Chutzpah

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Conf%C3%A9rence-d%C3%A9bat_de_Jean-Yves_Le_Drian,_ministre_de_la_D%C3%A9fense,_et_John_Chambers_pr%C3%A9sident_du_Conseil_d%E2%80%99administration_de_Cisco_Systems_le_Mardi_18_octobre_2016_%C3%A0_L%27Ecole_polytechnique_(29792458914).jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Reader David Kastelan just let me know about this — in 2015 someone scammed €80 million from wealthy victims by donning a silicone mask to impersonate French defense minister Jean-Yves Le Drian. Ostensibly he was asking for financial help in raising ransoms for journalists held hostage by Islamists.

“Everything about the story is exceptional,” Le Drian’s lawyer told the BBC. “They dared to take on the identity of a serving French minister. Then they called up CEOs and heads of government round the world and asked for vast amounts of money. The nerve of it!”

Early contacts were made by phone, but eventually “Le Drian” appeared on Skype in a brief call from a poorly lit ministerial office. Many of the targets refused, but the Aga Khan lost €18 million, and an unnamed Turkish businessman lost at least €40 million.

No one knows who’s responsible, but one suspect is French-Israeli con man Gilbert Chikli. He’s currently in jail in Paris, and the calls have stopped, but it’s possible that other gang members are still at large.

| Crime · Hoaxes

Slime Computing

In 2012 computer scientist Andrew Adamatzky set a plasmodium of the slime mold Physarum polycephalum into a maze with an oat flake at its center. By following a gradient of chemo-attractants given off by the flake, the plasmodium was able to solve the maze in one pass, extending a protoplasmic tube to the target.

The original recording was made at one frame per five minutes; this playback is 25-30 frames per second.

(Andrew Adamatzky, “Slime Mold Solves Maze in One Pass, Assisted by Gradient of Chemo-Attractants,” IEEE Transactions on Nanobioscience 11:2 [2012], 131-134.)

| Science & Math

Unquote

“I once spent all day thinking without taking food and all night thinking without going to bed, but I found that I gained nothing from it. It would have been better for me to have spent the time in learning.” — Confucius

| Quotations

Thought

“It is interesting that most of the human race has a reserve of the enzyme necessary to render alcohol harmless to the body — as if nature meant us to drink alcohol, unlike animals to which alcohol is a poison.”

— BUPA News, 1982, quoted in Richard Gordon, Great Medical Mysteries, 2014

| Science & Math

Working Smarter

In 1947 two Harvard undergraduates, William Burkhart and Theodore Kalin, built a primitive machine for doing propositional logic. They had been taking a course in symbolic logic with Willard Van Orman Quine and were tired of solving problems with pencil and paper, so they set about making a machine that would do their homework automatically.

The result of their $150 investment was a small machine that could handle problems involving up to 12 terms in the propositional calculus. The “Kalin-Burkhart machine” marks a milestone in the development of logic machines, but working in the machine’s language is so laborious that using a pencil is faster.

“It is interesting to note that when certain types of paradoxes are fed to the Kalin-Burkhart machine it goes into an oscillating phase, switching rapidly back and forth from true to false,” noted Martin Gardner in Logic Machines and Diagrams (1958). “In a letter to Burkhart in 1947 Kalin described one such example and concluded, ‘This may be a version of Russell’s paradox. Anyway, it makes a hell of a racket.'”

| Technology

Showdown

An epic contest from the Annual Green Fair and South West Scythe Festival in Somerset, U.K., June 2010.

One commenter wrote, “Now we know why Death carries a Scythe, not a brushcutter.”

| Technology

There and Back

https://www.flickr.com/photos/lawa/1520399
Image: Flickr

One day his inventive eye fell on an old bicycle saddle and handlebars. Placing the handlebars at the back of the saddle in an upright position he created a bull’s head with horns. The illusion was striking and the virtuosity of the transformation conferred a kind of noisy notoriety on this Tête de taureau. When it was exhibited after the Liberation Picasso looked at it with an amused air. ‘A metamorphosis has taken place,’ he said to André Warnod, ‘but now I would like another metamorphosis to occur in the opposite direction. Suppose my bull’s head was thrown on the rubbish heap and one day a man came along and said to himself: “There’s something I could use as handlebars for my bicycle.” Then a double metamorphosis would have been achieved.’

— A. Vallentin, Picasso, 1963

| Art

Decomposition

This verse is known as “Lord Macaulay’s Last Riddle.” Lord Macaulay was Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), though his authorship of the riddle is uncertain. What’s the answer?

Let us look at it quite closely,
‘Tis a very ugly word,
And one that makes one shudder
Whenever it is heard.

It mayn’t be very wicked;
It must be always bad,
And speaks of sin and suffering
Enough to make one mad.

They say it is a compound word,
And that is very true;
And then they decompose it,
Which, of course, they’re free to do.

If, of the dozen letters
We take off the first three,
We have the nine remaining
As sad as they can be;

For, though it seems to make it less,
In fact it makes it more,
For it takes the brute creation in,
Which was left out before.

Let’s see if we can mend it —
It’s possible we may,
If only we divide it
In some new-fashioned way.

Instead of three and nine, then,
Let’s make it four and eight;
You’ll say it makes no difference,
At least not very great;

But only see the consequence!
That’s all that need be done
To change this mass of sadness
To unmitigated fun.

It clears off swords and pistols
Revolvers, bowie-knives,
And all the horrid weapons
By which men lose their lives;

It wakens holier voices —
And now joyfully is heard
The native sound of gladness
Compressed into one word!

Yes! Four and eight, my friends!
Let that be yours and mine,
Though all the hosts of demons
Rejoice in three and nine.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Inflated Rhetoric

Swedish graffiti artist Daniel Fahlström makes trompe l’oeil murals of mylar balloon letters — there are no balloons, just the two-dimensional painted surface, but the effect is stunningly deceiving.

“I’ve seen a lot of reactions from people, and the funniest one was when this old lady that wasn’t wearing her glasses, she was trying to go up and touch the balloons,” he told Business Insider. “That’s good if they think that’s real balloons. That’s my mission, to make them believe that.”

| Art

Van der Waerden’s Theorem

Number eight cells:

van der waerden's theorem 1

Now suppose we want to color each cell red or blue such that no three cells are in arithmetic progression — for example, we don’t want cells 1, 2, and 3 to be the same color, or 4, 6, and 8. With eight cells it’s possible to accomplish this:

van der waerden's theorem 2

But if we want to add a ninth cell we can’t avoid an arithmetic progression: If the ninth cell is blue then cells 1, 5, and 9 are evenly spaced, and if it’s red then cells 3, 6, and 9 are. Dutch mathematician B.L. van der Waerden found that there’s always such a limit: For any given positive integers r and k, there’s some number N such that if the integers {1, 2, …, N} are colored, each with one of r different colors, then there will be at least k integers in arithmetic progression whose elements are of the same color. Determining what this limit is (in this example it’s 9) is an open problem.

(Bonus: Alexej Kanel-Belov found this pretty theorem concerning divisibility of integer sums within an infinite grid — Martin J. Erickson, in Beautiful Mathematics, calls it a two-dimensional version of van der Waerden’s theorem.)

| Science & Math