Off Schedule

Mark Twain approaches the international date line, 1895:

Sept. 8. To-morrow we shall be close to the center of the globe … And then we must drop out a day — lose a day out of our lives, a day never to be found again. We shall all die one day earlier than from the beginning of time we were foreordained to die. We shall be a day behindhand all through eternity. We shall always be saying to the other angels, ‘Fine day today,’ and they will be always retorting, ‘But it isn’t to-day, it’s tomorrow.’ We shall be in a state of confusion all the time and shall never know what true happiness is.

Next Day. Sure enough, it has happened. … While we were crossing the 180th meridian it was Sunday in the stern of the ship where my family were, and Tuesday in the bow where I was. They were there eating the half of a fresh apple on the 8th, and I was at the same time eating the other half of it on the 10th — and I could notice how stale it was, already.

That’s from Following the Equator. “[F]ortunately the ships do not all sail west, half of them sail east. So there is no real loss. These latter pick up all the discarded days and add them to the world’s stock again; and about as good as new, too; for of course the salt water preserves them.”

August 21, 2024August 20, 2024 | Literature · Oddities

Evidence

It must, I think, be allowed, that if a very limited intelligence, whom we shall suppose utterly unacquainted with the universe, were assured, that it were the production of a very good, wise, and powerful Being, however finite, he would, from his conjectures, form beforehand a different notion of it from what we find it to be by experience; nor would he ever imagine, merely from these attributes of the cause, of which he is informed, that the effect could be so full of vice and misery and disorder, as it appears in this life. Supposing now, that this person were brought into the world, still assured that it was the workmanship of such a sublime and benevolent Being; he might, perhaps, be surprised at the disappointment; but would never retract his former belief, if founded on any very solid argument; since such a limited intelligence must be sensible of his own blindness and ignorance, and must allow, that there may be many solutions of those phenomena, which will for ever escape his comprehension. But supposing, which is the real case with regard to man, that this creature is not antecedently convinced of a supreme intelligence, benevolent, and powerful, but is left to gather such a belief from the appearances of things; this entirely alters the case, nor will he ever find any reason for such a conclusion. He may be fully convinced of the narrow limits of his understanding; but this will not help him in forming an inference concerning the goodness of superior powers, since he must form that inference from what he knows, not from what he is ignorant of. The more you exaggerate his weakness and ignorance, the more diffident you render him, and give him the greater suspicion that such subjects are beyond the reach of his faculties. You are obliged, therefore, to reason with him merely from the known phenomena, and to drop every arbitrary supposition or conjecture.

— David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 1779

August 20, 2024August 19, 2024 | Religion

Ironically Apt

In 2013, Japanese refrigeration company Fukushima Industries introduced a new mascot, a happy winged egg:

“I fly around on my awesome wings, patrolling supermarket showcases and kitchen refrigerators. I can talk to vegetables, fruit, meat, and fish and can check on their health! I was born in a Fukushima refrigerator! I love eating and I’m full of curiosity. I think of myself as kind, with a strong sense of justice, but my friends say I’m a bit of a klutz. But I’m always working hard to make myself shine!”

Unfortunately the company named the character “Fukuppy,” a combination of Fukushima and the English word happy.

After the name began to make news in English-speaking countries, Fukushima issued an apology and withdrew it.

August 20, 2024August 19, 2024 | Language

Catastrophe

In Seven Types of Ambiguity (1949), William Empson describes a particularly inscrutable English newspaper headline:

ITALIAN ASSASSIN BOMB PLOT DISASTER

Bomb and plot, you notice, can be either nouns or verbs, and would take kindly to being adjectives, not that they are anything so definite here. One thinks at first that there are two words or sentences, and a semicolon has been left out as in telegrams: ‘I will tell you for your penny about the Italian Assassin and the well-known Bomb Plot Disaster’; but the assassin, as far as I remember, was actually not an Italian; Italian refers to the whole aggregate, and its noun, if any, is disaster. Perhaps, by being so far separated from its noun, it gives the impression that the other words, too, are somehow connected with Italy; that bombs, plots, and disasters belong both to government and rebel in those parts; perhaps Italian Assassin is not wholly separate in one’s mind from the injured Mussolini.

In fact it’s not clear what the intended meaning had been. Empson says that the main rhythm conveys the sense “This is a particularly exciting sort of disaster, the assassin-bomb-plot type they have in Italy.” In The Wordsworth Book of Usage & Abusage (1995), Eric Partridge suggests that the writer may have meant ITALIAN DISASTER ASSASSIN’S BOMB-PLOT, “There has been in Italy a disaster caused by a bomb in an assassin’s plot.” But he agrees that “even after an exasperating amount of cogitation by the reader,” the meaning is unclear.

August 19, 2024August 19, 2024 | Language

Unquote

Someone said to Socrates that a certain man had grown no better by his travels.

‘I should think not,’ he said; ‘he took himself along with him.’

— Montaigne, Essays

August 19, 2024August 18, 2024 | Quotations · Society

Nontransitive Tennis

A problem from the 17th Irish Mathematical Olympiad, in 2004:

In a tennis tournament, each player played one match against each of the others. If each player won at least one match, show that there’s a group of three players A, B, C in which A beat B, B beat C, and C beat A.

	Select Click for Answer
This solution, by Titu Zvonaru, is given in the February 2008 issue of Crux Mathematicorum: Suppose that the most unfortunate player beat 3 others. Label the players so that this player is P₁ and that the players he beat follow him immediately in the lineup, here as P₂, P₃, and P₄. Since the minimum number of wins is 3, there must be some player P_k such that player P₂ beat player P_k and k is greater than 4 (otherwise player P₂ could have beaten only players P₃ and P₄, which would give him the minimum number of wins, contrary to our supposition). This means that player P_k must have beaten player P₁, and we can declare that A = P₁, B = P₂, and C = P_k. The same argument holds for any minimum number of wins. (It wouldn’t work if the minimum were zero, but we’ve been told that’s not the case.) 09/02/2024 Reader Robert Filman offers an inductive proof: The theorem is obviously true for n = 1, 2 and 3. (n=1 is not a possible situation, because everyone won a game, and with n=1, there are no games; with n=2, there’s only one game, so the loser of that game had no one to beat. With n=3, the conditions require A>B, B>C, and C>A.) Assume hypothesis is true for 1, 2, 3, 4, … n – 1 players, and prove it true for n players. Pick any player, A. Divide the players into the ones that beat A (set W) and the ones that lost to A (set L). L is not empty, because A beat someone. If any player x in L beat any player y in W, we have a triangle <a, x, y> If not, consider the set L. No one in L beat anyone outside of L. Every player in L’s win came against another player in L. But the size of L is at most n – 1. So by induction, the theorem is true for L. Hence, the theorem is always true. (Thanks, Robert.)

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August 18, 2024September 2, 2024 | Puzzles

Tense Trouble

Sydney is 14 hours ahead of New York, so when it’s noon in Sydney it’s 10 p.m. the previous day in New York.

Suppose you were broadcasting to the U.S. on a news-service hook-up from Sydney, and wanted to tell the American public about an explosion that occurred at 2:30 A.M. in a factory in Sydney.

Would you say ‘There will be an explosion in the Sydney Boiler Works at 2:30 A.M. tomorrow morning?’

Or would you say ‘There was an explosion in the Sydney Boiler Works at 2:30 A.M. tomorrow morning?’

That’s from Gerald Lynton Kaufman’s It’s About Time, from 1935. For the record, the Associated Press would dateline the story SYDNEY and refer to clock times in that location.

August 17, 2024August 16, 2024 | Language · Oddities

Discernment

The most successful critics are always scribbling things in their programs, largely because it gives them an important and industrious air. Also, it is interesting to try to figure out what you’ve written afterward. Last week, for instance, I made a very helpful note during the second act of a drama called ‘They Walk Alone.’ ‘Lanchstr get face stuck 1 these nights awful if,’ it seemed to say.

— Wolcott Gibbs, “The Theatre,” New Yorker, Jan. 4, 1941

August 16, 2024August 16, 2024 | Entertainment

To the Point

In What a Word!, his 1936 examination of English usage, A.P. Herbert takes up a letter written in “officese”:

Madam,
We are in receipt of your favour of the 9th inst. with regard to the estimate required for the removal of your furniture and effects from the above address to Burbleton, and will arrange for a Representative to call to make an inspection on Tuesday next, the 14th inst., before 12 noon, which we trust will be convenient, after which our quotation will at once issue.

He reduces this to:

Madam,
We have your letter of May 9th requesting an estimate for the removal of your furniture and effects to Burbleton, and a man will call to see them next Tuesday forenoon if convenient, after which we will send the estimate without delay.

This shortens the letter from 66 words to 42. Then he cuts it again, to 35 words, or 157 letters against the original 294, a savings of nearly 50 percent:

Madam,
Thank you for your letter of May 9th. A man will call next Tuesday, forenoon, to see your furniture and effects, after which, without delay, we will send our estimate for their removal to Burbleton.

In a large firm, he estimates, cutting “verbose and indolent, obscure, inelegant, and time-devouring monkey-talk” could save a week’s work for two typists.

Elsewhere he considers a memo that reads “Hot-Water Bottles: With reference to the above matter I should like an opportunity of discussing same with you.” The improvement he suggests is “Could we, please, have a talk about Hot-Water Bottles?”

August 16, 2024August 16, 2024 | Language