Law and Order

Perhaps because the director has a law degree from Cambridge, Jonathan Lynn’s 1992 film My Cousin Vinny is widely praised for its realistic depiction of courtroom procedure and trial strategy.

Joe Pesci plays an inexperienced Brooklyn personal injury lawyer trying to save his cousin from a murder charge. But instead of relying on surprise witnesses and other unlikely dramatic gambits, “[t]he movie is close to reality even in its details,” writes plaintiff’s attorney Max Kennerly. “Part of why the film has such staying power among lawyers is because, unlike, say, A Few Good Men, everything that happens in the movie could happen — and often does happen — at trial.”

Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals judge Richard Posner calls the film “particularly rich in practice tips: how a criminal defense lawyer must stand his ground against a hostile judge, even at the cost of exasperating the judge, because the lawyer’s primary audience is the jury, not the judge; how cross-examination on peripheral matters can sow serious doubts about a witness’s credibility; how props can be used effectively in cross-examination (the tape measure that demolishes one of the prosecution’s eyewitnesses); how to voir dire, examine, and cross-examine expert witnesses; the importance of the Brady doctrine … how to dress for a trial; contrasting methods of conducting a jury trial; and more.”

“You can use the movie to discuss criminal procedure, courtroom decorum, professional responsibility, unethical behavior, the role of the judge in a trial, efficient cross-examination, the role of expert witnesses and effective trial advocacy,” writes John Marshall Law School professor Alberto Bernabe. And “[a]lthough Vinny is certainly no role model when it comes to knowledge of the law, legal analysis and ethical behavior, law students could learn from him as to how to use legal thinking in the complexity of actual law practice.”

Lynn suggested that lawyers like the film because “there aren’t any bad guys”; the judge, prosecutor, and defense are all simply seeking justice.

In 2008 the ABA Journal ranked the film third on its list of the “25 Greatest Legal Movies,” and in 2010 it ranked Vincent Gambini twelfth among “The 25 Greatest Fictional Lawyers (Who Are Not Atticus Finch).”

March 8, 2018March 7, 2018 | Entertainment

Not So Fast

In 1700 the body of John Dryden was arrested pending payment of his debts.

Before 1804 the cadaver of a debtor could be held hostage by the creditor until the dead person’s loved ones could pay the arrears.

Finally in the case Jones v. Ashburnham, Lord Ellenborough declared that the practice was “contrary to every principle of law and moral feeling. Such an act is revolting to humanity, and illegal, and, therefore, any promise extorted by it could never be valid law.”

March 7, 2018 | Death · Society

The Devens Literacy Test

This test was administered to recruits at Fort Devens, Mass., during World War I. The idea is to measure reading comprehension, but the questions take on a surreal poetry:

Norms:

Below 6: Illiterate
6 to 20: Primary
21 to 25: Grammar
26 to 30: Junior high school
31 to 35: Senior high school
36 to 42: College

Three additional versions of the test are given here.

March 7, 2018March 6, 2018 | History · Language

Black and White

bilfinger chess problem

By Carl Bilfinger. White to mate in two moves.

	Select Click for Answer
1. Rd3! The king is forced to take the rook, and 2. Qf3 is mate.

March 6, 2018 | Puzzles

Square Deal

From Recreational Mathematics Magazine, 1961, a magic square of cards:

Each row, column, and main diagonal contains an ace, king, queen, and jack and all four suits. There are numerous other subsquares and symmetrical subsets of squares that have the same property, including the center 2 × 2 square and the four corner squares.

(Recreational Mathematics Magazine 34:5, 24-29, via Pi Mu Epsilon Journal, “Unusual Magic Squares,” 6:2 [Spring 1975], 54-55.)

March 6, 2018March 5, 2018 | Science & Math

FWIW

How to get a boy to kiss you, from the advice column in Mirabelle, Nov. 18, 1961:

Here’s a trick a very pretty film star swears by. Look deep into your boy’s eyes. Fine, now you have got his attention. Drop your eyes to take a lingering look at his lips and then raise your eyes to his again. It’s practically irresistible.

March 5, 2018March 5, 2018 | Society

Podcast Episode 191: The Longest Flight

timm and cook 1

The world’s longest airplane flight took place in 1958, when two aircraft mechanics spent 64 days above the southwestern U.S. in a tiny Cessna with no amenities. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow the aerial adventures of Bob Timm and John Cook as they set a record that still stands today.

We’ll also consider a derelict kitty and puzzle over a movie set’s fashion dictates.

See full show notes …

March 5, 2018March 12, 2018 | History · Podcast · Technology

International Relations

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fanlight,_Belfast_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1531243.jpg — Image: Wikimedia Commons

The French word for fanlight, vasistas, derives from the German phrase Was ist das? (“Who’s there?” or literally “What is that?”).

There seem to be two competing explanations: Either German visitors to France were unfamiliar with these windows and commonly asked about them — or French visitors to Germany often heard that phrase called through the window before the door opened.

