Back Channels

In 1863 Union soldiers seized a bag of rebel correspondence as it was about to cross Lake Pontchartrain. In one of the letters, a woman named Anna boasted of a trick she’d played on a Boston newspaper — she’d sent them a poem titled “The Gypsy’s Wassail,” which she assured them was written in Sanskrit:

Drol setaredefnoc evarb ruo sselb dog
Drageruaeb dna htims nosnhoj eel
Eoj nosnhoj dna htims noskcaj pleh
Ho eixid ni stif meht evig ot

The paper published this “beautiful and patriotic poem, by our talented contributor.” A few days later a reader discovered the trick — it was simply English written in reverse:

God bless our brave Confederates, Lord!
Lee, Johnson, Smith, and Beauregard!
Help Jackson, Smith, and Johnson Joe,
To give them fits in Dixie, oh!

She had signed her name only “Anna,” but in the same bag they found a letter from her sister to her husband, saying “Anna writes you one of her amusing letters,” and this contained her signature and address. Union general Wickham Hoffman wrote to her: “I told her that her letter had fallen into the hands of one of those ‘Yankee’ officers whom she saw fit to abuse, and who was so pleased with its wit that he should take great pleasure in forwarding it to its destination; that in return he had only to ask that when the author of ‘The Gypsy’s Wassail’ favored the expectant world with another poem, he might be honored with an early copy. Anna must have been rather surprised.”

(From Hoffman’s 1877 memoir Camp, Court and Siege.)

Command Performance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8hL2Ml9WHo&feature=youtu.be

Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played with Glock pistols by Vitaly Kryuchin, president of the Russian Federation of Practical Shooting, from the 1979 Soviet TV miniseries The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed. He also plays “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” and the traditional Russian song “Murka.” It’s probably safest not to make requests.

February 22, 2017February 22, 2017 | Oddities

Goodbye to Romance

In his 1916 book The Science of Musical Sounds, Dayton Clarence Miller uses harmonic analysis to convert the line of a woman’s profile (left) into an equation of 18 terms. Then he uses this equation to reproduce the profile synthetically (right). “If mentality, beauty, and other characteristics can be considered as represented in a profile portrait,” he writes, “then it may be said that they are also expressed in the equation of the profile.”

He repeats the synthesized profile to produce a waveform:

“In this sense beauty of form may be likened to beauty of tone color, that is, to the beauty of a certain harmonious blending of sounds.”

In Noise, Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, Douglas Kahn writes, “The simple beauty of the female expressed in the line thus becomes also the simple beauty of mathematics, graphic representation, and instrumentation, let alone mediation and reproduction, involved in the production of the equation and profile. Thus, we move beyond Lord Kelvin’s fascination with a beauty of mathematics to a fascination with a mathematics of beauty.”

February 22, 2017February 21, 2017 | Science & Math

“A Cheap Correspondence”

A curious story of two poor lovers, whose system of correspondence was confined to an ingenious cipher of ink-blots on the outside of the letter, is told by the Poet Coleridge. In one of his walks in the Lake district, he saw the postman offer a letter to the servant-girl at a village inn, who, after carefully looking at the address, returned the document to the postman, telling him that she could not take it in, as she was too poor to pay the postage. Thereupon, Coleridge stepped forward, and giving the postman the shilling required for the letter, handed it to the girl. To his surprise, she did not appear as pleased as he had expected; and when the postman was out of hearing, she explained the matter by confessing to the poet that the whole of the letter consisted in its address and certain exterior blots and marks, and that it was the method adopted by her lover and herself to keep up an unpaid-for correspondence in the days of dear postage.

— Thomas Hood, The Book of Modern English Anecdotes, 1872

February 21, 2017 | Literature

Drawn Onward

tintin

Comic strips offer even more opportunities for working with the symbolism of direction. W.A. Wagenaar, a psychologist at Leiden University and a Tintin fan, once tallied up all the acts and transitions in three Tintin books and discovered that in three out of four cases the characters move from left to right, even when their movement takes several frames to portray. More interestingly still, movements towards the left almost always have a bad outcome. The man who moves his finger from right to left to ring Tintin’s doorbell falls unconscious on the doormat as soon as the alert reporter opens the door. When Captain Haddock crosses the frame from right to left in an attempt to escape, he is recaptured in no time. And so on. This is Tintin’s Law, and it is reminiscent of the messenger in the theatre of the ancient world: entering on the right — and therefore moving towards the left — is a sign to the audience that something ominous is happening.

— Rik Smits, The Puzzle of Left-Handedness, 2010

(Wagenaar’s paper is “Als Kuifje naar links beweegt is er iets mis,” NRC Handelsblad, Aug. 5, 1981.)

February 21, 2017February 20, 2017 | Entertainment · Oddities

Podcast Episode 142: Fingerprints and Polygraphs

Fingerprint identification and lie detectors are well-known tools of law enforcement today, but both were quite revolutionary when they were introduced. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe the memorable cases where these innovations were first used.

