Precocious

Christian Heinrich Heineken, “the infant scholar of Lübeck,” was so supernaturally gifted that it’s hard even to believe the stories that are told about him. Born in 1721 to a pair of German artists, as a baby he could recite several Biblical stories from memory, and he read the Old and New Testament in Latin before the age of 2.

After he was fourteen months of age the child began the history of the world and could answer any question asked. In his fourth year he could read printed and written matter, although he never learned to write. The multiplication table was learned and recited in order or skipping about. He could relate whole stories in French and knew fourteen hundred sentences from good Latin authors; in geography he knew all the important places on the map.

During a storm at sea he quoted John Trapp: Qui nescit orare, discat navigare (“He that cannot pray, let him go to sea [and there he will learn]”). Introduced to the Danish king at age 3, he said, “Permit me, sir, to kiss the hand of Your Majesty and the hem of your royal garment” and recited his own history of Denmark.

There’s no telling what sort of life lay in store for him, but he passed away after only 4 years and 4 months, apparently of celiac disease, leaving his tutor to proclaim him “a wonder for all time.”

(Jennifer L. Jolly and Justin Bruno, “The Public’s Fascination With Prodigious Youth,” Gifted Child Today, 33:2 [March 2010], 61-65.)

August 10, 2018August 9, 2018 | Oddities

Chapter One

Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics. Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously.

— David Goodstein, States of Matter, 1985

August 9, 2018 | Literature · Science & Math

The Telegarden

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

In 1995, artist Ken Goldberg fitted a $40,000 robot arm with a webcam and mounted it in a trough so that “virtual gardeners” from anywhere in the world could plant seeds and water them. After every hundred hits they were given the option to plant more seeds.

Organizers found that the users tended to discuss nature, technology, and interpersonal connections, with virtually no abusive language. They would ask one another to water their plants during vacations and would sometimes plant seeds “strategically” in order to be near one another. The community shared their sorrow at the death of one gardener, and a couple got engaged. One member wrote, “I am recovering from neck surgery and can not do anything. The place has been a life saver for me.” Altogether the project ran for nine years in Berkeley, California, and Linz, Austria.

“The public resonance of this installation was quite remarkable,” writes Oliver Grau in Virtual Art. “Up to this point in time, Goldberg had likened the culture of the Web as typical of that of hunter-gatherers. However, the telegarden was a symbolic model for a postnomadic society that anonymously and collectively tended plants on a minuscule piece of the earth. The members of this troup, who never actually came face to face, communicated with each other or were even aware of how many other virtual gardeners were logged in, were using the most modern medium of the time for this. Goldberg’s work was a collective intercontinental cultural production.”

August 9, 2018August 8, 2018 | Society · Technology

Black Monday

Something extraordinary happened to the army of Edward III on Monday, April 13, 1360, as they camped in an open field near Chartres during the Hundred Years’ War.

According to the contemporary historian Jean Froissart, “During the time that the French commissioners were passing backwards and forwards from the king to his council, and unable to obtain any favourable answer to their offers, there happened such a storm and violent tempest of thunder and hail, which fell on the English army, that it seemed as if the world was come to an end. The hailstones were so large as to kill men and beasts, and the boldest were frightened.”

Some sources say that 1,000 men and 6,000 horses were killed. Possibly they died through cold rather than trauma; a London chronicle says the “day was a foul dark day of mist and hail, and so bitter cold that many men died for cold.”

Whatever it was, it shook Edward’s confidence. Froissart writes, “The king turned himself towards the church of Our Lady at Chartres, and religiously vowed to the Virgin, as he has since confessed, that he would accept of terms of peace.”

August 8, 2018August 8, 2018 | History · Oddities

Holy Orders

Until recently, it was the habit of preachers to enumerate the points they made in their sermon. The phrase ‘fifthly and lastly, dear brethren’, or whatever number it was, was a familiar one to churchgoers. St Mary Magdalen Church in Bermondsey Street, London, once had a Puritan preacher who, some four hundred years ago, preached a sermon from sixty pages of notes concluding with the words ‘one hundred and seventhly and lastly, dear brethren.’

