The Jankó Keyboard

Hungarian engineer Paul von Jankó offered this alternative to the traditional keyboard layout in 1882. Within each row, the notes ascend by whole steps, and each vertical column of identical-sounding keys is a half-step in pitch from its neighbors. This means that each chord and scale gets the same fingering regardless of key, and wide stretches aren’t as necessary. The example above has four rows, but the full Jankó keyboard has six:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Janko_keyboard.svg

This is all appealingly sensible, but music educators were skeptical and performers were reluctant to learn the new fingerings, so manufacturers stayed away. Today it’s largely a curiosity.

| Art · Technology

Gregarious

A problem proposed by Ashay Burungale of Satara, Maharashtra, India, in the November 2008 issue of American Mathematical Monthly: In a certain town of population 2n + 1, all relations are reciprocal: If Person 1 knows Person 2, then Person 2 knows Person 1. For any set A that consists of n citizens, there’s some person among the remaining n + 1 who knows everyone in A. Prove that there’s some citizen of the town who knows all the others.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Ups and Downs

An Edinburgh startup called Gravitricity is hoping to create a “virtual battery” by hoisting and dropping weights in disused mine shafts. If the weights are hoisted when renewable energy is plentiful, and dropped when it’s expensive, then they can help to balance the energy grid with an efficient source of “gravity energy.”

Managing director Charlie Blair told the Guardian, “The beauty of this is that this can be done multiple times a day for many years, without any loss of performance. This makes it very competitive against other forms of energy storage — including lithium-ion batteries.”

Dropping 12,000 tonnes to a depth of 800 meters would produce enough electricity to power 63,000 homes for more than an hour. Oliver Schmidt of Imperial College London said, “I don’t expect Gravitricity to displace all lithium batteries on grids, but it certainly looks like a compelling proposition.”

(Via Tom Whitwell’s “52 Things I Learned in 2019.”)

| Science & Math · Technology

Turn, Turn, Turn

Austin game developer Frank Force has won the Neural Correlate Society’s 2019 Best Illusion of the Year Contest with this “dual axis illusion”:

“This spinning shape appears to defy logic by rotating around both the horizontal and vertical axis at the same time! To make things even more confusing, the direction of rotation is also ambiguous. Some visual cues in the video will help viewers change their perception.”

The top 10 finalists are here.

12/18/2019 UPDATE: Good heavens, people are making these things. Five years ago Bill Gosper created the Lissajoke ambiguous roller, which rolls in a perplexing way:

And reader Joe Kisenwether has rendered Force’s illusion in reality — here the shape on the left spins about a horizontal axis while the one on the right spins about the vertical one:

The same thing rendered more slowly:

(Thanks, Joe.)

| Oddities

A New Find

From Lee Sallows, a remarkable new self-inventorying list:

ONE A, ONE B, ONE C, ONE D, TWENTYEIGHT E, SEVEN F, FIVE G, FIVE H, EIGHT I, ONE J, ONE K, ONE L, ONE M, EIGHTEEN N, EIGHTEEN O, ONE P, ONE Q, FOUR R, TWO S, TEN T, FOUR U, FIVE V, FOUR W, ONE X, TWO Y, ONE Z

“I may be wrong, but I believe it to be the most concise self-descriptive (or ‘self-enumerating’) English pangram yet discovered, with as many as 12 of its 26 letters occurring just once.”

(Thanks, Lee!)

12/18/2019 UPDATE: We’ve learned that the same self-descriptive pangram had already been found in 1998 by Gilles Esposito-Farese, in collaboration with Éric Angelini and Nicolas Graner.

| Language

Now Showing

This is neat — Eric Harshbarger finds that a list of the 12 top-performing movies in the U.S. last weekend (Dec. 13-15, 2019) contains all 26 letters of the alphabet:

JUMANJI: THE NEXT LEVEL
FROZEN II
KNIVES OUT
RICHARD JEWELL
BLACK CHRISTMAS
FORD V FERRARI
QUEEN & SLIM
A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD
DARK WATERS
21 BRIDGES
MIDWAY
PLAYING WITH FIRE

The top 8 alone contain all the letters but P.

(Thanks, Eric.)

| Entertainment · Language

Podcast Episode 277: The Mad Trapper of Rat River

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

In the winter of 1931, a dramatic manhunt unfolded in northern Canada when a reclusive trapper shot a constable and fled across the frigid landscape. In the chase that followed the mysterious fugitive amazed his pursuers with his almost superhuman abilities. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe the hunt for the “Mad Trapper of Rat River.”

We’ll also visit a forgotten windbreak and puzzle over a father’s age.

See full show notes …

| Crime · History · Podcast

“A Rebus-Letter”

https://books.google.com/books?id=oWajwevvkDMC&pg=PA408

Mark Twain sent this letter to his wife and daughters from Montreal on Nov. 27, 1881. What does it mean?

Click for Answer
| Literature

False Features

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

Just before his death in 1702, butterfly collector William Charlton delivered an unusual specimen to London entomologist James Petiver. Petiver wrote, “It exactly resembles our English Brimstone Butterfly (R. Rhamni), were it not for those black spots and apparent blue moons on the lower wings. This is the only one I have seen.” Carl Linnaeus named it Papilio ecclipsis and included it in the 12th edition of his Systema Naturae in 1767.

It wasn’t until 1793 that Danish zoologist Johan Christian Fabricius discovered that the dark patches had been painted on — it was only an ordinary brimstone butterfly after all. The curator at the British Museum “indignantly stamped the specimen to pieces” at this news, but entomologist William Jones created two new replicas to commemorate the “Charlton Brimstones.”

| Hoaxes · Science & Math

Never Mind

On April 8, 1885, the St. Louis Evening Chronicle published an astonishing story — coal miner Tim Collins had broken into a forgotten cavern hewn by subterranean giants:

A large room, probably 65 by 100 feet in extent, showed itself dimly by the light of our tapers. It was about 20 or 25 feet from floor to ceiling, and had evidently been lighted from the top, though there were openings in the walls where, from appearances, great oaken blinds or doors had once been. These doors had rotted, and only small portions of them remained, small bits of which we chipped off with our knives as souvenirs of our visit. Further examination showed that this room had been used as a workshop but mechanics who had been at work long before Huram’s artificers hewed the architecture for Solomon’s temple. On each side near the walls, and also in the center, were found tables or benches where they had fashioned the work of their hands. These benches were of stone, and there were but few evidences of the character of work done. The wood that had been employed was damp, rotten and so covered with mold as to be almost indistinguishable in shape, and when touched, crumbled to dust. Tools were found on the benches, the handles of which had long since rotted away. But the tools themselves were in a good state of preservation and show that they were fashioned by master mechanics. A number of them were brought to the surface and are now exposed to the gaze of the curious.

The story drew worldwide attention for three days before it was revealed to be false — reporter J.W. Estes of the Moberly Daily Monitor had concocted it as a late April Fools’ Day hoax.

Collins was real enough — to keep off curiosity seekers he was forced to mount a sign at his mine’s entrance: NO BURRYIED SITY LUNATICKS ALOUD ON THESE PREMISES.

(From Kenneth L. Feder, Archaeological Oddities, 2019.)

| Hoaxes