We’ll also see some phantom ships and puzzle over a beer company’s second thoughts.

See full show notes …

February 20, 2017September 30, 2017 | Crime · Podcast · Technology

Little Wars

H.G. Wells played war games. In 1913 he published a set of rules for playing with miniature infantry, cavalry, and artillery, worked out with his friend Jerome K. Jerome while playing with toy soldiers after lunch one day.

He fired that day a shot that still echoes round the world. An affair — let us parallel the Cannonade of Valmy and call it the Cannonade of Sandgate — occurred, a shooting between opposed ranks of soldiers, a shooting not very different in spirit — but how different in results! — from the prehistoric warfare of catapult and garter. ‘But suppose,’ said his antagonists; ‘suppose somehow one could move the men!’ and therewith opened a new world of belligerence.

With another friend and a lot of playtesting, he worked out a set of rules by which two players contend for control of a battlefield, “little brisk fights in which one may suppose that all the ammunition and food needed are carried by the men themselves.”

In two or three moves the guns are flickering into action, a cavalry melee may be in progress, the plans of the attack are more or less apparent, here are men pouring out from the shelter of a wood to secure some point of vantage, and here are troops massing among farm buildings for a vigorous attack. The combat grows hot round some vital point. Move follows move in swift succession. One realises with a sickening sense of error that one is outnumbered and hard pressed here and uselessly cut off there, that one’s guns are ill-placed, that one’s wings are spread too widely, and that help can come only over some deadly zone of fire.

When Wells published his rules in August 1913, the Spectator raved that “there can be no doubt at all as to the excellence of Little Wars as a game for its own sake” — “Mr. Wells describes his new game and sets out its rules so attractively, and has, moreover, added to his description such alluring photographs, that his readers will find it hard indeed not to hurry out to the toy-shop round the corner, raise the necessary levies, and fall down forthwith upon hands and knees to emulate his achievements in the Battle of Hook’s Farm.”

Happily, since it was published a century ago, the whole thing is in the public domain — it’s available at Project Gutenberg.

February 19, 2017February 18, 2017 | Entertainment · Literature

Course Change

berouw

The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa was the most powerful natural sound ever experienced by humans. Captain Sampson of the British vessel Norham Castle, 40 kilometers away, wrote, “I am writing this blind in pitch darkness. We are under a continual rain of pumice-stone and dust. So violent are the explosions that the ear-drums of over half my crew have been shattered. My last thoughts are with my dear wife. I am convinced that the Day of Judgment has come.”

During the maelstrom the Dutch steam gunship Berouw was picked up by a wave and smashed down at the mouth of the Koeripan River, probably killing all 28 of her crew. Then a second enormous wave picked her up and carried her two miles inland, all the way up the river valley, and set her down upright, athwart the river and 60 feet above sea level.

The crew of a rescue ship discovered her there the following month: “She lies almost completely intact, only the front of the ship is twisted a little to port, the back of the ship a little to starboard. The engine room is full of mud and ash. The engines themselves were not damaged very much, but the flywheels were bent by the repeated shocks. It might be possible to float her once again.”

That never happened. In 1939 visitors reported that she was rusting in place, covered with vines, and home to a colony of monkeys. A few pieces remained in the 1980s, and today all trace of her is gone. In Krakatoa, Simon Winchester notes that Berouw is the Dutch word for “remorse.”

February 18, 2017February 17, 2017 | Oddities

Waste Not

British Columbia woodsman Francis Wharton shot a deer in the late 1960s but had no serviceable teeth with which to eat it.

With venison steak hanging in the balance, Wharton extracted the teeth from his deer, filed and ground them to what appeared a handy size. He then chewed up a wad of Plastic Wood, molding it to the shape of his gums, and thereto affixed the teeth, using household cement for binder. Francis then sat down to a hearty meal of venison and ate it with the deer’s own teeth.

That’s from dental researcher Gardner P.H. Foley’s 1972 Treasury of Dentistry. The teeth, described as “loose,” “dark and dirty,” are on display at the Museum of Health Care in Kingston. Reportedly Wharton used them for three years; collections manager Kathy Karkut says, “He must have used a lot of Polident.”

February 17, 2017 | Oddities

Bertrand’s Paradox

We ask for the probability that a number, integer or fractional, commensurable or incommensurable, randomly chosen between 0 and 100, is greater than 50. The answer seems evident: the number of favourable cases is half the number of possible cases. The probability is 1/2.

Instead of the number, however, we can choose its square. If the number is between 50 and 100, its square will be between 2,500 and 10,000.

The probability that a randomly chosen number between 0 and 10,000 is greater than 2,500 seems evident: the number of favourable cases is three quarters of the number of possible cases. The probability is 3/4.

The two problems are identical. Why are the two answers different?

— Joseph Bertrand, Calcul des probabilités, 1889 (translation by Sorin Bangu)

February 16, 2017 | Science & Math