The Smithy Code

In deciding a plagiarism case against author Dan Brown in 2006, British justice Peter Smith handed down a peculiar judgment: Certain letters in the text had been italicized with no explanation. Apparently inspired by Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code, Smith had hidden a message in the text.

The judgment included the sentence “The key to solving the conundrum posed by this judgment is in reading HBHG and DVC.” In context, those abbreviations refer to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, the book that Brown had been accused of plagiarizing, and The Da Vinci Code.

“I can’t discuss the judgement, but I don’t see why a judgement should not be a matter of fun,” Smith had said in handing down the opinion, which found Brown not guilty. He promised to confirm any correct solution.

He offered enough hints to reporters that Guardian media journalist Daniel Tench eventually solved it: It was a polyalphabetic cipher using a keyword based on the Fibonacci sequence, yielding the plaintext “Jackie Fisher who are you? Dreadnought.” Jackie Fisher was a British admiral whom Smith admired. (The code is described here; Tench describes the solving here.)

The Court of Appeal later said that Smith “was prompted by the extensive use in [The Da Vinci Code] of codes, and no doubt by his own interest in such things, to incorporate a coded message in his judgment, on which nothing turns. The judgment is not easy to read or to understand. It might have been preferable for him to have allowed himself more time for the preparation, checking and revision of the judgment.”

January 7, 2020January 6, 2020 | Puzzles

Podcast Episode 279: The Champawat Tiger

At the turn of the 20th century, a rogue tiger terrorized the villages of Nepal and northern India. By the time British hunter Jim Corbett was called in, it had killed 434 people. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe Corbett’s pursuit of the elusive cat, and his enlightened efforts to address the source of the problem.

We’ll also revisit a Confederate spy and puzzle over a bloody ship.

See full show notes …

January 6, 2020January 13, 2020 | History · Podcast

Quick Thinking

Struck by a cyclone in a Samoan harbor in 1889, the U.S. warship Trenton had lost steam and rudder and was in danger of foundering on a reef when her navigator, Robert M.G. Brown, thought of an inventive solution: The crew climbed into the port rigging, where their massed bodies acted as a sail. The ship was able to avoid the reef and even approach the sinking sloop Vandalia to rescue her crew. Of the 450 men aboard Trenton, only one was lost.

January 5, 2020 | History · Technology

All Right Then

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Roland_Barthes.jpg — Image: Wikimedia Commons

From Roland Barthes’ 1975 autobiography:

I like: salad, cinnamon, cheese, pimento, marzipan, the smell of new-cut hay (why doesn’t someone with a ‘nose’ make such a perfume), roses, peonies, lavender, champagne, loosely held political convictions, Glenn Gould, too-cold beer, flat pillows, toast, Havana cigars, Handel, slow walks, pears, white peaches, cherries, colors, watches, all kinds of writing pens, desserts, unrefined salt, realistic novels, the piano, coffee, Pollock, Twombly, all romantic music, Sartre, Brecht, Verne, Fourier, Eisenstein, trains, Médoc wine, having change, Bouvard and Pécuchet, walking in sandals on the lanes of southwest France, the bend of the Adour seen from Doctor L.’s house, the Marx Brothers, the mountains at seven in the morning leaving Salamanca, etc.

I don’t like: white Pomeranians, women in slacks, geraniums, strawberries, the harpsichord, Miró, tautologies, animated cartoons, Arthur Rubinstein, villas, the afternoon, Satie, Bartók, Vivaldi, telephoning, children’s choruses, Chopin’s concertos, Burgundian branles and Renaissance dances, the organ, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, his trumpets and kettledrums, the politico-sexual, scenes, initiatives, fidelity, spontaneity, evenings with people I don’t know, etc.

January 3, 2020 | Literature

Nets and Tabs

A neat little fact pointed out by George Pólya and Donald Coxeter: If a convex polyhedron is unfolded and presented as a flat “net” fitted with tabs for gluing, as in a children’s activity book, the smallest number of tabs needed is just one less than the number of vertices in the assembled shape. The net above, with 7 tabs, can be assembled into a hexahedron with 8 vertices, and the one below, with 19 tabs, can be assembled into a dodecahedron with 20.

(Nick Lord, “Nets and Tabs,” Mathematical Gazette 73:464 [June 1989], 93-96.)

January 3, 2020January 2, 2020 | Science & Math

Moving Up

Architect Raymond Hood’s 1927 proposal “City of Towers” would have turned Manhattan into a forest of needles — it would encourage developers to release some land area to public ownership in return for permission to build higher:

Whole blocks would soon develop of their own accord, where two or three towers would provide more floor space than there is in the average block of today, and there would be ten times as much street area round about to take care of the traffic.

