Ups and Downs

Here’s how the Union enciphered its messages during the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln sent this dispatch on June 1, 1863:

GUARD ADAM THEM THEY AT WAYLAND BROWN FOR KISSING VENUS CORRESPONDENTS AT NEPTUNE ARE OFF NELLY TURNING UP CAN GET WHY DETAINED TRIBUNE AND TIMES RICHARDSON THE ARE ASCERTAIN AND YOU FILLS BELLY THIS IF DETAINED PLEASE ODOR OF LUDLOW COMMISSIONER

The first word, GUARD, indicates the size of a containing rectangle and the paths on which the words must be laid out to decipher the message. In this case, they’ll go up the first column, down the second, up the fifth, down the fourth, and up the third. Also, just to confuse the Confederates, every eighth word after GUARD is a null and should be discarded. So we get:

FOR     VENUS          LUDLOW   RICHARDSON AND
BROWN   CORRESPONDENTS OF       THE        TRIBUNE
WAYLAND AT             ODOR     ARE        DETAINED
AT      NEPTUNE        PLEASE   ASCERTAIN  WHY
THEY    ARE            DETAINED AND        GET
THEM    OFF            IF       YOU        CAN
ADAM    NELLY          THIS     FILLS      UP

The last steps are to remove THIS FILLS UP, which is only there to fill out the block, and to replace a few code words:

VENUS = colonel
WAYLAND = captured
ODOR = Vicksburg
NEPTUNE = Richmond
ADAM = President of the United States
NELLY = 4:30 p.m.

That gives us the final message:

For Colonel Ludlow,

Richardson and Brown, correspondents of the Tribune, captured at Vicksburg, are detained at Richmond. Please ascertain why they are detained and get them off if you can.

The President, 4:30 p.m.

This system was such a valuable source of breaking news that Lincoln often visited the military telegraph office in the War Department, next to the White House, and would chat with the operators there. One of them, David Homer Bates, who was only 18 when the war started, remembered, “Outside the members of his cabinet and his private secretaries, none were brought into closer or more confidential relations with Lincoln than the cipher-operators, … for during the Civil War the President spent more of his waking hours in the War Department telegraph office than in any other place, except the White House. … His tall, homely form could be seen crossing the well-shaded lawn between the White House and the War Department day after day with unvaried regularity.”

(From David Kahn, The Codebreakers, 1996.)

November 4, 2016November 3, 2016 | History

Unquote

“Those praised in a book take that praise, and more, as their due. What you meant as a gift is accepted as an obligation. In a second printing of one of his books, a writer listed the misprints in the first. Among them was the dedication.” — Baltasar Gracián

November 3, 2016November 2, 2016 | Literature · Quotations

Alternate Routes

How many pairs of prime numbers are there whose sum is 999?

	Select Click for Answer
One. Any pair of numbers with an odd sum must have an even member, and there’s only one even prime. So there’s only one answer, 997 + 2 = 999.

November 3, 2016November 13, 2016 | Puzzles · Science & Math

Vacancies

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KdF._Kraft_durch_Freude._Geplantes_Ferienheim_der_Nationalsozialisten_in_Prora_auf_R%C3%BCgen.JPG — Image: Wikimedia Commons

Between 1937 and 1939, Nazi Germany built a colossal beach resort on the island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea. Its scale was enormous: Meant to host 20,000 holiday-makers at a time in shifts of 10 days, the six-story edifice of 10,000 double rooms stretches for 4.5 kilometers, requiring almost an hour to walk its length. At the end of the war seven of a planned eight blocks and part of a main square had been completed. Since then it’s housed small-scale projects, including a youth and a family hostel, a skating hall, a theatre, workshops, museums, art galleries, secondhand shops, and a disco. Today five of the blocks have been developed as apartments and a new hostel, while the remaining three lie in ruins.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Greenland_flag_on_building.jpg — Image: Wikimedia Commons

