Time Trial

When Florence Ilott began working at the House of Commons in the early 1930s, she learned that the staff there had set a standing challenge: to run across Westminster Bridge in the time it took Big Ben to strike noon. An amateur sprinter, Ilott donned her running gear and on April 14, 1934, became the first person to fulfill the challenge, as witnessed by reporters and photographers from the Associated Press, the Daily Sketch, and the Evening Standard.

The feat was reported in other newspapers around the world, but in researching this story recently with his father, Ilott’s grandson, Scott Pack, found a more compelling record:

(Via MetaFilter.)

| Oddities

Podcast Episode 223: The Prince of Forgers

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Denis_Vrain-Lucas.jpg

Denis Vrain-Lucas was an undistinguished forger until he met gullible collector Michel Chasles. Through the 1860s Lucas sold Chasles thousands of phony letters by everyone from Plato to Louis the 14th, earning thousands of francs and touching off a firestorm among confused scholars. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll trace the career of the world’s most prolific forger.

We’ll also count Queen Elizabeth’s eggs and puzzle over a destroyed car.

See full show notes …

| History · Hoaxes · Podcast

All Right Then

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EB_White_and_his_dog_Minnie.png
Image: White Literary LLC

A reader once wrote to E.B. White:

Dear Mr. White,

I’m omitting needless words!

Sincerely yours,

[a reader]

He wrote back:

Dear Ms. ——

Thanks. So am I.

Yrs,

E.B. White

(From Mark Garvey, Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, 2009.)

| Language

In Memoriam

https://www.flickr.com/photos/branestawm/16810237844
Image: Flickr

In Terry Pratchett’s 2004 novel Going Postal, a man named Robert Dearheart invents a network of semaphore towers known as the Clacks. When his son John dies while working on a Clacks tower, Robert resolves to keep his memory alive by transmitting his name perpetually through the network as a special operational signal:

GNU John Dearheart

G: Send the message onto the next Clacks Tower.

N: Do not log the message.

U: At the end of the line, return the message.

This ensures that the Clacks will transmit John’s name forever, and “A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.”

When Pratchett died in March 2015, webmasters adopted the HTTP header X-Clacks-Overhead as a tribute: It silently includes “GNU Terry Pratchett” among a site’s responses, so that Pratchett’s name “will always be spoken.”

By June 2015 Netcraft reported that 84,000 websites had been configured with the header, including that of the newspaper the Guardian, resulting in terabytes of additional bandwidth per day.

(More info here and here. Thanks, Noëlle.)

| Literature · Technology

The Best People

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ludwig_Valenta_-_In_the_library.jpg

To read good books is like holding a conversation with the most eminent minds of past centuries and, moreover, a studied conversation in which these authors reveal to us only the best of their thoughts.

— René Descartes, Discourse on the Method, 1637

For him, books were like friends, and reading an extension of companionship — a way of expanding beyond the circumference of time and place the circle of one’s kindred acquaintances.

— Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey, 1971

‘There is nothing like books’; — of all things sold incomparably the cheapest, of all pleasures the least palling, they take up little room, keep quiet when they are not wanted, and, when taken up, bring us face to face with the choicest men who have ever lived, at their choicest moments.

As my walking companion in the country, I was so UnEnglish (excuse the two capitals) as on the whole, to prefer my pocket Milton which I carried for twenty years, to the not unbeloved bull terrier Trimmer, who accompanied me for five — for Milton never fidgeted, frightened horses, ran after sheep or got run over by a goods-van.

— Samuel Palmer, letter to Charles West Cape, Jan. 31, 1880

In a very real sense, then, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. … It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

— S.I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action, 1952

| Literature

Dead Reckoning

buchanan chess puzzle

A.G. Buchanan posed this curious puzzle in The Problemist in July 2001. Who moved last? The question seems absurd. If each side has only a bare king, how can we know which made the last move?

The answer turns on Rule 5.2b in the Laws of Chess:

The game is drawn when a position has arisen in which neither player can checkmate the opponent’s king with any series of legal moves. The game is said to end in a ‘dead position.’ This immediately ends the game, provided that the move producing the position was legal.

In the position above, suppose it was Black who moved last. He cannot simply have moved his king to the corner from a7 or b8, because in that earlier position Rule 5.2b would already have applied: The game would have ended in a draw at that point, and Black would have had no opportunity to move his king to a8. Similarly, Black cannot have captured a knight or a bishop on a8, because neither of those pieces (alone with a king) is sufficient to give checkmate, and again the game would have ended before the diagrammed position could be reached.

Black might have captured a rook or a queen on a8. But consider that case: Suppose there was a queen on a8, and the black king was in check on a7 or b8. In that case the capture was forced — Black had no other legal move. And hence even before the capture took place it would have been correct to say that “neither player can checkmate” — the capture was ordained and no possible mate lay in the future. And so the game would have ended at that point, and again we could never have reached the diagrammed position.

Hence Black has no possible legal last move, and the answer to the puzzle is that White moved last, capturing a black piece on c6. Because this capture wasn’t forced, Rule 5.2b is not invoked.

This is a technicality, but it’s an important one. In 2015 the World Federation of Chess Composition voted that the “dead position” rule applies only to retrograde (backward-looking) problems like the one above. More details are here.

| Puzzles

The Seven Coins Puzzle

seven coins puzzle

We want to place a coin at each vertex of this figure but one. A coin is placed by moving it along a free line and putting it down at the end of that line. A line is called free if there’s no coin at either of its numbered endpoints. So, for example, we might put a coin on 1 by moving it from 4 to 1 and leaving it there. Then we could put a coin on 2 by moving along 5-2, then on 3 by moving along 6-3, on 4 by moving along 7-4, and on 5 by moving along 8-5. But then we’re stuck — there are no more free lines, and we’ve placed only five coins. How can we place all seven?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Analysis

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

A quirky old gent, name of Freud,
Was, not without reason, anneud
That his concept of Id,
And all that Id did,
Was so starkly and loosely empleud.

— Martin Fagg

“If you dream,” said the eminent Freud,
“Your Id is in doubt, or annoyed,
By neuroses complex
From suppression of sex,
So passions are best if enjoyed.”

— Russell Miller

Sigmund Freud says that one who reflects
Sees that sex has far-reaching effects,
For bottled-up urges
Come out in great surges
In directions that no-one expects.

— Peter Alexander

Said Freud: “I’ve discovered the Id.
Of all your repressions be rid.
It won’t ease the gravity
Of all the depravity,
But you’ll know why you did what you did.”

— Frank Richards

| Humor · Poems · Science & Math