One-Man Band

In the early days of silent movies, large theaters would engage orchestras to play the accompanying music. But starting around 1910, small venues that lacked the money or the space could use a machine instead. In Film Music, music editor Roy M. Pendergast writes, “In addition to music, these machines were capable of providing a battery of sound effects, and they ranged in size from what was essentially a player piano with small percussion setup to elaborate instruments nearly equaling a twenty-piece pit orchestra.” He quotes Samuel A. Peeples in Films in Review:

The crowning achievement of the American Photo Player Company was their Fotoplayer Style 50, only one of which is presently known to survive in operating condition. Among the most splendid automatic musical instruments ever built, it was 21 feet long, 5 feet wide, and 5 feet 2 inches tall. It was capable of recreating the volume of a 20-piece pit orchestra, plus a full-scale theatre pipe-organ, with an incredible range of effects, such as the lowing of cattle, the drumming of hoofs in assorted gaits, several varieties of klaxons, street traffic noises, crackling flames, breaking wood and brush, rifle, pistol and machine gun shots, even the sound of a French 75MM cannon!

Pendergast adds, “One wonders about the quality of genius it must have taken to operate one of these devices.”

June 21, 2018 | Entertainment · Technology

Black and White

korolikov chess problem

A curiously ambiguous problem by V.A. Korolikov. Mate in 1. Either side can fulfill this easily — but which has the move?

	Select Click for Answer
White’s knights began the game on squares of opposite color, but now they’re both on white squares. That means that, between them, they’ve made an odd number of moves in this game. By a similar argument White’s rooks and king have made an even number of moves in total, and we can see that White has made a single pawn move. White’s bishops haven’t moved, and his queen must have been captured on her home square. So White has made an even number of moves. The same considerations apply to Black’s position, but he’s made an extra pawn move, so altogether he’s made an odd number of moves. Since White moved first, this means it’s Black turn to move, and he can mate with 1. Nxc2#. (From Schach, 1957, via Noam D. Elkies and Richard P. Stanley, “The Mathematical Knight,” Mathematical Intelligencer 25:1 [December 2003], 22-34.)

Click for Answer

June 21, 2018June 21, 2018 | Puzzles

The Key to My Future

“Truel,” a mathematical romance by Tom Vaughan.

(This is based on a problem in game theory, but interestingly the hero is named Galois and one of his opponents is d’Herbinville — that’s the name of the man Alexandre Dumas identified as the opponent of Évariste Galois in his fatal duel of 1832.)

June 20, 2018 | Science & Math

Express

Panegyric to a train, from the Hurutshe people of South Africa:

Iron thing coming from Pompi, from the round-house
Where Englishmen smashed their hands on it,
It has no front it has no back.
Rhino Tshukudu going that way.
Rhino Tshukudu no, coming this way.
I’m no greenhorn, I’m a strong, skillful man.
Animal coming from Pompi, from Moretele.
It comes spinning out a spider’s web under a cloud of gnats
Moved by the pulling of a teat, animal coming from Kgobola-diatla
Comes out of the big hole in the mountain, mother of the great woman,
Coming on iron cords.
I met this woman of the tracks curving her way along the river bank and over the river.
I thought I’d snatch her
So I said
“Out of the way, son of Mokwatsi, who stands there at the teat.”
The stream of little red and white birds gathered up all of its track
Clean as a whistle.
Tshutshu over the dry plains
Rhino Tshukudu out of the high country
Animal from the south, steaming along
It comes from Pompi, the round-house, from Kgobola-diatla.

(Jerome Rothenberg, Technicians of the Sacred, 1968; Ruth Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa, 2012.)

June 20, 2018June 19, 2018 | Poems · Technology

Photo Finish

In February 1985, British birder David Hunt led a tour around India. One of the stops was Jim Corbett National Park, in Uttar Pradesh, which has a large tiger population. The park provides an armed guard to each group of visitors, and they’re required to stay on the trails. As his party explored the park, though, Hunt heard an unknown call and walked a short distance off the track. Minutes later there was a scream. When his friends rushed to help, they discovered his mauled body in a clearing nearby. His friend Bill Oddie wrote:

When David’s body was recovered, so was his camera. Later on, the slides were developed … The first one is a nice close-up of a Spotted Owlet sitting on a branch … Then he must have heard a noise behind him, or maybe just sensed that he was not alone. Keeping crouched, he turned and saw a tiger pacing to and fro at the edge of the clearing. The next slide is of the tiger. It is some way away, walking to the right. On the next picture it is walking to the left. In the next one, it is facing the camera. In the next, it has begun to move forward, still looking straight at the lens. The next is closer. Then closer. And closer still. The final picture is of a frame-filling shot of the tiger’s head, eyes blazing and teeth exposed in a snarl.

“If David had kept shooting on his motor-drive, the whole thing must have happened in barely ten seconds,” Oddie added. “Crouched behind a camera, looking through the viewfinder and especially when using a telephoto lens, you don’t realise how close your subject has got. Neither, at the time, do you care. All you are focusing on is the picture. Press cameramen in war situations call it ‘camera blindness.’ It has proved fatal before.”

(From Oddie’s Follow That Bird!, quoted in Stephen Moss’ A Bird in the Bush, 2004.)

June 19, 2018June 19, 2018 | Death · Technology

The Way of Things

“Pyramid of Capitalist System,” from a 1911 edition of Industrial Worker, a newspaper of the international labor union Industrial Workers of the World.

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings,” said Churchill. “The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”

June 19, 2018June 18, 2018 | Society

Close Quarters

Paulo Guarini di Forli offered this puzzle in 1512. On this tiny 3 × 3 board, which is the smallest number of moves in which the white knights can exchange places with the black ones?

	Select Click for Answer
Henry Dudeney presented this solution in his 1917 Amusements in Mathematics; it’s now known as the “method of buttons and strings.” No knight will ever visit the center square, so we can ignore that; regard each of the remaining squares as a button and connect it by a string to each square that’s a knight’s move away. That produces diagram B. Now if we untangle the strings we get diagram C, a unique cycle that any knight must follow in making its way around this board. The four knights must follow this cycle, and no two knights may ever occupy the same square. The white knights start on squares 1 and 3, the black on 6 and 8. So to exchange the white and black knights, we must advance all four knights four steps along the circle, either clockwise or counterclockwise. Since the four knights make four moves each, the task is done in 16 moves. That’s the minimum. (Somewhat paradoxically, if three white knights oppose three black ones in the starting position, the minimum number of moves drops to 8.)

Click for Answer

June 18, 2018 | Puzzles

Podcast Episode 205: The White Mouse

In 1928 Nancy Wake ran away from her Australian home and into an unlikely destiny: She became a dynamo in the French resistance, helping more than a thousand people to flee the Germans and then organizing partisans to fight them directly. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the story of the White Mouse, one of the bravest heroes of World War II.

We’ll also marvel at mailmen and puzzle over an expensive homework assignment.

See full show notes …

June 18, 2018June 25, 2018 | History · Podcast

For What It’s Worth

In an effort to attract female worshippers and tourists, Taiwan’s Southwest Coast National Scenic Area erected the “High-Heel Wedding Church” in 2016 in Budai Township, Chiayi County. It’s 17 meters tall and contains about 320 pieces of blue-tinted glass; Guinness has certified it as the “world’s largest high-heel shoe-shaped structure.” The BBC reports:

The shoe was inspired by a local story. According to officials in the 1960s, a 24-year-old girl surnamed Wang from the impoverished region suffered from Blackfoot disease. Both of her legs had to be amputated, leading to the cancellation of her wedding. She remained unmarried and spent the rest of her life at a church. The high heel is intended to honour her memory.

The church will be used for weddings and pre-wedding photo shoots, not regular services. Pan Tsuei-ping, the administration’s recreation section manager, said, “In our planning, we want to make it a blissful, romantic avenue. … Every girl imagines how they will look like when they become the bride.” The building will contain “100 female-oriented features,” including “chairs for lovers, maple leaves, biscuits, and cakes,” all suited for romantic photographs.

But the project has also been criticized as sexist and patronizing. On the Chinese microblogging site Weibo, Jessie Chou wrote, “I wear flip flops anyway.”

June 17, 2018 | Oddities

The No-Three-in-Line Problem

In 1917 Henry Dudeney asked: What’s the maximum number of lattice points that can be placed on an n × n grid so that no three points are collinear?

The answer can’t be more than 2n, since if we place one point more than this, we’re forced to put three into the same row or column. (The 10 × 10 grid above contains 20 points.)

For a grid of each size up to 52 × 52, it’s possible to place 2n points without making a triple. For larger grids it’s conjectured that fewer than 2n points are possible, but today, more than a century after Dudeney posed the question, a final answer has yet to be found.

June 16, 2018 | Science & Math