He surpassed that four years later with the “City Under a Single Roof,” in which each resident would spend as much time as possible in a single vertical building: “The Unit Building, covering three blocks of ground space, will house a whole industry and its auxiliary businesses. Only elevator shafts and stairways reach the street level. The first ten floors house stores, theaters and clubs. Above them is the industry to which the Building is devoted. Workers live on the upper floors.”

In a later proposal these enormous buildings merge into 38 “mountains,” positioned on alternate avenues at every 10th street. This would finally transcend the “congestion barrier”: The old bustle of the streets would now be moved permanently indoors.

January 2, 2020 | Society · Technology

Miwin’s Dice

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Miwin_Wuerfel_Titan.gif — Image: Wikimedia Commons

Physicist Michael Winkelmann devised these nontransitive dice in 1975.

Die I has sides 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 9.
Die II has sides 1, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9.
Die III has sides 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8.

Collectively the 18 faces bear the numbers 1 to 9 twice. The numbers on each die sum to 30 and have an arithmetic mean of 5.

But Die I beats Die 2, Die 2 beats Die 3, and Die 3 beats Die 1, each with probability 17/36.

January 2, 2020January 1, 2020 | Science & Math

The Minister’s Treehouse

In 1993, Tennessee minister Horace Burgess was praying when God told him, “If you build a treehouse, I’ll see that you never run out of material.” He set to work and spent the next 12 years building a house 97 feet tall, unofficially the largest in the world.

The house was closed in 2012 because it didn’t follow building and fire safety codes, and last October it burned to the ground. Burgess told the New York Times that in some ways this was a relief. Though it had been important to him for decades, “It’s always been a pain,” he said.

January 1, 2020 | Oddities

Self-Scrutiny

In 1937, after Jawaharlal Nehru had been elected president of the Indian National Congress for a second time, an author signing himself “Chanakya” published an article in Modern Review warning that power can corrupt an idealist:

The most effective pose is one in which there seems to be the least of posing, and Jawahar had learned well to act without the paint and powder of an actor … What is behind that mask of his? … what will to power? … He has the power in him to do great good for India or great injury … Men like Jawaharlal, with all their capacity for great and good work, are unsafe in a democracy. He calls himself a democrat and a socialist, and no doubt he does so in all earnestness, but every psychologist knows that the mind is ultimately slave to the heart and that logic can always be made to fit in with the desires and irrepressible urges of man. … Jawahar has all the makings of a dictator in him — vast popularity, a strong will, ability, hardness, an intolerance for others and a certain contempt for the weak and inefficient … In this revolutionary epoch, Caesarism is always at the door. Is it not possible that Jawahar might fancy himself as a Caesar? … He must be checked. We want no Caesars.

The author was later revealed to have been Nehru himself. “I wrote it for amusement, sent it to a woman friend who had it published,” he said. “Gandhi was even indignant, thinking some enemy was attacking me.”

Asked whether he thought the judgment correct, he said, “I suppose if a man can see such weaknesses inside himself, and discuss them, this is advance proof he will never succumb to them.”

January 1, 2020December 31, 2019 | History

Patriotism

On January 3, 1917, L.H. Luksich, a Coast Guard recruiter in New York, spotted a man wiping his muddy hands on an American flag and knocked him down. Luksich was not a native-born American; he was a naturalized citizen from Austria. The Treasury Department sent him an official commendation in which Assistant Secretary A.J. Peters wrote:

The department desires to commend you for the spirit of loyalty and patriotism which impelled your ready defense of the national colors, and in voicing this commendation I am not unmindful that you are a naturalized American citizen, for the reason that the incident is rendered the more conspicuous by this fact, and affords gratifying evidence of your assimilation of the spirit and best traditions of the country of your adoption.

The following year, a Montana mob demanded that local man E.V. Starr kiss the flag to prove his loyalty. He replied, “What is this thing anyway? Nothing but a piece of cotton with a little paint on it, and some other marks in the corner there. I will not kiss that thing. It might be covered with microbes.” Under a state law he was convicted of sedition, sentenced to 10–20 years at hard labor, and fined $500 plus court costs. Federal judge George M. Bourquin called the sentence “horrifying” and compared the mob to “heresy hunters” and “witch burners” but said he was powerless to intervene. Starr served 35 months before Governor Joseph M. Dixon commuted his sentence.

December 31, 2019December 31, 2019 | History · Society