIX.

String together the numbers 1, 10, and 6 and you get 1106.

Add them and you get 17.

The word EXTENSIVELY can be rearranged into the words SIXTY and ELEVEN.

String together the numbers 60 and 11 and you get 6011.

Add them and you get 71.

| Language

Uneasy Bedfellows

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I cannot help thinking that the difference which he [Matthew Arnold] makes between Washington and Lincoln is due to the fact that the one lived a century ago, and the other in our own time. A hundred years ago Englishmen would have laughed at the praise he gives to Washington. Fifty years ago they would have still considered it extravagant. To-day, they think it just. So will it be with Lincoln. Compare what was said of him in his lifetime with what is said of him even now, and we shall be able to form some idea of the verdict of the future.

— Theodore Roosevelt, commenting in Murray’s Magazine, quoted in Patrick Maxwell, Pribbles and Prabbles, 1906

| History · Society

The Visby Lenses

In 1997, three scientists examined 10 rock crystal lenses discovered in a Viking grave on Sweden’s Gotland Island. Made in the 12th century, the lenses had been thought to be simple ornaments, but examination showed they had been crafted with the ideal focusing lens shape 500 years before Descartes could calculate it mathematically.

“It seems that the elliptical lens design was invented much earlier that we thought and then the knowledge was lost,” researcher Olaf Schmidt told the BBC. Scientists speculate that the lenses were used to start fires or perhaps even to form a crude telescope.

Who made them? Not Vikings — probably a group of craftsmen in Byzantium or Eastern Europe, possibly even a single talented artisan. Whoever it was, he knew even more about applied optics than scientists at the time.

| Oddities · Science & Math

Infinite Egress

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Leinbach had discovered a proof that there really is no death. It is beyond question, he had declared, that not only at the moment of drowning, but at all the moments of death of any nature, one lives over again his past life with a rapidity inconceivable to others. This remembered life must also have a last moment, and this last moment its own last moment, and so on, and hence, dying is itself eternity, and hence, in accordance with the theory of limits, one may approach death but can never reach it.

— Arthur Schnitzler, Flight Into Darkness, 1931

| Death · Science & Math

Thou Whoreson Zed!

What’s unique about this poem?

Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
But then begins a journey in my head,
To work my mind, when body’s work’s expired:
For then my thoughts, from far where I abide,
Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,
And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,
Looking on darkness which the blind do see
Save that my soul’s imaginary sight
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,
Which, like a jewel hung in ghastly night,
Makes black night beauteous and her old face new.
Lo! thus, by day my limbs, by night my mind,
For thee and for myself no quiet find.

It’s the only one of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets that contains all 26 letters of the alphabet.

| Language · Poems