Oops

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_H._Seward_portrait_-_restoration.jpg

On Nov. 23, 1866, Secretary of State William Henry Seward inaugurated the first sustainable transatlantic telegraph line by sending a diplomatic cable. Seward’s message was a tidy 780 words, but he sent it using a Monroe cipher, which converted the text into groups of numbers. And the telegraph company stipulated that a coded message that used number groups had to spell out the numbers — so 387 was sent as THREE EIGHT SEVEN. Consequently Seward’s message expanded to 3,772 words. To add insult to injury, the Anglo-American Telegraph Company charged double, or $5 per word, for coded messages. Seward’s telegram ended up costing $19,540.40, more than three times his salary.

Seward refused to pay at first, but he lost a court fight. The editor of the New York Herald wrote sarcastically, “It is a shame for the United States government not to be able to pay its telegraph bills as promptly as a New York newspaper.”

(Ralph E. Weber, “Seward’s Other Folly: America’s First Encrypted Cable,” Studies in Intelligence 36 [1992], 105-109.) (Thanks, John.)

| History

Backwards and Forwards

The French acronym for NATO is OTAN (Organisation du traité de l’Atlantique nord).

11/08/2019 UPDATES:

Spanish yields the same acronym as French: Organizacion del Tratado Atlantico Norte. (Thanks, Marcial.)

The name of the standards organization ISO is not an acronym: “Because ‘International Organization for Standardization’ would have different acronyms in different languages (IOS in English, OIN in French), our founders decided to give it the short form ISO. ISO is derived from the Greek isos, meaning equal. Whatever the country, whatever the language, the short form of our name is always ISO.” (Thanks, John.)

Similarly, UTC doesn’t stand for anything. It was agreed as a common abbreviation by English speakers (who otherwise would use CUT, “coordinated universal time”) and French speakers (in place of TUC, temps universel coordonné). (Thanks, Scott.)

| Trivia

Everyday Heroes

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Postman%27s_Park_Wall_of_Heroes.JPG
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In Postman’s Park in the City of London, an array of ceramic tiles honor ordinary people who died saving the lives of others:

Elizabeth Boxall
Aged 17 of Bethnal Green
Who died of injuries received in trying to save a child from a runaway horse
June 20, 1888

David Selves aged 12
Off Woolwich supported his drowning playfellow and sank with him clasped in his arms.
September 12, 1886

James Hewers
On Sept 24 1878
Was killed by a train at Richmond in the endeavour to save another man

The Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice was conceived by painter and sculptor George Frederic Watts in 1887, but only four tiles were in place at his death in 1904, and even today two of the five planned rows remain empty. The most recent tile, the 54th, was added in 2009. The full list is here.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:George_Frederick_Simonds.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons
| Death · Society

Podcast Episode 271: The Fraudulent Life of Cassie Chadwick

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Bankers_Magazine/LFgmAQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA551

In 1902, scam artist Cassie Chadwick convinced an Ohio lawyer that she was the illegitimate daughter of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. She parlayed this reputation into a life of unthinkable extravagance — until her debts came due. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe Chadwick’s efforts to maintain the ruse — and how she hoped to get away with it.

We’ll also encounter a haunted tomb and puzzle over an exonerated merchant.

See full show notes …

| Crime · History · Podcast · Society

Misc Physics

1. An object’s motion can be described by derivatives and integrals of displacement. The first few derivatives — position, velocity, and acceleration — are familiar, but the succeeding ones have pleasing names: jerk, jounce (also known as snap), crackle, pop, lock, and drop.

The integrals of displacement are absement, absity, abseleration, abserk, and absounce. More here. (Thanks, Colin.)

2. The quarks now known as “bottom” and “top” were sometimes referred to initially as “beauty” and “truth.” Collider experiments designed to produce large numbers of B mesons are sometimes called “beauty factories.” (Thanks, Jackson.)

3. Reader Nick Ortenzio found this unexpectedly poignant quote in the Wikipedia article on false vacuum, from a paper in which Sidney Coleman and Frank De Luccia consider the prospect that our universe exists in an unstable bubble that might wink into a new state and annihilate us:

The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated.

| Science & Math

Lento

At a performance by an Italian string quartet, George Bernard Shaw’s companion remarked, “These men have been playing together for 12 years.”

Shaw said, “Surely we have been here longer than that.”

| Literature

Words to Remember

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sans_Forgetica_font_sample.jpg

Designed by a multidisciplinary team at Melbourne’s RMIT University, Sans Forgetica is a typeface that’s intended to reduce legibility, on the theory that the “desirable difficulty” of reading it will result in deeper processing and, ultimately, better retention.

The back-slanted, incomplete letters form a “simple puzzle” for the reader, RMIT lecturer Stephen Banham told the Washington Post last October. “It should be difficult to read but not too difficult. In demanding this additional act, memory is more likely to be triggered.”

The team say they’ve tested the font on university students and found that “Sans Forgetica broke just enough design principles without becoming too illegible and aided memory retention.” You can try it yourself — they’re offering a free download and a Chrome extension.

| Language · Science & Math

A Surprise First

https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=275931&picture=vatican-city-and-rome-skyline

The residents of Vatican City drink more wine per person than any other country, at least as of 2014 — 74 liters per year, or about 105 bottles, twice the amount drunk by the average person in France and three times that in the U.K.

The state’s tiny size — just 800 people — means that such figures are easily skewed, and Vatican residents tend to be old, male, and highly educated and to eat in large groups, all of which can contribute to higher wine consumption. (So does the use of ceremonial Communion wine.)

An overlooked additional factor: Wine sold in the Vatican supermarket is subject to a lower tax than in Italy — which attracts customers from the broader vicinity and may drive up the numbers.

| Trivia