Apparition

four vagabonds

Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, John Burroughs, and Harvey Firestone used to take a camping trip each summer, calling themselves the Four Vagabonds. Ford liked to tell a story about stopping at a service station to replace a headlight:

He claimed to have said to the attendant, ‘By the way, you might be interested to hear that the man who invented this lamp is sitting out there in my car.’

‘You don’t mean Thomas Edison?’ the man gasped.

‘Yes, and, incidentally, my name is Henry Ford.’

‘Do tell! Good to meet you, Mr. Ford!’

Noting the brand of tire in the service station’s racks, Ford added, ‘And one of the other men in the car makes those tires — Firestone.’

The attendant’s jaw dropped. Then he saw John Burroughs with his flowing beard and his voice became skeptical: ‘Look here, mister, if you tell me that the old fellow with the whiskers out there is Santa Claus, I’m going to call the sheriff.’

(From Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Fords: An American Epic, 2002. Thanks, Bill.)

| Technology

Hooky

In 1911 William Howard Taft escaped the White House:

In the face of a driving rain the president and Mrs. Taft at 4:30 o’clock this afternoon left the White House, dodging the guardian, Major Butt, and the secret service men, and for two hours tramped together through the streets, dropping in at the homes of friends to wish them the compliments of the season.

Reportedly Calvin Coolidge also walked Washington with a single Secret Service guard in the 1920s, his identity “often … never suspected”:

One story had it that on an icy Winter’s day pedestrians on a downtown street noticed a thin man without an overcoat, gazing intently into a restaurant window where a girl was busily turning griddle cakes. As one passerby was pitying him for his apparent cold and hunger, the man turned and walked rapidly away, followed by another man in a greatcoat. The thinly clad one was the President.

(From Richard J. Ellis, Presidential Travel, 2008.)

| History · Society

Grice’s Maxims

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Watrous_discussion.jpg

What rules underlie natural conversation? In a lecture at Harvard in 1967, British philosopher H.P. Grice set out to specify them using a mathematical approach, as Euclid had done in plane geometry. First, he said, the participants in a conversation follow a Cooperative Principle:

Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.

Then he derived more specific principles under four headings:

  • Quantity
    1. Make your contribution as informative as is required.
    2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
  • Quality
    1. Try to make your contribution one that is true.
    2. Do not say what you believe to be false.
    3. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
  • Relation
    1. Be relevant.
  • Manner
    1. Be perspicuous.
    2. Avoid obscurity of expression.
    3. Avoid ambiguity.
    4. Be brief.
    5. Be orderly.

These are useful, but they’re not axioms. “[I]t is possible to engage in a genuine and meaningful conversation and yet fail to observe one or more of the maxims Grice listed,” writes Stanford mathematician Keith Devlin. “The maxims seem more a matter of an obligation of some kind.” In Grice’s own words, “I would like to be able to think of the standard type of conversational practice not merely as something which all or most do in fact follow, but as something which it is reasonable for us to follow, which we should not abandon.”

(Keith Devlin, “What Will Count as Mathematics in 2100?”, in Bonnie Gold and Roger A. Simons, eds., Proof & Other Dilemmas: Mathematics and Philosophy, 2008.)

| Science & Math · Society

Creed

In 1903, the Lexington, Ky., Blue-Grass Blade invited its readers to contribute to a feature titled “Why I Am an Atheist.” Twenty-three-year-old Minnie Parrish of Leonard, Texas, sent this response:

Why Am I an Atheist

Because it has dawned upon me that it is right to be so, and upon investigation I find no real evidence of the divine origin of the scriptures. And because I cannot, as a refined and respectable woman, take to my bosom as a daily guide a book of such low morals and degrading influences. Written by a lot of priests, I cannot accept a salvation that is based wholly upon the dreams of an ancient and superstitious people, with no proof save blind faith.

Everything that so many people think transpires from the supernatural, and many things that would really perplex the average mind, have a natural and material foundation in the workings of the human mind; that is, things that are not connected with our solar system.

It is ignorance of the scientific working of their own natures and mind that keep so much ‘mystery’ in the air; and as long as there is a mystery afloat the people will ascribe it to the supernatural.

I am an Atheist because I know the Bible will not do to depend upon. I have tried it, and found it wanting.

In fact, I found in the scriptures the origin of woman’s slayer, and that it was one of God’s main points to oppress women and keep them in the realms of ignorance.

I am in the ranks of Liberalism because of its elevating principles, its broad road to freedom of thought, speech, and investigation.

MINNIE O. PARRISH

She went on to become the first female doctor to practice in North Texas.

(From Letters of Note.)

| Religion

Float Like a Butterfly

ali star

Muhammad Ali’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is the only one not set in the pavement — it hangs on a wall near the entrance to the Dolby Theatre.

When he accepted the honor in 2002, Ali said, “I bear the name of our beloved Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, and it is impossible that I allow people to trample over his name.”

(Thanks, Eloy and Alejandro.)

| Trivia

The Scenic Route

https://www.loc.gov/item/2004633094/

G.E. Bula devised this map in 1908 (click to enlarge it):

This unique map will make a lasting impression for good on all who study it. The names of states, towns, railroads, lakes, rivers and mountains are all significant. A copy of this map should be in every home, hotel, railroad station, and public place. It makes an interesting study for school children, both in the public and Sunday schools. It will cause many a one to leave the Great Destruction Route and finish his journey on the Great Celestial Route. Price 35 cents.

The Great Celestial Route leads from Decisionville through the states of Righteousness, Sacrifice and Service to the Celestial City via Prayerview, Peacedale, Purity Falls, and Goodhope. It is straight and, presumably, narrow. Wander slightly off the path and you can visit Hypocrisy Heights, Slumberfield, Masquerade, and Theaterburg, and further afield you’ll find Cigaretteville, Moonshine Hollow, Morphine Castle, and Wine Heights.

The bad road seems much more popular than the good one.

(From the Library of Congress.)

| Society

Time Pyramid

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zeitpyramide_2013.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Manfred Laber’s public art piece in Wemding, Germany, doesn’t look much like a pyramid yet. That’s because a new concrete block is laid only every 10 years; the structure was begun in 1993 and will be completed in the year 3183, when the 120th block is placed at the top.

Altogether that’s 1,200 years, the town’s age when Laber conceived the project and laid its foundation.

| Art

Turán’s Brick Factory Problem

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zarankiewicz_K4,7.svg

During World War II, Hungarian mathematician Pál Turán was forced to work in a brick factory. His job was to push a wagonload of bricks along a track from a kiln to storage site. The factory contained several kilns and storage sites, with tracks criss-crossing the floor among them. Turán found it difficult to push the wagon across a track crossing, and in his mind he began to consider how the factory might be redesigned to minimize these crossings.

After the war, Turán mentioned the problem in talks in Poland, and mathematicians Kazimierz Zarankiewicz and Kazimierz Urbanik both took it up. They showed that it’s always possible to complete the layout as shown above, with the kilns along one axis and the storage sites along the other, each group arranged as evenly as possible around the origin, with the tracks running as straight lines between each possible pair. The number of crossings, then, is

\displaystyle \mathrm{cr}\left ( K_{m,n} \right ) \leq \left \lfloor \frac{n}{2} \right \rfloor \left \lfloor \frac{n-1}{2} \right \rfloor \left \lfloor \frac{m}{2} \right \rfloor \left \lfloor \frac{m-1}{2} \right \rfloor ,

where m and n are the number of kilns and storage sites and \displaystyle \left \lfloor \right \rfloor denotes the floor function, which just means that we take the greatest integer less than the value in brackets. In the case of 4 kilns and 7 storage sites, that gives us

\displaystyle \left \lfloor \frac{7}{2} \right \rfloor \left \lfloor \frac{7-1}{2} \right \rfloor \left \lfloor \frac{4}{2} \right \rfloor \left \lfloor \frac{4-1}{2} \right \rfloor = 18 ,

which is the number of crossings in the diagram above.

Is that the best we can do? No one knows. Zarankiewicz and Urbanik thought that their formula gave the fewest possible crossings, but their proof was found to be erroneous 11 years later. Whether a factory can be designed whose layout contains fewer crossings remains an open problem.

| Science & Math