University of Minnesota percussionist Gene Koshinski’s composition “As One” has two performers (here, Koshinski and Tim Broscious) complementing each other on identical setups, splitting one complex piece into two complex halves.
More about Koshinski at his website.
In his letters, Tchaikovsky comes to two contrary impressions of Venice in the space of three years:
April 17, 1874: “Now I will tell you about Venice. It is a place in which — had I to remain for long — I should hang myself on the fifth day from sheer despair. The entire life of the place centres in the Piazza San Marco. To venture further in any direction is to find yourself in a labyrinth of stinking corridors which end in some cul-de-sac, so that you have no idea where you are, or where to go, unless you are in a gondola. A trip through the Canale Grande is well worth making, for one passes marble palaces, each one more beautiful and more dilapidated than the last. In fact, you might suppose yourself to be gazing upon the ruined scenery in the first act of Lucrezia. But the Doge’s Palace is beauty and elegance itself; and then the romantic atmosphere of the Council of Ten, the Inquisition, the torture chambers, and other fascinating things. I have thoroughly ‘done’ this palace within and without, and dutifully visited two others, and also three churches, in which were many pictures by Titian and Tintoretto, statues by Canova, and other treasures. Venice, however — I repeat it — is very gloomy, and like a dead city. There are no horses here, and I have not even come across a dog.”
November 16, 1877: “Venice is a fascinating city. Every day I discover some fresh beauty. Yesterday we went to the Church of the Frati, in which, among other art treasures, is the tomb of Canova. It is a marvel of beauty! But what delights me most is the absolute quiet and absence of all street noises. To sit at the open window in the moonlight and gaze upon S. Maria della Salute, or over to the Lagoons on the left, is simply glorious! It is very pleasant also to sit in the Piazza di San Marco (near the Café) in the afternoon and watch the stream of people go by. The little corridor-like streets please me, too, especially in the evening when the windows are lit up. In short, Venice has bewitched me … To-morrow I will look for a furnished apartment.”
(Thanks, Charlie.)
Hold on to your seats, boys. This one gets complicated.
It seems that on Aug. 12, 1940, there occurred an automobile collision at Forty-second avenue S. and Forty-second street.
A car driven by Leo R. Johnson, Hopkins, and owned by Frank M. Anderson, 2912 Sixteenth avenue S., was in collision with one driven by Francis D. Hall, 3413 E. Minnehaha parkway.
It happened that both owners were insured with the same company, the Westchester Fire Insurance Co., and both had $50 deductible collision policies.
The company paid $65 to Anderson for damages to his car and $300 to Hall for damages to his car.
Then the company started suit in municipal court to recover the money.
Action was started against Hall to recover the $65 paid for damages to Anderson’s car, charging him with negligence, and against Anderson to recover the $300 paid for damages to Hall’s car, charging Johnson, the driver, with negligence. …
Benjamin Rigler, attorney for Hall, then came into court with an answer denying that his client was negligent and charging that the driver of Anderson’s car was the negligent party.
And A.C. Johnston, attorney for Anderson, came into court with an answer denying that Johnson was negligent in driving and charging that Hall was guilty of contributory negligence.
The insurance company then filed replies to both answers, denying them.
Since it denied the answers, it also denied each answer’s charge that the other party was guilty of negligence, and thus denied its own original complaint.
Today the attorneys moved for dismissal on the ground that the reply to the answers was ‘sham and frivolous.’
Municipal Judge William A. Anderson dismissed both cases.
(From William L. Prosser’s The Judicial Humorist, 1952. The author is unknown.)
For what it’s worth: In 2015 University of Wisconsin psychologists Megan Savage and Charles Snowdon considered that music might appeal better to other species if it used the same tempos and frequency ranges that they use to communicate.
Accordingly they got musician David Teie to compose three songs that ought to appeal to felines and tried them out on 47 domestic cats, comparing their reactions to Bach’s “Air on a G String” and Fauré’s “Elegie.” The cat music was pitched about an octave higher than human voices, and its tempos replicated purring and suckling rather than a human heartbeat.
The cats showed no interest in the music intended for humans, but they showed a “significant preference for and interest in” Teie’s cat-targeted songs, approaching the speakers and often rubbing their scent glands on them. Also, for some reason young and old cats seemed to like the cat music better than middle-aged ones.
Savage and Snowdon conclude that these results “suggest novel and more appropriate ways for using music as auditory enrichment for nonhuman animals.” Here’s a sample to try on your own cat:
(Charles T. Snowdon, David Teie, and Megan Savage, “Cats Prefer Species-Appropriate Music,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 166 [May 2015], 106–111.) (Thanks, Noah.)