Until four years ago, fully 1 percent of Greenland’s population was housed in a single building, Blok P. Erected in the 1960s, it was five stories high and stretched 200 meters, the largest construction project in the Kingdom of Denmark, with one end boasting the world’s largest flag of Greenland. But its poor design made the building a difficult and depressing home for its residents, and it was demolished in 2012.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Famagusta-Varosha_2007.JPG — Image: Wikimedia Commons

Before the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, the tourist district of Varosha was the nation’s premier vacation destination, with high-rise hotels, shopping centers, restaurants, and nightclubs. With the invasion, the entire population of 39,000 fled, leaving behind an opulent ghost town. Since then it’s been fenced off, accessible only by the Turkish military and United Nations personnel. Negotiations continue, but after 40 years of mounting disrepair it’s not clear how much of it might still be salvaged.

(Thanks, Matthias and Steve.)

November 2, 2016November 1, 2016 | Oddities

A Splitting Headache

https://www.flickr.com/photos/dkalo/2909921582 — Image: Wikimedia Commons

Tom has a crystal ball that shows him the future. One day it shows him a bomb going off in the city. He alerts the authorities, who disable the bomb, saving millions of people. Tom is glad, but he wonders: How can this outcome be logically consistent with the future that the crystal ball had shown him? In that future he saw millions of people die, but in this future they’re still alive. He realizes that when he contacted the authorities the timeline must have split in two. In the original timeline, the bomb went off just as the crystal ball had foretold, and the city’s population did die. But in this new timeline, the authorities defused the bomb and everyone lived.

This understanding seems to explain what has happened, but it leaves a worrying subjective question. If there are two timelines then there are two Toms, both sharing the same history and presumably each realizing that two instances of his identity now exist. “We are familiar with physical things splitting into two, and can accept in principle that they could even be duplicated,” writes Western University philosopher John L. Bell. “But it is extremely difficult to make sense of the idea that an individual consciousness can be so split.”

The doomed Tom might ask himself, “Why am I the doomed Tom?” Objectively the answer is that he’s the Tom who failed to alert the authorities to the coming catastrophe. “But from a subjective point of view he can ask: why was I the Tom who failed to act? Why couldn’t I have been the saved Tom? There seems to be no satisfactory answer to this question.”

In his Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science, mathematician Hermann Weyl notes that Leibniz thought he had resolved the tension between freedom and predestination by letting God consider the infinite number of possible universes and assign existence to one of them. “This solution may objectively be sufficient,” Weyl wrote, “but it is shattered by the desperate outcry of Judas, ‘Why did I have to be Judas?'”

(From Oppositions and Paradoxes, 2016.)

November 1, 2016October 31, 2016 | Oddities

Immaterial

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sarah_caudwell.jpg — Image: Wikimedia Commons

British author Sarah Caudwell wrote four mystery novels without revealing the main character’s gender.

Like Caudwell herself, sleuth Hilary Tamar taught law at Oxford and was witty, erudite, and incisive. In the four novels — Thus Was Adonis Murdered, The Shortest Way to Hades, The Sirens Sang of Murder, and The Sybil in Her Grave — Tamar acts as mentor to four barristers in “legal whodunits” that revolve around the intricacies of the British legal system. Tamar, who serves as both storyteller and detective, writes in the first person, often communicates with the other characters by letter, and is addressed directly when present:

‘So you see, Hilary,’ said Selena, ‘no one’s on holiday. Except Julia, of course. She should be in Venice by now.’

‘Julia?’ I said, much astonished. ‘You haven’t let Julia go off on her own to Venice, surely?’

‘Am I,’ asked Selena, ‘Julia’s keeper?’

‘Yes,’ I said, rather severely, for her attitude seemed to me irresponsible.

“Others speak to Hilary or use the name — one never knows for sure whether Hilary is woman or man,” notes Sally McConnell-Ginet in Greville G. Corbett’s The Expression of Gender. “Caudwell manages this so skillfully that people reading the novels do not always notice the absence of definitive gendering of Hilary: they sometimes mentally provide she or he on the basis of whichever familiar gender assumptions happen to attract their attention.”

