Jones tells a mountain to hop into the sea and it does so. Has he performed a miracle?
Well, no, writes University of Birmingham philosopher George Chryssides. If Jones repeats his feat, then he’s revealed an underlying causal principle that’s amenable to study just like the rest of the natural world. If he doesn’t repeat the feat, then there’s no support for the idea of a link between his command and the mountain’s movement — we know only that the two events coincided, not that one caused the other.
“In order … to determine the answer to the question, ‘Did Jones move the mountain?’ … we must ascertain whether similar effects would follow similar putative causes,” Chryssides writes. “Either an allegedly miraculous event is a violation of scientific law, in which case it could not be performed by an agent, or else it is performed by an agent, in which case it could not be a violation of scientific law.”
(George D. Chryssides, “Miracles and Agents,” Religious Studies 11:3 [September 1975], 319-327.)
In the summer of 1997 mathematician Lionel Levine discovered a sequence of numbers: 1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 7, 14, 42, 213, 2837, … . It’s made up of the final term in each row of this array:
The array is built from a simple rule. Start with 1 1 and regard each line as a recipe for building the next one: Read it from right to left and think of it as an inventory of digits. The first line, 1 1, would be read “one 1 and one 2,” so that gives us 1 2 for the second line. The second line (again, reading from right to left) would be read “two 1s and one 2,” giving 1 1 2 for the third line.
And so on. That’s it. It’s excruciatingly simple, “yet it seems likely that the 20th term say is impossible to compute,” wrote N.J.A. Sloane that November. At that time only 15 terms were known, the last being 508009471379488821444261986503540. Two further terms have since been found, bringing us up to 5347426383812697233786139576220450142250373277499130252554080838158299886992660750432. And the 20th is still out of sight.
See the link below (page 15) for more.
(Neil J.A. Sloane, “My Favorite Integer Sequences,” in C. Ding, T. Helleseth, and H. Niederreiter, Sequences and Their Applications: Proceedings of SETA ’98, 2012, 103-130.)
Here’s a surprisingly modern-looking exercise machine from 1796. Essentially it’s a set of flywheels turned by hand cranks and foot treadles; Francis Lowndes said he patented it “to give and apply motion and exercise, voluntary or involuntary, to the limbs, joints, and muscles of the human body.”
He claimed he’d successfully used it to treat gout, palsy, rheumatism, debility, and contraction, but he said it would be equally useful for healthy people in sedentary occupations, according to the Monthly Magazine: “The merchant, without withdrawing his attention from his accounts, and the student, while occupied in writing or reading, may have his lower limbs kept in constant motion by the slightest exertion, or by the assistance of a child.”
At the height of her fame in 1943, movie star Gene Tierney contracted German measles during pregnancy and bore a daughter with severe birth defects. The strain ended her marriage to Oleg Cassini and sent her into a breakdown that lasted years. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe Tierney’s years of heartbreak and the revelation that compounded them.
We’ll also visit some Japanese cats and puzzle over a disarranged corpse.
Until the 1990s it was arguably legal to purchase stolen goods in London’s Bermondsey Market without fear of prosecution.
The market operated under the ancient law of marché ouvert, or “open market,” a medieval legal concept that allowed for the open sale of stolen goods between the sunset and sunrise in designated markets in a city.
The idea was that if you were robbed and you didn’t check to see whether your stolen property was being sold in a local market, then you weren’t taking reasonable steps to recover it.
Surprisingly, Bermondsey Market operated under this law until 1995, when a stolen Joshua Reynolds painting was sold there for 100 pounds and the purchaser avoided prosecution for handling stolen goods by arguing that the sale was subject to these rules. The loophole has since been abolished.
(Thanks, Cathy.)
05/01/2019 UPDATE: A better explanation: It was never legal to sell or buy stolen goods knowingly. Ordinarily if a buyer is convicted of handling stolen goods then a court can order the goods returned to the original owner, and even without a criminal prosecution the owner can still seek recovery of their goods by appealing to a principle of the common law known as “nemo dat quod non habet” (“no one may give what he does not have”) — even if a buyer pays a fair price for goods she doesn’t know are stolen, she can’t obtain “good title,” ownership that defeats the claims of others, so the original owner can still recover the goods. “Market overt” is an exception to the nemo dat rule — until 1995, anything bought in good faith at a market overt in England became the legal property of the buyer, including title, even if it turned out to have been stolen — the original owner had no legal redress.
