Moving Spirits

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_GreatLester_1904_-_Wielki_Lester_1904.png

Vaudeville ventriloquist Harry Lester made his reputation with feats of vocal dexterity — he would walk among the audience while his dummy whistled a tune, or place telephone calls to heaven and hell, altering his voice to simulate a remote character on the line. Most famously he could drink water and smoke while his dummies talked.

In 1925, during a performance at the Balaban and Katz Theatre in Chicago, Lester’s drinking feat was unexpectedly modified when straight whisky replaced the usual coloured water in his decanter. The orchestra had switched drinks as a joke, trying to catch him off guard. When Lester innocently drank the liquid, not a muscle moved in his face, but the figure exploded into a storm of coughing. This piece of showmanship was so much appreciated by the orchestra that they rose from their seats and applauded; the audience, sensing something unusual, joined in.

(From Valentine Vox, I Can See Your Lips Moving, 1981.)

| Entertainment

Sitting In

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sargent-wilson.jpg

In 1915, American artist John Singer Sargent donated a blank canvas for auction at a Red Cross benefit, promising to paint a portrait of the donor who purchased it. Sir Hugh Lane bought it for £10,000 but died in the sinking of the Lusitania. He left his art collection to the National Gallery of Ireland, which didn’t know what to do with the blank canvas, so the executors finally held a referendum to ask whose portrait Sargent should paint. The popular choice, to Sargent’s surprise, was Woodrow Wilson.

At the White House Sargent confided his nerves to first lady Edith Wilson, who tried to amuse him at the easel. Still, she didn’t care for the result. “I think it lacks virility and makes Mr. Wilson look older than he did at the time,” she said later. Advisor Edward M. House said he thought it too austere, but then “I think I never knew a man whose general appearance changed so much from hour to hour.” Wilson’s opinion is not recorded.

Bonus blank canvas story: In 1951 Robert Rauschenberg painted a series of “white paintings” with the explicit intention that they appear untouched by human hands. Some patrons considered this an outright swindle when the paintings were first exhibited in 1953, but Rauschenberg wasn’t kidding: In 1962, when curator Pontus Hulten wanted to show them at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, the paintings had been lost, so Rauschenberg simply sent him the measurements and samples of the paint and the canvas, and Hulten remade them from scratch.

| Art

The Scenic Route

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Interplanetary_Superhighway.jpg

A thrifty space traveler can explore the solar system by following the Interplanetary Transport Network, a series of pathways determined by gravitation among the various bodies. By plotting the course carefully, a navigator can choose a route among the Lagrange points that exist between large masses, where it’s possible to change trajectory using very little energy.

In the NASA image above, the “tube” represents the highway along which it’s mathematically possible to travel, and the green ribbon is one such route.

The good news is that these paths lead to some interesting destinations, such as Earth’s moon and the Galilean moons of Jupiter. The bad news is that such a trip would take many generations. Virginia Tech’s Shane Ross writes, “Due to the long time needed to achieve the low energy transfers between planets, the Interplanetary Superhighway is impractical for transfers such as from Earth to Mars at present.”

| Science & Math

Podcast Episode 168: The Destruction of the Doves Type

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_T_J_Cobden-Sanderson_(1840-1922)_by_William_Rothenstein.png

In March 1913, Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson threw the most beautiful typeface in the world off of London’s Hammersmith Bridge to keep it out of the hands of his estranged printing partner. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll explore what would lead a man to destroy the culmination of his life’s work — and what led one modern admirer to try to revive it.

We’ll also scrutinize a housekeeper and puzzle over a slumped child.

See full show notes …

| Art · History · Literature · Podcast · Technology

Ends and Means

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mydoglikes/27249865650
Image: Flickr

“I find to my delight that I can make my dog happy by wagging its tail for it.” — Reveille, letter to the editor, quoted in Michael Bateman, ed., This England, 1969

| Oddities

Black and White

piccinini chess puzzle

By Augusto Piccinini. Imagine that the board is a vertical cylinder, that is, that the a-file and the h-file are joined so that pieces can move across the border. How can White mate Black in two moves?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Lament

i'm tired of being a zero vector
i'm tired of being a zero vector
with no direction
         no dimension
                and no magnitude;
         what i need is another element
            -- but that would be
                 a contradiction
            of my definition

— Eileen Tupaz, a student at Ateneo University, Quezon City, Philippines, in Crux Mathematicorum 26:6 (June 2000), 337

| Poems

Wakeful Watchers

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Xochimilco_Dolls%27_Island.jpg Image: Wikimedia Commons
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Mexico’s Isla de las Muñecas is a floating garden festooned with dolls — the story goes that a local man discovered a drowned girl, hung her doll from a tree as a gesture of remembrance, and was haunted by her spirit ever after, no matter how many dolls he hung. Today, inevitably, it’s a tourist attraction, but it’s still effective — photographer Cindy Vasko called it the creepiest place she’s ever visited.

Below: As her village has dwindled from 300 residents to 30, Japanese artist Ayano Tsukimi has been replacing them with dolls, life-sized figures made of cloth and stuffed with cotton and newspapers. The first was intended to be a scarecrow, but because it resembled her father she found that her neighbors interacted with it. In the ensuing 10 years she’s made hundreds.

“Every morning, I just greet them,” she told NPR. “I say ‘good morning’ or ‘have a nice day!’ I never get a response, but that doesn’t make a difference. I go around talking to them anyway.”

| Oddities

Mix and Match

{7442, 28658, 148583, 177458, 763442}

The sum of any two of these numbers is a perfect square:

7442 + 28658 = 1902

7442 + 148583 = 3952

7442 + 177458 = 4302

7442 + 763442 = 8782

28658 + 148583 = 4212

28658 + 177458 = 4542

28658 + 763442 = 8902

148583 + 177458 = 5712

148583 + 763442 = 9552

177458 + 763442 = 9702

Two other such sets:

{-15863902, 17798783, 21126338, 49064546, 82221218, 447422978}

{30823058, 63849842, 150187058, 352514183, 1727301842}

Whether there’s a set of six positive integers with this property is an open question.

(A.R. Thatcher, “Five Integers Which Sum in Pairs to Squares,” Mathematical Gazette 62:419 [March 1978], 25-29.)

| Science & Math