— N.T.P. Murphy, A Wodehouse Handbook, 2013

August 8, 2018August 7, 2018 | Society

The Ranchers’ Split

A problem from the Graham Dial, a publication of Graham Transmissions Inc., via L.A. Graham’s The Surprise Attack in Mathematical Problems (1968):

Little Euclid went with his father to visit a friend who ran a small ranch. The rancher told them that he and his partner used to herd cattle but had then sold the herd for as many dollars per head as there were head in the herd. With the proceeds they had bought as many sheep as they could at $10.00 per sheep, and with the money that remained they bought a dog. Later the rancher and his partner decided to split up evenly, so they added the dog to the herd and each of them took the same number of animals.

Euclid surprised him by saying, “I hope you paid him $2.00 to even things up.”

“Why, yes, I did,” the rancher said, “but how did you know? I haven’t told you any of the numbers or prices.” Can you prove that Little Euclid had to be correct?

	Select Click for Answer
First, three observations: (1) The number of dollars that the men received for the herd of cattle was a perfect square. (2) The number of sheep they bought was odd, because it was necessary to throw in the dog in order to divide the animals evenly. (3) Since they bought an odd number of sheep at $10.00 per head, the next-to-last digit in the square payment from observation (1) must be odd. Now, as it happens, in any perfect square, if the next-to-last digit is odd, the last figure must be a 6. The simplest way to see this is to consider that any number can be expressed as 10a + b, where a comprises all the digits except the last and b is the last digit (0 to 9). The square of this number is 100a² + 20ab + b². But 100a² has zeros in the last two places, and 20ab has a zero in the last place and is preceded by an even number. So, in order for the square to have an odd digit in the next-to-last position, b² must have an odd first digit, and the only possibilities are 4² = 16 and 6² = 36. In either case, the dog cost $6.00, and the rancher owed his partner $2.00 for accepting a $6.00 dog in place of a $10.00 sheep.

Click for Answer

August 7, 2018 | Puzzles

Discretion

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Looking_across_the_Cherwell_at_Parsons_Pleasure_(geograph_5379091).jpg — Image: Wikimedia Commons

A group of Oxford dons were sunbathing nude by the River Cherwell when a female student floated by in a punt.

Most of them scrambled to cover their nakedness, but Sir Maurice Bowra instead put a flannel over his head.

When asked why, he said, “I don’t know about you, gentlemen, but in Oxford I, at least, am known by my face.”

August 7, 2018August 6, 2018 | Society

Next Up

What’s the next number in this sequence?

1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5, 5, 6, 6, 6, 6, 7, 7, 7, 7, 8, 8, 8, 8, 9, 9, 9, 9, …

	Select Click for Answer
The next number is 9. This is Golomb’s sequence, a non-decreasing sequence of integers in which a_n is the number of times that n occurs in the sequence. We’re given a₁ = 1 to start with, and this indicates that the number 1 appears only once in the whole sequence. That means that a₂ is greater than 1. Setting a₂ to 2 immediately tells us that 2 appears twice in the sequence, so a₃ also must be 2. That tells us that 3 occurs twice in the sequence, and so on. In this way each number in the sequence is uniquely determined.

Click for Answer

August 6, 2018 | Puzzles

Podcast Episode 211: Cast Away on an Ice Floe

Germany’s polar expedition of 1869 took a dramatic turn when 14 men were shipwrecked on an ice floe off the eastern coast of Greenland. As the frozen island carried them slowly toward settlements in the south, it began to break apart beneath them. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow the crew of the Hansa on their desperate journey toward civilization.

We’ll also honor a slime mold and puzzle over a reversing sunset.

See full show notes …

August 6, 2018August 13, 2018 | History · Podcast

Jack the Snipper

From the United Press, June 18, 1942:

Pascagoula, Miss. — (U.P.) — Everybody in town is just as mystified over the motive of the ‘phantom barber’ as they are about who he might try to clip next.

Without robbing or otherwise disturbing his victims, he breaks into homes at night and snips the hair of heavy sleepers. He has given haircuts to three persons in the past week and not one of them even woke up during the process.

Police chief A. W. Ezell said he didn’t have the slightest idea why a man would want to do such a thing, but because the complaints have been coming hard and heavy, his department has staked a $300 reward for information leading to his capture. He also gave pistol permits to six volunteer officers and ordered the regular police force to be on the alert.

Bloodhounds, given a man’s footprint to start on, have failed miserably. None of the victims could give a description since they slumbered on oblivious of the tonsorial attention they were getting.

August 5, 2018August 4, 2018 | Crime · Oddities