Presence

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Antony_Gormley_Quantum_Cloud_2000.jpg

Anthony Gormley’s 1999 sculpture Quantum Cloud is well named — it both does and doesn’t present the figure of a man. It’s composed of sections of steel 1.5 meters long, arranged by a computer using a random walk algorithm starting from points on the surface of an enlarged version of the sculptor’s own body. The result manages to suggest a man’s image without quite depicting it.

“How can you convey the fact that the presence of somebody is greater or different from their appearance?” Gormley writes. “The DOMAINS allowed me to evoke the internal space of the body as a field, but are still bound by an invisible skin: I want to extend or ignore the skin.”

It stands now next to the O2 in London.

| Art

In a Word

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Warwick_Smith_-_Lake_Windermere_from_Calgarth_with_Belle_Isle_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

hydronym
n. the name of a river, lake, sea, or any other body of water

A bizarre exchange from E.S. Turner’s 2012 What the Butler Saw, a social history of servants in English society:

Vain young gentlemen had a way of summoning their valets to answer questions to which they well knew the answer. [Beau] Brummell, when asked by a bore which of the Lakes he liked best, rang for Robinson. ‘Which of the lakes do I admire most, Robinson?’ he asked; and was informed, ‘Windermere, sir.’ ‘Ah, yes, Windermere, so it is. Thank you, Robinson.’

| Language · Society

Data!

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sherlock_Holmes_I.jpg

Sherlock Holmes has the reputation of being relentlessly dour — in “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone” Watson even says that “Homes seldom laughed.” To counter this, A.G. Cooper counted up 292 instances of Holmes’ laughter, and Charles E. Lauterbach and Edward S. Lauterbach even compiled this table:

Frequency Table Showing the Number and Kind of Responses Sherlock Holmes Made to Humorous Situations and Comments in His 60 Recorded Adventures

Smile: 103
Laugh: 65
Joke: 58
Chuckle: 31
Humor: 10
Amusement: 9
Cheer: 7
Delight: 7
Twinkle: 7
Miscellaneous: 19
Total: 316

The explanation, they suggest, is that Watson was deaf.

(A.G. Cooper, “Holmesian Humour,” Sherlock Holmes Journal 6:4 [Spring 1964), 109-113; Charles E. Lauterbach and Edward S. Lauterbach, “The Man Who Seldom Laughed,” Baker Street Journal Christmas Annual No. 5 [1960], 265-271.)

| Literature

Palindromic Substrings

What’s unusual about this passage from Great Expectations?

It is not much to the purpose whether a gate in that garden wall which I had scrambled up to peep over on the last occasion was, on that last occasion, open or shut. Enough that I saw no gate then, and that I saw one now. As it stood open, and as I knew that Estella had let the visitors out,– for she had returned with the keys in her hand,– I strolled into the garden, and strolled all over it.

It contains a string of 15 letters that reads the same forward and backward:

It is not much to the purpose whether a gate in that garden wall which I had scrambled up to peep over on the last occasion was, on that last occasion, open or shut. Enough that I saw no gate then, and that I saw one now. As it stood open, and as I knew that Estella had let the visitors out,– for she had returned with the keys in her hand,– I strolled into the garden, and strolled all over it.

Reader Eric Harshbarger has been searching for such strings in literary texts. Here are his finds, and here’s a nifty tool he made that will find the longest palindromic substring in a given passage.

(Thanks, Eric.)

12/11/2021 UPDATE: Eric wonders what’s the longest sensible text one might construct that doesn’t contain any such substrings (an example: “We view uncopyrightable material on Wednesdays”). Add your ideas here.

| Language

Balance

A normal die is painted so that it has four green faces and two red. Then it’s shaken in a cup and thrown repeatedly onto a table. You’re invited to guess which of these three sequences results. If you guess wrong you lose $10; and if you guess right you win $30.

  1. RGRRR
  2. GRGRRR
  3. GRRRRR

Most people express the preferences 2, 1, 3, in that order. Red is less likely than green, but it predominates in all three sequences, so many subjects explain that sequence 2 is more “balanced,” and therefore more probable. In fact 65 percent of all subjects (excluding expert statisticians and people whose business is probability) show a strong propensity to vote for sequence 2, even when it’s pointed out explicitly that sequence 1 is just sequence 2 minus the first throw — so sequence 2 cannot be more likely!

