From Lee Sallows, “A novel geometric proof that 16 is a square number.” :)
(Thanks, Lee!)
Microbial Art
Biochemist Roger Tsien won the 2008 Nobel prize in chemistry for his contributions to knowledge of green fluorescent protein, a complex of amino acid residues that glow vividly when exposed to ultraviolet light.
Inspired, Nathan Shaner, a researcher in Tsien’s lab, painted this San Diego beach scene using an eight-color palette of bacterial colonies expressing fluorescent proteins.
Alexander Fleming was drawing “germ paintings” in the 1930s.
Skyward
When Gabe McCubbins’ daughter needed a project for her seventh grade science fair, they decided to mount a GoPro video camera in a bowling ball and fire it out of a cannon.
Launch starts at 1:50.
A One and a Two
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In 2013, Georgia Institute of Technology mechanical engineer David Hu and his colleagues discovered a “law of urination”: All mammals weighing more than 1 kilogram empty their full bladders in about 21 seconds (standard deviation 13 seconds).
Last year Hu followed that up with a law of defecation: Despite a rectum length varying from 4 to 40 centimeters, mammals from cats to elephants defecate within a nearly constant duration of 12 ± 7 seconds. A layer of mucus helps feces slide through the large intestine; larger animals have more feces but also thicker layers of mucus, which aids their ejection.
From the journal Soft Matter, whose cover artist deserves some kind of award.
(David L. Hu et al., “Hydrodynamics of Defecation,” Soft Matter 13:29 [August 2017], 4960-4970.) (Thanks, Colin.)
Unquote
“The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.” — J.M. Barrie
An Early Visit
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In 1829 a group of convicts seized the English brig Cyprus off Tasmania and sailed her to Canton. When captured, the convicts’ leader, William Swallow, claimed that they had visited Japan along the way. This was widely dismissed, as Japan had a strictly isolationist foreign policy at that time.
But just last year amateur historian Nick Russell discovered Japanese records of a visiting “barbarian” ship in 1830 that flew a British flag. Local samurai had visited the ship and recorded what they saw, including watercolors. The visitors had “long pointed noses” and asked in sign language for water and firewood. The young skipper put tobacco in “a suspicious looking object, sucked and then breathed out smoke.” The men “exchanged words amongst themselves like birds twittering,” and the ship’s dog “did not look like food. It looked like a pet.”
Another samurai listed gifts that the crew offered to the Japanese, including an object that’s now believed to have been a boomerang.
Takashi Tokuno, chief curator at the archive of Tokushima Prefecture, said there is a “high probability” that the barbarian ship is the Cyprus; Warwick Hirst, former curator of manuscripts at the State Library of New South Wales, said, “I have no doubt that the Japanese account describes the visit of the Cyprus.”
The Japanese turned away the mutineers, who eventually scuttled the Cyprus near Canton and worked their way back to England, where they found that word of their deed had preceded them. Swallow died in prison, and the rest became the last men hanged for piracy in Britain.
Podcast Episode 200: Lateral Thinking Puzzles
Here are five new lateral thinking puzzles — play along with us as we try to untangle some perplexing situations using yes-or-no questions.
Late Word
In 1967, Ian Stevenson closed a combination lock and placed it in a filing cabinet in the psychiatry department at the University of Virginia. He had set the combination using a word or phrase known only to himself. He told his colleagues that he would try to communicate the code to them after his death, as potential evidence that his awareness had survived.
The combination “is extremely meaningful to me,” he said. “I have no fear whatever of forgetting it on this side of the grave and, if I remember anything on the other side, I shall surely remember it.”
His colleague Emily Williams Kelly told the New York Times, “Presumably, if someone had a vivid dream about him, in which there seemed to be a word or a phrase that kept being repeated — I don’t quite know how it would work — if it seemed promising enough, we would try to open it using the combination suggested.”
Stevenson died in 2007. As of October 2014, the lock remained unopened.
Ghost Failure
In 2004, using the memorable experiment above, psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris showed that when viewers are concentrating on a task they can become functionally blind to unexpected objects and events.
Remarkably, Cambridge-based parapsychologist A.D. Cornell had earlier demonstrated a similar effect in an even stranger experiment. In 1959 he dressed up in a white sheet and “haunted” a cow pasture near King’s College; none of approximately 80 passers-by seemed to notice anything at all. When he moved the “ghost walk” to the graveyard of St Peter’s Church, 4 of 142 people gave any clear indication of having seen the “experimental apparition,” and none of them thought they’d seen anything paranormal. (One saw “a man dressed as a woman, who surely must be mad,” one saw “an art student walking about in a blanket,” and two said “we could see his legs and feet and knew it was a man dressed in some white garment.”)
The following year Cornell again dressed as a ghost and passed twice across the screen in an X-rated cinema. 46% of the respondents failed to notice his first passage, and 32% remained completely unaware of him. One person thought she’d seen a polar bear, and another reported a fault in the projector. Only one correctly described a man dressed in a sheet pretending to be a ghost. Cornell concluded that the number of “true” hauntings may be grossly under-reported.
(A.D. Cornell, “An Experiment in Apparitional Observation and Findings,” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 40:701, 120-124; A.D. Cornell, “Further Experiments in Apparitional Observation,” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 40:706, 409-418.) (Thanks, Elizabeth.)
Circles
“Is the old maxim true about there being an exception to every rule? Well, no doubt we can all think of rules that appear to have no exceptions, but since appearances can be deceiving, maybe the old maxim is true. On the other hand, the maxim is itself a rule, so if we assume that it’s true, it has an exception, which would be tantamount to saying that there is some rule that has no exception. So if the maxim is true, it’s false. That makes it false. Thus we know at least one rule that definitely has an exception, viz., ‘There’s an exception to every rule,’ and, although we haven’t identified it, we know that there is at least one rule that has no exceptions.”
— David L. Silverman, Word Ways, February 1972
Raymond Smullyan used to send emails to friends that read, “Please ignore this message.”
“I don’t like writers who are making sweeping statements all the time. Of course, you might argue that what I’m saying is a sweeping statement, no?” — Jorge Luis Borges, quoted in Floyd Merrell, Unthinking Thinking, 1991