On a regular 8 × 8 chessboard, a wandering knight can visit each square once and then return to his starting square. Show that he can’t do this on an m × n board if m and n are both odd.
Home Again
Latin Proverbs
Nullus agenti dies longus est.
No day is long for the person who is active. (Seneca)
Omnibus in rebus gravis est inceptio prima.
In all things the first undertaking is hard. (Anonymous)
Formosos saepe inveni pessimos, et turpi facie multos cognovi optimos.
I have often discovered beautiful people to be the worst, and I have discovered many fine people with unpleasant appearance. (Phaedrus)
Mendaci homini, ne verum quidem dicenti, credere solemus.
We do not usually believe an untruthful man, even when he is telling the truth. (Cicero)
In bibliothecis loquuntur defunctorum immortales animae.
Immortal spirits of the dead speak in libraries. (Pliny the Elder)
Plures amicos mensa quam mens concipit.
A person’s table attracts more friends than his mind. (Publilius Syrus)
Propositum mutat sapiens, at stultus inhaeret.
A wise man changes his proposal, but a stupid man clings to it. (Petrarch)
Nihil recte sine exemplo docetur aut discitur.
Nothing is rightly taught or learned without examples. (Columella)
Tranquillas etiam naufragus horret aquas.
The shipwrecked man is afraid even of quiet waters. (Ovid)
Homicidium, cum admittunt singuli, crimen est; virtus vocatur cum publice geritur.
When individuals commit it, murder is a crime; it is called a virtue when it is done publicly. (Cyprian)
Omne ignotum pro magnifico est.
Everything unknown is considered to be magnificent. (Tacitus)
Black and White
Turnabout
During the second assault on Beaumont-Hamel in November 1916, British Second Lieutenant George Edwards was ordered to capture a German battalion headquarters. The fog was so thick that Edwards managed to surround the Germans, and their commanding officer and 300 men surrendered when they were told that strong reinforcements were on the way. When the reinforcements didn’t materialize, though, it became clear that Edwards’ platoon was in fact badly outnumbered.
The German Commanding Officer told him [Edwards] quite nicely and politely that the position was reversed and that he and his men were now the prisoners. There was nothing for it but to submit and Edwards accompanied the C.O. down into the dugout. Here he was given a drink, treated with every consideration and even invited to look through the periscope — a huge affair which gave its owners a commanding view of the surrounding country.
It was then, the fog having lifted somewhat, that Edwards spotted the arrival of the long expected reinforcements. Not to be outdone in courtesy by his German hosts he begged them to consider themselves once more as his prisoners and, as such, to accompany him to the surface. This they did, only to find on arrival that they were called upon to surrender for a third time — on this occasion by a chaplain and a party of Dublin Fusiliers.
“Edwards went up to the Chaplain to explain the situation; the Chaplain promptly knocked him down and disappeared into the fog with his captives.”
(From Richard van Emden, Meeting the Enemy: The Human Face of the Great War, 2013.)
Fire and Water
I find this hard to believe. In Creature From the Black Lagoon, there’s a scene in which the creature attacks Whit Bissell and he hits it with a lantern. Wreathed in flames, it dives into the water. Ben Chapman, who played the creature, says that he was never set afire for the scene: “It was just going through the motions where he hits me and I start patting myself like I’m on fire and dive off. Then they bring a stunt double in. He would watch the film and the way I’m moving. When he did it he had an asbestos suit on. When it was time, they lit [the suit] and he went through the motions putting out the flames and dive off. They took that and superimposed it over me.”
John Johnson confirms this in Cheap Tricks and Class Acts, his history of the special effects of 1950s monster movies: “Chapman was never actually set on fire … either onboard the ship or as he jumped into the water. What the effects team did was to superimpose footage of Al Wyatt, a specialist in fire stunts, directly over Chapman. Wyatt, wearing an asbestos suit, roughly imitated the movements of Chapman. Only the fire on Wyatt’s suit was superimposed over the Chapman footage.”
Chapman says, “Next time you watch the movie, when you get to that scene, hit the remote button to make it slow, you can see that the flames are superimposed on top of me. The burning comes from inside out. When it is superimposed they lay it on top of you and if you look very closely you can see I’m not on fire and that it’s superimposed. Rock Hudson’s double did that because Rock and I were good friends. As a matter of fact, Rock and I were the same identical size.”
Johnson calls this “[p]erhaps the most undetectable example of superimposure seen during the fifties monster craze.”
In Common
In his 1991 book Human Universals, American anthropologist Donald Brown listed “features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exception”:
- fear of death
- tickling
- baby talk
- territoriality
- rites of passage
- hairstyles
- belief in supernatural
- dance
- containers
- jokes
- shame
- turn-taking
- weapons
- myths
- musical variation
The whole list is here. “We can look forward to the time when a great many cultural features are traced beyond the time and place of their invention to the specific features of human nature that gave rise to them,” he wrote. “The study of human universals will be an important component of that task.”
(Donald E. Brown, “Human Universals, Human Nature & Human Culture,” Daedalus 133:4 [Fall 2004], 47-54.)
The Letters of Utrecht
Utrecht contains a poem. Each Saturday at 1 p.m. a letter is hewn into another cobblestone in a line along a central thoroughfare:
You have to begin somewhere to give the past its place, the present matters ever less. The further you are, the better. Continue now, leave your footprints. Forget the flash, in which you may exist, the world is your map.
Written by a succession of poets from the city’s poetry guild, the poem grows by about 5 meters a year, and it takes about 3 years to publish a sentence.
As a theme and as an undertaking, the project appeals specifically to the passing of time and the benefit of future generations. Its creators have linked it explicitly to the 10,000-year clock being built in Texas’ Sierra Diablo Mountain Range and the 7,000 oak trees planted in Kassel, Germany, by artist Joseph Beuys. Each cobblestone is sponsored by a citizen, often to commemorate a milestone such as a birthday, anniversary, or marriage.
If the funding continues, the poem will grow forever. In time the line of cobblestones will itself describe a U and a T in the city’s center, and the residents in that time (the year 2350) can decide where it goes after that.
Demonstration
Royal Air Force pilot Alan Pollock was disappointed that no aerial displays had been planned to mark the RAF’s semicentennial in April 1968. So he performed one himself: He took off in an unauthorized Hawker Hunter from RAF Tangmere in Sussex and flew to London, where he circled the Houses of Parliament three times, dipped his wings over the RAF Memorial, and then found himself facing an unexpected landmark:
Until this very instant I’d had absolutely no idea that, of course, Tower Bridge would be there. It was easy enough to fly over it, but the idea of flying through the spans suddenly struck me. I had just ten seconds to grapple with the seductive proposition which few ground attack pilots of any nationality could have resisted. My brain started racing to reach a decision. Years of fast low-level strike flying made the decision simple.
He flew between the spans, becoming the first pilot to do so in a jet aircraft. He buzzed three more airfields before returning to his base, where he was promptly arrested. But rather than face a court-martial he was quietly invalided out of the RAF on medical grounds — the government didn’t want to bring any more attention to the stunt.
(Thanks, Scott.)
Unquote
“It is always easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.” — Alfred Adler
“Idealism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem.” — John Galsworthy
Podcast Episode 258: The First Great Train Robbery
In 1855 a band of London thieves set their sights on a new target: the South Eastern Railway, which carried gold bullion to the English coast. The payoff could be enormous, but the heist would require meticulous planning. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the story of the first great train robbery, one of the most audacious crimes of the 19th century.
We’ll also jump into the record books and puzzle over a changing citizen.