The town of Glacier View, Alaska, doesn’t get dark enough for fireworks on the Fourth of July. So they drive cars off a cliff.
The Dilemma of Timeless Knowledge
- God timelessly believes K and is infallible.
- Nobody now can do anything about the fact that God timelessly believes K and is infallible.
- Nobody can do anything about the fact that if God timelessly believes K and is infallible, then A will kill B on Saturday (what is next Saturday to us).
- So nobody now can do anything about the fact that A will kill B on Saturday (what is next Saturday to us).
- So A will not kill B freely.
From Linda Zagzebski, Philosophy of Religion, quoted in W. Jay Wood, God, 2011.
The Motorist’s Complaint
There are 8 ways to fold a 2 × 2 map along its creases:
But no one knows how to calculate the number of ways that a larger map might be folded. Amazingly, the number of ways to fold an n × n map has been worked out only as high as 7 × 7:
1, 8, 1368, 300608, 186086600, 123912532224, 129950723279272
Via Fermat’s Library.
Better People
Horace Walpole on the preferability of animals’ companionship to that of humans:
“Sense and fidelity are wonderful recommendations; and when one meets with them, and can be confident that one is not imposed upon, I cannot think that the two additional legs are any drawback. At least I know that I have had friends who would never have vexed or betrayed me, if they had walked on all fours.”
(From a letter to the Earl of Strafford, Oct. 11, 1783.)
In a Word
philargyry
n. love of money
pismirism
n. hoarding of money; miserliness
ingordigious
adj. greedy, avaricious
pleonectic
adj. excessively covetous, avaricious, or greedy
Podcast Episode 255: Death on the Ice
In 1914, 132 sealers found themselves stranded on a North Atlantic icefield as a bitter blizzard approached. Thinly dressed and with little food, they faced a harrowing night on the ice. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the story of the Newfoundland sealing disaster, one of the most dramatic chapters in Canadian maritime history.
We’ll also meet another battlefield dog and puzzle over a rejected necklace.
The Cute Response
“Humans feel affection for animals with juvenile features,” noted Konrad Lorenz. “Large eyes, bulging craniums, retreating chins. Small-eyed, long-snouted animals do not elicit the same response.”
This induces people to care for small, cuddly animals. “And this has led some experts to argue that the entire phenomenon of pet-keeping is nothing more nor less than an elaborate case of social parasitism,” writes zoologist James Serpell. “Needless to say, this idea has done little to promote a positive view of pets or their owners. Rather, it creates the impression that pet-owners are the victims of some kind of bizarre affliction, and that dogs, cats and budgerigars are little different from body lice, fleas or tapeworms or, indeed, any other sort of parasitic organism.”
(From James Serpell, In the Company of Animals, 1986.)
When in Rome
In German East Africa during World War I, soldiers painted this pony to resemble one of the local zebras so it could be tethered in the open.
The Imperial War Museum adds, “Two white ponies behind anxiously await their makeovers.”
Invention
The job of creating voices for Munchkins and Winkies in The Wizard of Oz fell to vocal arranger Ken Darby. “In those days we didn’t have the technical facilities we have now, like speeding up tape,” he said. “I had to figure out how to make the Munchkins sound high-pitched”:
I worked it out mathematically, using a metronome. Then I went to the head of the sound department, Doug Shearer. I told him that if we could record at sixty feet per minute instead of the normal ninety feet per minute and if we sang at a slower pace in a different key, when we played it back at ninety it should sound right. He said there was no way to do that because we didn’t have a variable-speed recorder. Then he said he would try to manufacture a new gear for the sound-recording machine. And it worked. I had the singers sing very slowly and distinctly so the words would be clear when we played it back at a faster speed. Ding … Dong … the … witch … is … dead. When we played it back, it was a perfect one-fourth higher.
“None of the midgets did any of the singing. None of them could carry a tune.”
(From Aljean Harmetz, The Making of The Wizard of Oz, 1977.)
Good Faith
“Everyone believes in the normal law, the experimenters because they imagine that it is a mathematical theorem, and the mathematicians because they think it is an experimental fact.” — Gabriel Lippmann
(Thanks, Tom.)