Commentary

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Notes left in manuscripts and colophons by medieval scribes and copyists, from the Spring 2012 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly:

New parchment, bad ink; I say nothing more.

I am very cold.

That’s a hard page and a weary work to read it.

Let the reader’s voice honor the writer’s pen.

This page has not been written very slowly.

The parchment is hairy.

The ink is thin.

Thank God, it will soon be dark.

Oh, my hand.

Now I’ve written the whole thing; for Christ’s sake give me a drink.

Writing is excessive drudgery. It crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides.

St. Patrick of Armagh, deliver me from writing.

While I wrote I froze, and what I could not write by the beams of the sun I finished by candlelight.

As the harbor is welcome to the sailor, so is the last line to the scribe.

This is sad! O little book! A day will come in truth when someone over your page will say, “The hand that wrote it is no more.”

In her History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting, Anne Trubek lists another: “Here ends the second part of the title work of Brother Thomas Aquinas of the Dominican Order; very long, very verbose, and very tedious for the scribe.”

| History · Literature · Technology

Pole Position

A puzzle from James F. Fixx’s More Games for the Superintelligent, 1976:

A rope 150 feet long is strung between the tops of two flagpoles, each 100 feet high. At its lowest point the rope sags to within 25 feet of the ground. How far apart are the flagpoles?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Express

high noon train approach

To film the dramatic approach of the train in High Noon, director Fred Zinnemann and cinematographer Floyd Crosby put their camera flat on the ground between the rails a few hundred yards ahead of the station. Zinneman wanted the train to appear as a dot that grew larger as it approached.

When the signal was given to start, “It looked beautiful, moving rapidly with white smoke, which looked even better,” Zinneman wrote later. “Then it let out black smoke, which looked even better. What we didn’t know was that this was the signal that the engine’s brakes were failing.”

When Zinnemann and Crosby realized that the train wasn’t going to stop, Crosby grabbed the camera, but one of its tripod hooks caught on a rail and he lost his grip. The camera fell in front of the engine as it roared past the men. It was badly damaged, but the magazine was intact, and the footage of the train’s approach is in the final film.

(From Michael Francis Blake, Code of Honor, 2003.)

| Entertainment

Free Thinking

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Arthur Conan Doyle in Tit-Bits, Dec. 15, 1900:

There is one fact in connection with Holmes which will probably interest those who have followed his career from the beginning, and to which, so far as I am aware, attention has never been drawn. In dealing with criminal subjects one’s natural endeavour is to keep the crime in the background. In nearly half the number of the Sherlock Holmes stories, however, in a strictly legal sense no crime was actually committed at all. One heard a good deal about crime and the criminal, but the reader was completely bluffed. Of course, I could not bluff him always, so sometimes I had to give him a crime, and occasionally I had to make it a downright bad one.

A footnote from Leslie Klinger’s New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, 2005:

Fletcher Pratt computes that by 1914, when the record of Holmes’s detective activities ceases, no crimes had taken place in one quarter of the total published cases. In nine of these cases, there was no legal crime. In six no crime took place because Holmes intervened in time to prevent its occurrence.

| Literature

The Blythe Intaglios

In 1932, pilot George Palmer was flying from Las Vegas to Blythe, Calif., when he saw drawings sketched on the desert. Someone had scraped away the dark surface soil to draw three human figures, two four-legged animals, and a spiral.

Because they’re so large (the largest human figure is 171 feet long), they’d gone unnoticed until then. No local Native American group claims to have made them; radiocarbon dating places their creation between 900 BCE and 1200 CE.

| Oddities

“The Longest Letter in the World”

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Your friends are always asking for long letters. To supply this demand a man in Los Angeles, California, has invented a little novelty that has captured the fancy of visiting tourists.

It consists of a roll of paper tape sixty feet long. The paper is made to write on, and has a place for the name and address of the sender and receiver. It goes as first class mail for two cents, like any other letter, and can be mailed in any mail box.

These little ‘long letters’ cause many a laugh and one can write a regular letter on the tape, by merely unrolling it as it is used up.

— Popular Science Monthly, February 1916

| Technology

Podcast Episode 202: The Rosenhan Experiment

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

In the 1970s psychologist David Rosenhan sent healthy volunteers to 12 psychiatric hospitals, where they claimed to be hearing voices. Once they were admitted, they behaved normally, but the hospitals diagnosed all of them as seriously mentally ill. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe the Rosenhan experiment, which challenged the validity of psychiatric diagnosis and set off a furor in the field.

We’ll also spot hawks at Wimbledon and puzzle over a finicky payment processor.

See full show notes …

| History · Podcast · Science & Math

Right and Wrong

finger pointing

In a series of experiments in 2009, Stanford psychologist Daniel Casasanto investigated whether right- and left-handed people differ in how they associate abstract concepts such as good and bad with horizontal space.

He found that right-handed people associate the space to their right with good things like intelligence, attractiveness, honesty, and happiness more readily than the space to their left. With left-handed people, the opposite applies.

“This means for example that the same portrait photo, when placed on a table to the right of a right-hander, will be seen in a more positive light than when it happens to be placed on the other side,” writes Rik Smits in The Puzzle of Left-Handedness. “It’s as if the preference for one hand over the other radiates out into the vicinity of that hand. It may even mean that when an employer looks at a list of brief descriptions of job applications that has been laid out in two columns, those in the column of the same same side as his or her preferred hand will be judged more favourably. If this turns out to be true, then perhaps elections, selection procedures and recruitment are even less rational processes than we already feared. It seems there isn’t an awful lot we can do about that.”

(Daniel Casasanto, “Embodiment of Abstract Concepts: Good and Bad in Right- and Left-Handers,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 138:3 [August 2009], 351–367.)

| Science & Math