One more example of the trials of 19th-century house servants — in 1832 Elizabeth Fox, Baroness Holland, strained a sinew in her back:
Lady Hardy … said to her hostess after dinner, in the presence of the gentlemen, ‘Is it very painful? Where is it?’ Upon which her Ladyship called her page, made him turn his back to her, put her finger on his posterior regions, and said, ‘Here, Lady Hardy.’
(From Giles Fox-Strangways’ 1937 Chronicles of Holland House, 1820-1900.)
These are called Borwein integrals, after David and Jonathan Borwein, the father-and-son mathematicians who first presented them in 2001.
Engineer Hanspeter Schmid writes, “[W]hen this fact was recently verified by a researcher using a computer algebra package, he concluded that there must be a ‘bug’ in the software. It is not a bug, though; this series of integrals really only results in π/2 up to a certain point, and then breaks down. This astonishes most mathematically educated readers, as especially those readers mentally extrapolate the sequence shown above and find it surprising that something fundamental should change when the factor sinc(x/15) is introduced.” He gives a graphic explanation of what’s happening.
(David Borwein and Jonathan M. Borwein, “Some Remarkable Properties of Sinc and Related Integrals,” Ramanujan Journal 5:1 [March 2001], 73–89.) (Thanks, Dan.)
When Virginia senator William B. Spong Jr. first went to Washington, he worried that the media might mistakenly pronounce his name Sponge.
But he observed that his Senate colleagues included Russell B. Long (D-La.) and Hiram L. Fong (R-Hawaii).
So in introducing himself at the National Press Club, he announced that the three of them would be introducing a bill to protect the rights of songwriters in Hong Kong. It would be called the Long Fong Spong Hong Kong Song Bill.
They never introduced the bill, but the media never mispronounced Spong’s name.
During World War I the Red Cross solicited contributions by literally sucking them out of a crowd with a vacuum cleaner.
The stunt took place on May 25, 1917, before the New York Public Library. From Scientific American: “While a soldier and a sailor urged the public to hand in their contributions the suction tube of the machine was reached out over the crowd. The suction was sufficient to draw up pieces of money of any denomination and deposit them in the bag of the vacuum cleaner. By this means it was possible to reach the crowd readily and it was unnecessary for a contributor to elbow his way through the jam in order to reach the Red Cross workers.”
The National Archives notes, “So great was the eagerness of the people to have their coins taken in by the cleaner that the bag inside the vacuum cleaner had to be emptied several times.”
This passage is from Rudyard Kipling’s 1910 story “Brother Square-Toes.” What’s notable about the bolded section?
‘I’ll have to bide ashore and grow cabbages for a while, after I’ve run this cargo; but I do wish’ — Dad says, going over the lugger’s side with our New Year presents under his arm and young L’Estrange holding up the lantern — ‘I just do wish that those folk which made war so easy had to run one cargo a month all this winter. It ‘ud show ’em what honest work means.’
‘Well, I’ve warned ye,’ says Uncle Aurette. ‘I’ll be slipping off now before your Revenue cutter comes. Give my love to sister and take care o’ the kegs. It’s thicking to southward.’
In his 2008 book Impossible?, Julian Havil presents an argument offered in Massachusetts in 1854 contending that foreigners were more likely to be insane than native-born Americans. These figures were offered:
| Whole Population | |||
| Insane | Not Insane | Totals | |
| Foreign-Born | 625 | 229375 | 230000 |
| Native-Born | 2007 | 892669 | 894676 |
| Totals | 2632 | 1122044 | 1124676 |
The probability that a foreign-born person was deemed insane was 625/230000 = 2.7 × 10-3, and for a native-born person the probability was 2007/894676 = 2.2 × 10-3, which seems to support the claim.
But we get a different story when we divide the data by social hierarchy, into what were called the pauper and independent classes:
| Pauper Class | |||
| Insane | Not Insane | Totals | |
| Foreign-Born | 182 | 9090 | 9272 |
| Native-Born | 250 | 12513 | 12763 |
| Totals | 432 | 21603 | 22035 |
| Independent Class | |||
| Insane | Not Insane | Totals | |
| Foreign-Born | 443 | 220285 | 220728 |
| Native-Born | 1757 | 880156 | 881913 |
| Totals | 2200 | 1100441 | 1102641 |
In the pauper class the probability of a foreign-born person being deemed insane is 182/9272 = 0.02, which is the same as that for a native-born person (250/12763 = 0.02). And the same is true in the independent class, where both probabilities are 2.0 × 10-3. Havil writes, “So, if an adjustment is made for the status of the individuals we see that there is no relationship at all between sanity and origin” (an example of Simpson’s paradox).