“The longer the sequence, the less probable it is, independently of its being ‘balanced’ or ‘unbalanced,'” writes Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini in Inevitable Illusions. “This shows how resistant certain cognitive illusions are. Many other more complex examples have been advanced, and these show that even professional statisticians are sometimes subject to the same illusion.”

| Science & Math

Reunion

I was just researching wartime superstitions and came across this striking anecdote. Major Hubert Knilans was an American bomber pilot who flew with the No. 619 Squadron in the RAF during World War II. As he was climbing to cruising altitude one evening, “The upper sky before me was still somewhat lighted. A figure of a woman several thousand feet high slowly emerged into my startled view.”

He realized she had the face of a young woman he’d loved but who had died suddenly of pneumonia some years earlier. “She had a slight smile on her lips as I flew towards her. The vision slowly melted into the darkening sky around us.”

He says he was “a bit uneasy” over this vision, uncertain “if she had appeared to reassure me that she would keep me from harm or if she was welcoming me into her world of the hereafter.”

Apparently it was the former — he finished the mission successfully and wrote up the encounter in his private memoir A Yank in the RCAF.

| Oddities

Head Over Heels

https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/4574320
Image: John Allan

In his 1703 Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, Martin Martin describes an alarming tradition concerning a beetling rock formation in St. Kilda:

In the face of the rock, south from the town, is the famous stone, known by the name of the mistress-stone; it resembles a door exactly; and is in the very front of this rock, which is twenty or thirty fathom [120-180 feet, 37-55 meters] perpendicular in height, the figure of it being discernible about the distance of a mile; upon the lintel of this door, every bachelor-wooer is by an ancient custom obliged in honour to give a specimen of his affection for the love of his mistress, and it is thus; he is to stand on his left foot, having the one half of his sole over the rock, and then he draws the right foot further out to the left, and in this posture bowing, he puts both his fists further out to the right foot; and then after he has performed this, he has acquired no small reputation, being always after it accounted worthy of the finest mistress in the world: they firmly believe that this achievement is always attended with the desired success.

“This being the custom of the place, one of the inhabitants very gravely desired me to let him know the time limited by me for trying of this piece of gallantry before I design’d to leave the place, that he might attend me,” he added. “I told him this performance would have a quite contrary effect upon me, by robbing me both of my life and mistress at the same moment.”

| Society

Literally

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Reigate_Puzzle_by_William_Henry_Hyde_2.jpg

As Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1893 story “The Adventure of the Reigate Squire” begins, Sherlock Holmes is recuperating after the unspecified-but-apparently-quite-taxing case of the “Netherlands-Sumatra company,” which left him lying exhausted in the Hotel Dulong in Lyons. Watson writes:

The triumphant issue of his labours could not save him from reaction after so terrible an exertion, and at a time when Europe was ringing with his name, and when his room was literally ankle-deep with congratulatory telegrams, I found him prey to the blackest depression.

Leslie S. Klinger’s New Annotated Sherlock Holmes includes this droll footnote:

Carol P. Woods calculates that to fill the average French hotel room to ‘ankle-deep’ would require 10,741 crumpled telegrams; and she muses that Holmes’s illness was caused not entirely by the exertions put forth in the Netherlands-Sumatra case but also by the telegram-crumpling itself, which would have required slightly over 179 hours of opening, reading, crumpling, and tossing.

| Literature

Eventful

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Letizia_Ramolino.jpg

Letizia Ramolino was born in 1750. In her 85 years of life she gave birth to Napoleon Bonaparte, saw the French monarchy collapse, witnessed the French Revolution, and saw her son crowned emperor. Then she saw his death, the collapse of his empire, and the restoration of the monarchy.

She died in 1836, 15 years after her most famous son.

| History

Three Predictions

In Season 8, Episode 7 of Penn & Teller’s magic competition show Fool Us, magician Hans Petter Secker appears to predict the outcome of three successive rounds of rock-paper-scissors, though Secker oversees the game remotely from Norway and the players are invited to exchange items before each round. How is this accomplished?

Click for Answer
| Entertainment · Science & Math