Fair Enough

Engaged to give a talk at a university, logician Raymond Smullyan arrived half an hour early and wrote the following sentence on the blackboard, “to give the audience something to mull over”:

You have no reason to believe this sentence.

This, he reasoned, was a paradox. If you have no reason to believe the sentence, then what it states is really the case, which is certainly a good reason to believe it. But if you have a good reason to believe it, then it must be true … which means that you have no reason to believe it.

Half an hour later he came down the stairs to a packed audience. Spotting a bright-looking boy in the front row, he pointed to the sentence and asked him, “Do you believe that sentence?”

“Yes,” said the boy.

“What is your reason?”

“I don’t have any.”

Smullyan asked, “Then why do you believe it?”

The boy said, “Intuition.”

(Raymond Smullyan, “Self-Reference in All Its Glory!” conference “Self-Reference,” Copenhagen, Oct. 31-Nov. 2, 2002.)

| Science & Math

Second Life

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

The samurai crab, Heikea japonica, earns its nickname well: Its shell bears a startling resemblance to the face of an angry warrior. Some Japanese believe that these crabs are reincarnated samurai who, defeated at the Battle of Dan-no-ura, threw themselves into the sea, as described in the epic Tale of the Heike.

Biologist Julian Huxley put forward the idea that the “faces” were an example of artificial selection. He suggested that fishermen who caught crabs with particularly face-shaped carapaces, believing them to be reincarnated spirits, threw them back into the sea, permitting them to reproduce while their brothers were eaten.

But humans don’t eat these crabs, and in any case the “warrior” crabs exist even far from sites of human fishing. Really the crabs are an example of another, equally compelling phenomenon — pareidolia, our tendency to see significant patterns where none exist.

| Science & Math

Short Notice

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Having lost both his legs at the Second Battle of Bull Run, James Tanner had settled into life as a government stenographer in the Ordnance Department in Washington, D.C., when on April 14, 1865, he was suddenly summoned to the building next to his boarding house, where Abraham Lincoln lay dying. Between midnight and 1:30 a.m., using shorthand, he recorded the accounts of those who had witnessed the assassination, and, he said later, “in fifteen minutes I had testimony enough to hang Wilkes Booth, the assassin, higher than ever Haman hung.” Here’s a sample, the statement of actor William Henry Hawk, who had been performing at Ford’s Theatre that night:

I was on the stage at the time of the firing & heard the report of the pistol. My back was towards the Presidents box at the time. I heard something tear & somebody fell & as I looked towards him he came in the direction in which I was standing & I believe to the best of my knowledge that it was John Wilkes Booth. Still I am not positive that it was him. I only had one glance at him as he was rushing towards me with a dagger & I turned and run & after I run up a flight of stairs I turned and exclaimed ‘My God that’s John Booth.’ I am acquainted with Booth. I met him the first time a year ago. I saw him today about one o’clock. Said I ‘how do you do Mr. Booth’ and he says ‘how are you Hawk.’ He was sitting on the steps of Fords Theatre reading a letter. He had the appearance of being sober at the time. I was never intimate with him. He had no hat on when I saw him on the stage. In my own mind I do not have any doubt but that it was Booth. He made some expression when he came on the stage but I did not understand what.

Tanner’s notes are known as the Tanner Manuscript — you can read them at the Internet Archive.

| History

A Company of Soldiers

During World War II, British thespian Maurice Evans toured the Central Pacific with a stripped-down version of Hamlet in which all the male actors were G.I.s. He cut down and sped up the text so that the play ran in 2 hours and 45 minutes, so that the men could return to their quarters on time.

“As I remember, on opening night, Hamlet seemed like a flop,” recalled one participant. “There was barely a murmur of response from the house and a fair amount of gloom backstage. We were later told that the audience had been reminded that this was not some cheap skin show but a classic, and that they were to show respect for Shakespeare and for Hamlet, who happened to be, by God, an officer in the United States Army. With this misunderstanding cleared up, future audiences were much more enthusiastic.”

In fact the “G.I. Hamlet” proved so successful that when the war was over Evans moved it to New York and then toured the country. He didn’t mean to be typed as a Shakespearean actor, he said; he just wanted audiences to enjoy the plays as “rattling good shows.”

| Art

An Idea Grows

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This is Charles Darwin’s first diagram of an evolutionary tree, from his First Notebook on Transmutation of Species. He drew it around July 1837, barely a month after he’d opened his first full transmutation notebook.

“Case must be that one generation should have as many living as now,” he wrote. “To do this and to have as many species in same genus (as is) requires extinction. Thus between A + B the immense gap of relation. C + B the finest gradation. B + D rather greater distinction. Thus genera would be formed. Bearing relation to ancient types with several extinct forms.”