Market overt regulations were regarded as a valuable form of consumer protection when they were instantiated in the 12th century, but by the end of the 20th they had become known as the “thieves’ charter” for the dodgy sales they permitted. “It is a good thing it’s been stopped,” one Bermondsey trader told the Guardian in 1995. “People knew that market overt gave them a licence to bring stolen stock down here once a week.”
William Hone’s Every-Day Book of 1837 repeats a story in which St. Martin meets the devil, who asks why he is walking to Rome rather than riding. The saint commands him to become a beast of burden, the devil assumes the shape of a mule, and Martin jumps onto his back and spurs him on his way by repeatedly making the sign of the cross. At length the devil says:
Signa te, Signa: temere me tangis et angis:
Roma tibi subito motibus ibit amor.
That means “Cross, cross thyself — thou plaguest and vexest me without necessity; for, owing to my exertions, Rome, the object of thy wishes, will soon be near.” And each line is a palindrome, reading the same backward and forward.
Hone adds, “These lines have been quoted imperfectly and separately in ‘Encyclopedies’ and other books, under the words ‘Palindromical verses;’ but the reader will not easily meet with the legendary tale, which gives them historical consistence and meaning.”
In 1969, solicitor James Jarvis booked a skiiing holiday in Switzerland. A brochure from Swan Tours Ltd. described the attractions in Mörlialp, Giswil, thus:
House Party Centre with special resident host. … Mörlialp is a most wonderful little resort on a sunny plateau … Up there you will find yourself in the midst of beautiful alpine scenery, which in winter becomes a wonderland of sun, snow and ice, with a wide variety of fine ski-runs, a skating rink and exhilarating toboggan run … Why did we choose the Hotel Krone … mainly and most of all because of the ‘Gemütlichkeit’ and friendly welcome you will receive from Herr and Frau Weibel. … The Hotel Krone has its own Alphütte Bar which will be open several evenings a week. … No doubt you will be in for a great time, when you book this houseparty holiday … Mr. Weibel, the charming owner, speaks English. …
All these House Party arrangements are included in the price of your holiday. Welcome party on arrival. Afternoon tea and cake for 7 days. Swiss dinner by candlelight. Fondue party. Yodeler evening. Chali farewell party in the ‘Alphütte Bar’. Service of representative.
He flew out on Dec. 20 and flew back on Jan. 3 in a bitter and unrefreshed state of mind. Mr. Weibel, the charming owner, certainly had not spoken English, and the vaunted house party had amounted to 13 people in the first week and zero in the second. In the subsequent lawsuit for breach of contract, Tom Denning, the Master of the Rolls, wrote:
So there was Mr. Jarvis, in the second week, in this hotel with no house party at all, and no one could speak English, except himself. He was very disappointed, too, with the ski-ing. It was some distance away at Giswil. There were no ordinary length skis. There were only mini-skis, about 3 ft. long. So he did not get his ski-ing as he wanted to. In the second week he did get some longer skis for a couple of days, but then, because of the boots, his feet got rubbed and he could not continue even with the long skis. So his ski-ing holiday, from his point of view, was pretty well ruined.
There were also no Swiss cakes, just crisps and little dry nut cakes. The ‘yodeler’ was a local man who came in work clothes and sang four or five songs quickly. The ‘Alphütte Bar’ was empty and only open one evening.
Jarvis had paid £63.45, and the trial judge, estimating that he’d received about half of what was promised, awarded him £31.72. But Denning went further: He judged that Jarvis’ disappointment in itself constituted a damage and deserved to be compensated. “I think the judge was in error in taking the sum paid for the holiday £63.45 and halving it. The right measure of damages is to compensate him for the loss of entertainment and enjoyment which he was promised, and which he did not get.” He awarded Jarvis £125.
In 2005, as the Art League of Houston planned to demolish two houses it owned, it invited sculptors Dan Havel and Dean Ruck to transform them first. So they peeled off the buildings’ skins and arranged them into a vortex to another dimension.
Six years later they extended the same treatment to other dilapidated houses in Houston:
