Podcast Episode 287: The Public Universal Friend
After a severe fever in 1776, Rhode Island farmer’s daughter Jemima Wilkinson was reborn as a genderless celestial being who had been sent to warn of the coming Apocalypse. But the general public was too scandalized by the messenger to pay heed to the message. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the story of the Public Universal Friend and the prejudiced reaction of a newly formed nation.
We’ll also bid on an immortal piano and puzzle over some Icelandic conceptions.
Disharmony
Dutch writer Gerard Nolst Trenité’s 1920 poem “The Chaos” is a polemic on the senselessness of English pronunciation:
Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.
I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.
Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word.
Sword and sward, retain and Britain
(Mind the latter how it’s written).
Made has not the sound of bade,
Say–said, pay–paid, laid but plaid.
Reflections
Maxims of Goethe:
- When a rainbow has lasted as long as a quarter of an hour we stop looking at it.
- Researching into nature we are pantheists, writing poetry we are polytheists, morally we are monotheists.
- Considered historically, our good points appear in a moderate light, our faults excuse themselves.
- To do well you need talent, to do good you need means.
- For surely everyone only hears what he understands.
- If you miss the first buttonhole, you can’t ever get fully buttoned up.
- You really only know when you know little; doubt grows with knowledge.
- People think one ought to be busy with them when one isn’t busy with oneself.
- Acumen is least likely to desert clever men when they are in the wrong.
- One doesn’t find frogs wherever there is water, but there is water where you hear frogs.
- Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but not more interesting than contemplating.
- Everyone manages to have just about enough strength left to act according to his convictions.
- Let memory fail as long as our judgment remains intact when needed.
- Dirt glitters when the sun happens to shine.
- Beauty can never be clear about itself.
- Mysteries do not as yet amount to miracles.
“There are people who ponder about their friends’ shortcomings: there’s nothing to be gained by that. I have always been on the lookout for the merits of my opponents, and this has been rewarding.”
Stop
“The actual building of roads devoted to motor cars is not for the near future, in spite of many rumors to that effect.” — Harper’s Weekly, Aug. 2, 1902
“That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical character have been introduced.” — Scientific American, Jan. 2, 1909
The Skynet Series
In August 2016 artist Patrick Shearn installed a 15,000-square-foot kinetic sculpture overnight in Los Angeles’ Pershing Square. Inspired by schools of fish and murmurations of starlings, Shearn suspended two layers of holographic mylar streamers across the square to make large movements of air visible both to pedestrians and to occupants of the surrounding buildings. He’s followed it up with similar sculptures around the world.
Full Speed Ahead
I just liked this — during World War I, the British painted false bow waves on the sides of their transport ships to deceive German submarines as to their speed.
From The Times History of the War, 1917.
Manly Faces
In studying the attractiveness of human facial features, University of St Andrews psychologist David Perrett found that femininity in female face shape was preferred across cultures and by both men and women. Surprisingly, he found that masculinity in male faces makes them less attractive — in fact, people prefer male faces with a slightly feminized shape. Evaluators said that images of male faces that had been artificially masculinized looked less kind, less emotional, colder, less honest, less cooperative, and less likely to be a good parent. Feminization of male faces had the opposite effect.
This has some basis in real life, where men with more masculine faces show more aggressive and more uncooperative behavior:
Men with masculine face proportions commit more fouls in ice-hockey games and end up with a greater number of time-out penalties than men with more feminine facial proportions. Off the pitch, in an experimental set-up in which players can gain resources, defend them, and steal from others, men with masculine facial proportions choose to retaliate aggressively when other players steal from them and then to steal right back. In contrast, men with feminine facial proportions are more likely to build defences against further infringement. Furthermore, men with high testosterone (that is, those likely to have a masculine facial appearance) have more troubled relationships, and show increased rates of infidelity, violence, and divorce. Masculine males, it seems, are more likely to behave like cads than be good dads.
Men with masculine features do tend to be perceived as stronger and more dominant, and they do tend to be physically strong. Some studies have found a preference for a slight degree of masculinity, but this effect is neither dramatic nor consistent. And “no one has found an overall preference for a high degree of facial masculinity.”
(From Perrett’s 2010 book In Your Face: The New Science of Human Attraction.)
Castaway Depots
Following a series of shipwrecks in the 19th century, the government of New Zealand began to establish huts on remote subantarctic islands for the use of castaways, who otherwise might die of starvation or exposure.
The depots were stocked with firewood, rations, clothing, hunting and fishing equipment, medicine, and matches. Some included boat sheds, and steamers visited each island twice a year. To discourage opportunistic thieves, the government posted warnings on the provisions; one read, “The curse of the widow and fatherless light upon the man that breaks open this box, whilst he has a ship at his back.”
The project was discontinued after about 1927 as radio technology improved and the old clipper route fell out of use, but the depots were proving their value as late as 1908, when 22 crewmembers from the French barque President Félix Faure were shipwrecked in the Antipodes Islands. A depot there helped to sustain them until they could signal a passing warship.
Unquote
“It has always puzzled me that so many religious people have taken it for granted that God favors those who believe in him. Isn’t it possible that the actual God is a scientific God who has little patience with beliefs founded on faith rather than evidence?” — Raymond Smullyan