At the top he’s written “I think.”

| Science & Math

Noted

In a Midlands pub in October 1888, a Londoner named Alfred Blanchard told the landlord that he was the Whitechapel murderer. He repeated the statement to several people and was taken to the Duke Street police station, where he quickly recanted his confession. He had been in the pub for nine hours and drunk about five and a half pints of beer. From the Birmingham Press Gazette:

About half-past twelve o’clock he asked witness what kind of detectives they had in Birmingham. Witness told him he believed them to be very clever men. Prisoner said that it would be a funny thing if the Whitechapel murderer were to give himself up in Birmingham. Witness acquiesced, and prisoner continued, ‘I am the Whitechapel murderer.’ Turning round to an elderly gentleman sitting in the bar, prisoner said, ‘Look here, old gentleman; perhaps you would not think there was a murderer in the house.’ ‘I don’t know about that,’ replied the customer; ‘you might not look unlike one.’ Prisoner said, ‘I am one, then.’ Later on the old gentleman asked prisoner had he got the knife with him, and he answered that he had left a long knife behind him. Someone asked prisoner how he did the murders without making the victims scream. He explained that this was done ‘simply by placing the thumb and finger on the windpipe and cutting the throat with the right hand.’ He said he had ‘done six of them in London.’ He was sober when he made this statement. Turning round to witness prisoner said, ‘You are a fool if you don’t get the thousand pounds reward offered for me; you may as well have it as anyone else.’

He told the magistrate’s clerk that he had been drinking for two or three days before this and hoped that the press would be kind enough not to mention his case. He was dismissed with the admonition, “What a foolish man you have been.”

| Crime

The Telharmonium

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Inventor Thaddeus Cahill offered a startling advance in 1895: An electronic keyboard instrument that could distribute music over the nation’s telephone networks. By combining sine waves according to Hermann Helmholtz’s new theories, the device could approximate the tone of any given instrument using electrical dynamos.

After hearing a demonstration at the Hotel Hamilton, Ray Stannard Baker wrote in McClure’s, “The first impression the music makes upon the listener is its singular difference from any music ever heard before: in the fullness, roundness, completeness, of its tones.”

Unfortunately, the device required an enormous amount of electricity, it disrupted the New York telephone network, and it was rapidly overtaken by other inventions in an immensely fruitful period. Cahill had hoped to fund it through subscriptions, and this quickly became impossible. But it had its adherents — Mark Twain’s friend Albert Bigelow Paine recalled a social gathering at the Clemens home at which the author demonstrated the instrument:

“Clemens was filled with enthusiasm over the idea. He made a speech a little before midnight, in which he told how he had generally been enthusiastic about inventions which had turned out more or less well in about equal proportions. He did not dwell on the failures, but he told how he had been the first to use a typewriter for manuscript work; how he had been one of the earliest users of the fountain-pen; how he had installed the first telephone ever used in a private house, and how the audience now would have a demonstration of the first telharmonium music so employed. It was just about the stroke of midnight when he finished, and a moment later the horns began to play chimes and ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and ‘America.'”

| Art · Technology

Casper the Commuting Cat

Susan Finden named her cat Casper because he kept disappearing, visiting doctor’s offices, office buildings, and pharmacies near her Weymouth home. When she moved to Plymouth in 2006 she was too busy to monitor his daily activities, and so three years later she was surprised to learn that he was riding buses. The drivers, who looked out for him, told her that he would journey 11 miles to the city center and back, sitting on a favored seat. They would let him out opposite his house.

“I couldn’t believe it at first, but it explains a lot,” she said. “He loves people and we have a bus stop right outside our house so that must be how he got started — just following everyone on.”

Ironically, or perhaps inevitably, he was finally killed by a taxi. The news of his death brought condolences from around the world, and Finden wrote a best-selling book. “He will be greatly missed,” she wrote in a note posted on Casper’s usual bus stop. “He was a much-loved pet who had so much character. Thank you to all those who befriended him.”

| Oddities

In a Word

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barkable
adj. able to bark

There’s a word for you! Eileen Power’s The Wool Trade in English Medieval History (1941) quotes a 13th-century treatise on estate management:

It profiteth the lord to have discreet shepherds, watchful and kindly, so that the sheep be not tormented by their wrath, but crop their pasture in peace and joyfulness; for it is a token of the shepherd’s kindness if the sheep be not scattered abroad but browse around him in company. Let him provide himself with a good barkable dog and lie nightly with his sheep.

Bonus: hinnible means able to neigh or whinny.

| Language

Cribbage

From reader Derek Christie:

Each player in a game of cribbage has a hand of four cards. A single further card is turned up and serves as the fifth card in every player’s hand. Part of the game involves scoring your hand. You get points for any combination of cards that adds to 15, like 9 4 2; for two or more of any rank, like 3 3; or for any run of three or more, like Ace 2 3. The Jack, Queen, and King each score 10. Show that if a 5 has been turned up, every player must score some points.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles