Midas, they say, possessed the art of old
Of turning whatsoe’er he touch’d to gold;
This modern statesmen can reverse with ease —
Touch them with gold, they’ll turn to what you please.
— John Wolcot (1738-1819)
Robinson Tiles
Berkeley mathematician Raphael Robinson discovered this remarkable set of aperiodic tiles in 1978. The six shapes will neatly tile a plane, as shown below, and though the pattern cannot be regular, it reliably produces a hierarchical design: Each small orange square sits at the corner of a larger orange square, which sits at the corner of a still larger one, and so on ad infinitum. This is because subgroups of tiles form “supertiles” with similar properties — see here.
(Thanks, Jacob.)
Podcast Episode 199: The Mystery of the Carroll A. Deering
In 1921 a schooner ran aground on the treacherous shoals off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. When rescuers climbed aboard, they found signs of a strange drama in the ship’s last moments — and no trace of the 11-man crew. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll examine the curious case of the Carroll A. Deering, which has been called “one of the enduring mysteries of maritime history.”
We’ll also experiment with yellow fever and puzzle over a disputed time of death.
Fair’s Fair
Pavia once had an upside-down tower, the “Torre del Pizzo in giù.” According to legend, Andreotto del Maino, head of the del Maino family in the 15th century, was so fed up with his son Giasone’s unpromising academic career that he vowed to build an inverted tower if only he graduated. Giasone not only took his degree but became one of the most esteemed jurists of his age, so Andreotto fulfilled his promise.
The tower was demolished in the 18th century, “destroyed through stupid timidity,” writes the Irish historian Kenelm Henry Digby, “when it was too late discovered that it had been built with such skill that it might have stood for many ages.”
(Thanks, Daniele.)
A Moveable Feast
When does Sherlock Holmes eat breakfast?
- In A Study in Scarlet we are told that Holmes “had invariably breakfasted and gone out” before Watson rose in the morning.
- But just over a year later, in early April 1883, Watson describes himself as “regular in my habits” and says Holmes is “a late riser as a rule.”
- In 1889, in “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb,” Watson receives a visitor just before 7 a.m. and takes him to visit Holmes, remarking that they will “just be in time to have a little breakfast with him.”
- In The Hound of the Baskervilles Holmes is “usually very late in the mornings.”
- In “The Adventure of Black Peter” Inspector Stanley Hopkins is invited to breakfast at 9:30 a.m.
- In The Valley of Fear Holmes is found sitting before “his untasted breakfast” at about 10.
- In “The Five Orange Pips” “Sherlock Holmes was already at breakfast when I came down.”
- In “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder” the two breakfast together.
- In “The Problem of Thor Bridge” Watson descends to breakfast with his friend and finds “that he had nearly finished his meal, and that his mood was particularly bright and joyous.”
In Sherlock Holmes Detected, Ian McQueen writes, “There are so many contradictions about breakfast-time that one hesitates to express a certain view; save possibly one, that Watson, ready as always to submit to his very human failings, was not very good at getting up in the mornings.” He quotes Ronald Knox: “Both in A Study in Scarlet and in The Adventures, we hear that Watson breakfasted after Holmes: in The Hound we are told that Holmes breakfasted late. But then, the true inference from this is that Watson breakfasted very late indeed.”
By the time of Holmes’ retirement, McQueen notes, Watson pays Holmes no more than “an occasional week-end visit,” since the detective now takes only an “early cup of tea” and favors clifftop walks and sea-bathing before breakfast. “Watson kept out of the way!”
Last Words
Hit by shrapnel on April 16, 1917, French infantryman Jean-Louis Cros managed to scribble this message before dying:
My dear wife, my dear parents and all I love, I have been wounded. I hope it will be nothing. Care well for the children, my dear Lucie; Leopold will help you if I don’t get out of this. I have a crushed thigh and am all alone in a shell hole. I hope they will soon come to fetch me. My last thought is of you.
The card was sent to his family.
In August 1918 the Rev. Arthur Boyce found this letter on the battlefield near Rheims. The writer had asked the finder to forward it to his family:
My dear wife, I am dying on the battlefield. With my last strength God bless you and the kiddies. I am glad to give my life for my country. Don’t grieve over me — be proud of this fact. Goodbye and God bless you. Fred
When the kiddies get older tell them how I died.
He had written a similar note to his mother. His identity could not be discovered.
(From Peter Hart’s The Great War, 2013, and Richard van Emden’s The Quick and the Dead, 2012.)
A Prime Square
In 1913 J.N. Muncey of Jessup, Iowa, showed that the first 144 odd prime numbers (counting 1 as prime) can be arranged into a magic square.
Each row, column, and long diagonal totals 4514.
A Bad Plan
The HMS Effingham was sunk with a pencil. On May 18, 1940, the Royal Navy cruiser was escorting a troop convoy near Bodø, Norway, when she struck a large rock and had to be scuttled. The rock was well known and appeared on the ship’s chart, but the navigator had obscured it with a pencil line in drawing the ship’s passage on the map, and she ran directly onto it.
No one was killed; the crew were evacuated and an accompanying destroyer finished her with a torpedo.
(Thanks, Alex.)
Time and Talk
Speakers of the Kuuk Thaayorre language, spoken by the Thaayorre people in Queensland’s Pormpuraaw settlement, use absolute cardinal directions (north, south, east, west) rather than relative spatial terms (left, right), even at small scales. So, for example, they would say, “The cup is southeast of the plate” or “The boy standing to the south of Mary is my brother.”
In 2010, University of California psychologists Lera Boroditsky and Alice Gaby gave Kuuk Thaayorre speakers sets of cards depicting temporal progressions — a man aging, a crocodile growing, a banana being eaten — and asked them to arrange the shuffled cards on the ground to indicate the correct temporal order.
English speakers arrange the cards from left to right, Hebrew speakers from right to left. But the Kuuk Thaayorre arranged them from east to west, regardless of the direction the subjects themselves were facing.
Among other things, this means that the Kuuk Thaayorre must be constantly aware of their orientation in the world. “We never told anyone which direction they were facing,” Boroditsky wrote later. “The Kuuk Thaayorre knew that already and spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.”
(Lera Boroditsky, “How Language Shapes Thought,” Scientific American 304:2 [February 2011], 62-65.)
Prepared
Verbatim from the FBI’s “most wanted” website:
Former Ten Most Wanted Fugitive #236: On March 29, 1967, [James Robert] Ringrose was apprehended in Osaka, Japan, by Japanese police while attempting to pass bad checks. He was arrested in Hawaii after his return to the United States from Japan. He told the FBI agents he had been saving an item for several years and now he needed it. He then presented them with the Monopoly game card, ‘Get out of jail free.’
I’m pretty sure they’d have to honor this, wouldn’t they? It’s in the rules.