March 4, 2018 | Language

The Three-Hat Problem

In the October 2003 issue of MIT Technology Review, Donald Aucamp offered this conundrum:

Three logicians, A, B, and C, are wearing hats. Each hat displays a positive integer, and each logician can see his companions’ numbers but not his own. All of them know that the numbers are positive integers and that one of the numbers is the sum of the other two. The three then take turns in a contest to see who can determine his number first. In the first round, all three pass, but in the second round A correctly states his number is 50. What are the other two numbers, and how did A know that his was 50?

	Select Click for Answer
This solution is by Howard Haber, who writes, “The key observation is that if two of the three integers are equal, then the person who sees the equal integers knows that his number is twice the same integer.” Disregard the actual values for the moment and focus on their ratio instead. For A, B, C respectively, this ratio must be 5, 2, 3. To see why, consider the first round. A, who sees the numbers 2, 3, concludes that he himself must be wearing either 1 (1 + 2 = 3) or 5 (2 + 3 = 5). A can’t get any further than this in the first round and watches the play continue, adopting for the moment the hypothesis that A, B, C are 1, 2, 3. He’s not surprised when B passes his turn, then, because that’s consistent with his idea: B would have seen A wearing 1 and C wearing 3 and been unable to decide whether he himself were wearing 2 (1 + 2 = 3) or 4 (1 + 3 = 4). So he’d pass. So far, so good. Now play passes to C. If A, B, C were 1, 2, 3, then C would see A wearing 1 and B wearing 2. That would tell C that he himself must be wearing 3 (1 + 2 = 3) or 1 (1 + 1 = 2). But unlike the first two players, C would have a way to eliminate one of his candidates: He would know that he himself could not be wearing 1, because if he were, then B would have seen the numbers 1 and 1 on his turn, and thus would have realized that his own (B’s) number must have been 2 (according to the key observation above). With that insight B would have had enough information to win the game on his turn — he could have declared that A, B, C were 1, 2, 1. But B passed his turn, revealing to C that B was unable to reach that conclusion. And seeing that, C could then have concluded that the numbers could not have been 1, 2, 1 and so must have been 1, 2, 3. But C too passes his turn. That tells A (finally!) that his starting hypothesis was wrong: A, B, C can’t be 1, 2, 3. That leaves only the second possibility he’d identified, where A, B, C are 5, 2, 3, and he announces this. “For the problem as stated [i.e., using actual values rather than ratios], just multiply all numbers above by 10.”

Click for Answer

This solution is by Howard Haber, who writes, “The key observation is that if two of the three integers are equal, then the person who sees the equal integers knows that his number is twice the same integer.”

Disregard the actual values for the moment and focus on their ratio instead. For A, B, C respectively, this ratio must be 5, 2, 3. To see why, consider the first round. A, who sees the numbers 2, 3, concludes that he himself must be wearing either 1 (1 + 2 = 3) or 5 (2 + 3 = 5). A can’t get any further than this in the first round and watches the play continue, adopting for the moment the hypothesis that A, B, C are 1, 2, 3. He’s not surprised when B passes his turn, then, because that’s consistent with his idea: B would have seen A wearing 1 and C wearing 3 and been unable to decide whether he himself were wearing 2 (1 + 2 = 3) or 4 (1 + 3 = 4). So he’d pass. So far, so good. Now play passes to C. If A, B, C were 1, 2, 3, then C would see A wearing 1 and B wearing 2. That would tell C that he himself must be wearing 3 (1 + 2 = 3) or 1 (1 + 1 = 2). But unlike the first two players, C would have a way to eliminate one of his candidates: He would know that he himself could not be wearing 1, because if he were, then B would have seen the numbers 1 and 1 on his turn, and thus would have realized that his own (B’s) number must have been 2 (according to the key observation above). With that insight B would have had enough information to win the game on his turn — he could have declared that A, B, C were 1, 2, 1. But B passed his turn, revealing to C that B was unable to reach that conclusion. And seeing that, C could then have concluded that the numbers could not have been 1, 2, 1 and so must have been 1, 2, 3.

But C too passes his turn. That tells A (finally!) that his starting hypothesis was wrong: A, B, C can’t be 1, 2, 3. That leaves only the second possibility he’d identified, where A, B, C are 5, 2, 3, and he announces this.

“For the problem as stated [i.e., using actual values rather than ratios], just multiply all numbers above by 10.”

March 3, 2018March 3, 2018 | Puzzles

Misc

Queen Victoria and her future husband, Albert, were born with the help of the same midwife.
Ulysses Grant and Harry Truman had the same meaningless middle initial.
SLICES OF BREAD is an anagram of DESCRIBES LOAF. (Dean Mayer)
France’s longest land border is with Brazil (via French Guiana).
“A creed is an ossified metaphor.” — Elbert Hubbard

(Thanks, Tony.)

March 2, 2018 | History · Language · Quotations · Trivia