dungeonable
adj. malicious, damnable; devilish
In a Word
Podcast Episode 250: The General Slocum
In 1904 a Manhattan church outing descended into horror when a passenger steamboat caught fire on the East River. More than a thousand people struggled to survive as the captain raced to reach land. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe the burning of the General Slocum, the worst maritime disaster in the history of New York City.
We’ll also chase some marathon cheaters and puzzle over a confusing speeding ticket.
A New Illusion
Get three empty matchboxes and put a weight in one of them. Lift the weighted box on its own, then put it down and lift all three boxes together. In tests by Isabel Won and her colleagues at Johns Hopkins University, 90 per cent of subjects who tried this said that the weighted box lifted on its own felt heavier than the three boxes lifted together.
“[T]he experience was so striking that subjects often spontaneously and astoundedly commented on its impossibility to the experimenter, and even requested to lift the objects again after the experiment was over,” the authors report. “Anecdotally, those subjects reported that the illusion persisted even during these repeated lifts, including when subjects placed all three boxes on their palm and then suddenly removed the two lighter boxes — distilling the phenomenon into a single impossible ‘moment’ wherein removing weight caused the sensation of adding weight.”
“We suggest that the space of impossible experiences is larger than has been appreciated, extending into a new sense modality. … Impossibility can not only be seen, but also felt.” See the paper for details.
(Thanks, Sharon.)
Mail Boat Jumpers
The homes around Wisconsin’s Geneva Lake receive their mail by boat, a tradition begun in 1916. While the boat travels at a steady 5 mph, a “jumper” must jump onto each dock, run to the mailbox, swap the outgoing mail with the incoming, and jump back on board before the boat has traveled out of reach.
They can accomplish all this in as little as 10 seconds — but a typical career also includes one fall into the lake.
The Bavinger House
Norman, Okla., got an architectural landmark in 1955 when architect Bruce Goff completed an “organic house” for artists Nancy and Eugene Bavinger. Surmounted by a logarithmic spiral upheld by a recycled oil field drill stem, the Bavinger House had no interior walls — each “room” was a saucer suspended from the ceiling, reached by a stairway from the ground floor, which was mostly water and plants. The residents hung their clothes on rotating rods in hanging copper closets, and the entire house was air-cooled.
The Bavingers began to charge visitors $1 to view the house, eventually raising $50,000 in this way. One tourist told them, “I couldn’t live in it, but I wish I could.” The house fell into an extended vacancy, though, and by the time the “home for a lover of plants” was demolished in 2016, it had “become as choked with vegetation as a lost temple in the jungle.”
Exercise
In his later years Lewis Carroll would while away sleepless hours by solving mathematical problems in his head. Eventually he published 72 of these as Pillow Problems (1893). “All of these problems I thought up in bed, solving them completely in my head, and I never wrote anything down until the next morning.” Can you solve this one?
Prove that 3 times the sum of 3 squares is also the sum of 4 squares.
Many-Sided Story
From Ed Southall’s Twitter feed, a polygon name builder:
A 55-sided figure is a pentacontapentagon; one with 79 sides is a heptacontaenneagon. A system exists to go even higher: A figure with 9,000 sides is an enakischiliagon, and one with a million is a megagon.
René Descartes suggested the 1,000-sided chiliagon as an example of a thing that can be considered without being explicitly imagined; one “does not imagine the thousand sides or see them as if they were present.” So the intellect is not dependent on imagination.
Shibboleths
In a 1954 essay, “The English Aristocracy,” Nancy Mitford observed that English class consciousness had permeated the language itself, so that using the wrong term betrayed a lack of breeding. She had been inspired by linguist Alan S.C. Ross, who distinguished upper-class (“U”) terms from those used by the middle class:
| U | Non-U |
| Bike or Bicycle | Cycle |
| Dinner jacket | Dress suit |
| Knave (cards) | Jack |
| Vegetables | Greens |
| Ice | Ice cream |
| Scent | Perfume |
| They’ve a very nice house | They have (got) a lovely home |
| Ill (in bed) | Sick (in bed) |
| Looking-glass | Mirror |
| Chimneypiece | Mantelpiece |
| Graveyard | Cemetery |
| Spectacles | Glasses |
| False teeth | Dentures |
| Die | Pass on |
| Mad | Mental |
| Jam | Preserve |
| Napkin | Serviette |
| Sofa | Settee or couch |
| Lavatory or loo | Toilet |
| Rich | Wealthy |
| Good health | Cheers |
| Lunch | Dinner (for midday meal) |
| Pudding | Sweet |
| Drawing-room | Lounge |
| Writing-paper | Note-paper |
| What? | Pardon? |
| How d’you do? | Pleased to meet you |
| Wireless | Radio |
| (School)master, mistress | Teacher |
Ross added, “It is solely by their language that the upper classes nowadays are distinguished since they are neither cleaner, richer, nor better-educated than anybody else.” Mitford said she’d written the essay “In order to demonstrate the upper middle class does not merge imperceptibly into the middle class.”
The essay touched off a vigorous national debate about English snobbery; Mitford’s essay was published in a 1956 book, Noblesse Oblige, to which John Betjeman contributed a mordant poem, “How to Get On in Society”:
Phone for the fish knives, Norman
As cook is a little unnerved;
You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes
And I must have things daintily served.
Are the requisites all in the toilet?
The frills round the cutlets can wait
Till the girl has replenished the cruets
And switched on the logs in the grate.
It’s ever so close in the lounge dear,
But the vestibule’s comfy for tea
And Howard is riding on horseback
So do come and take some with me
Now here is a fork for your pastries
And do use the couch for your feet;
I know that I wanted to ask you-
Is trifle sufficient for sweet?
Milk and then just as it comes dear?
I’m afraid the preserve’s full of stones;
Beg pardon, I’m soiling the doileys
With afternoon tea-cakes and scones.
(Alan S.C. Ross, “Linguistic Class-Indicators in Present-Day English.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 55:1 [1954], 20-56.)
Fitting
… is an 11-letter word that contains 11 curved lines and 11 straight lines.
A Rapid Sum
From Lewis Carroll’s diary, Feb. 5, 1856:
Varied the lesson at the school with a story, introducing a number of sums to be worked out. I also worked for them the puzzle of writing the answer to an addition sum, when only one of the five rows have been written: this … astonished them not a little.
He had started by writing an arbitrary number:
21879
Then he asked the students to call out a second five-digit number. Carroll added a third, the students shouted a fourth, and Carroll added a fifth and immediately wrote the sum:
21879 62593 37406 82527 + 17472 221877
How did he do this?