“Very few people seemed to notice that there was any doubt,” Caudwell said. “Usually they referred to Hilary as certainly female or certainly male. It’s now mentioned in the jacket copy and, having been tipped off, readers become very angry at me for not resolving it at the end of the book.” But she had determined never to reveal Tamar’s gender. “I think Hilary is sort of a quintessential Oxford don,” she said. “I don’t really regard Oxford dons as being determined by gender.”

This never bothered her fans, who love the books for their brilliance and humor. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Newgate Callendar praised Caudwell’s “polished, stylized prose,” “a kind of English that has not been around since the days of Oscar Wilde.” Robert Bork once said, “In my opinion, there can’t be too many Sarah Caudwell novels.” Alas, there are only four — she passed away in 2000.

October 31, 2016October 30, 2016 | Literature

Smoothly

This is an excerpt from Kaikhosru Sorabji’s Opus Clavicembalisticum of 1930. The snaky line running through it is a slur (!) encompassing the whole complex passage.

Indiana University information scientist Donald Byrd observes, “It has a total of 10(!) inflection points; it spans three systems, repeatedly crosses three staves (this is also the most staves within a system for any slur I know of), and goes slightly backwards — i.e., from right to left — several times.”

More at Byrd’s Gallery of Interesting Music Notation.

October 30, 2016November 17, 2016 | Art · Oddities

Harms and the Man

The International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD) is a list of more than 10,000 diseases and maladies that patients might present. The medical community uses it for recordkeeping — for example, a patient admitted to the hospital with whooping cough would be logged in the database with code A37. Reader Will Beattie sent me a list of some of the stranger complaints on the list:

Urban rabies – A821
Lobster-claw hand, bilateral – Q7163
Fall into well – W170
Complete loss of teeth, unspecified cause – K0810
Pecked by turkey – W6143
O’nyong-nyong fever – A921
Hang glider explosion injuring occupant – V9615
Contact with hot toaster – X151
Major anomalies of jaw size – M260
Intrinsic sphincter deficiency (ISD) – N3642
Underdosing of cocaine – T405X6
Prolonged stay in weightless environment – X52

Will says his favorite so far is “Burn due to water skis on fire – V9107.” It’s a dangerous world,” he writes. “Be safe out there.”

Related: Each year the Occupational Safety and Health Administration publishes a list of workplace deaths, with a brief description of each incident:

Worker died when postal truck became partially submerged in lake.
Worker was caught between rotating drum and loading hopper of a ready-mix truck.
Worker fatally engulfed in dry cement when steel storage silo collapsed.
Worker on ladder struck and killed by lightning.
Worker was pulled into a tree chipper machine.
Worker was caught between two trucks and crushed.
Worker died when his head was impaled by metal from the drive section of a Ferris wheel. The employee slipped after acknowledging he was clear and the wheel began to turn, trapping his head.
Worker was draining a tank; one of the employees climbed to the top of the tank and lit a cigarette and waved it over the opening in the tank. The tank exploded, killing the worker.
Worker was kicked by an elephant.
Sheriff Deputy was walking through the woods, working a cold case, and fell 161 feet into a sink hole.

It’s hard to pick the worst one. “Worker was operating a skid-steer cleaning out a dairy cattle barn near an outdoor manure slurry pit. The skid-steer and the worker fell off the end of the push-off platform into the manure slurry pit, trapping the worker in the vehicle. Worker died of suffocation due to inhalation of manure.”

October 29, 2016October 28, 2016 | Death · Science & Math

Practicalities

If 6 cats can kill 6 rats in 6 minutes, how many will be needed to kill 100 rats in 50 minutes?

It’s easy enough to work out that the answer is 12, but consider what this means. “When we come to trace the history of this sanguinary scene through all its horrid details, we find that at the end of 48 minutes 96 rats are dead, and that there remain 4 live rats and 2 minutes to kill them in,” observed Lewis Carroll in the Monthly Packet in February 1880. “The question is, can this be done?”

Consider the original statement: 6 cats can kill 6 rats in 6 minutes. What can this actually mean? Carroll counts at least four possibilities:

A. “All 6 cats are needed to kill a rat; and this they do in one minute, the other rats standing meekly by, waiting for their turn.”
B. “3 cats are needed to kill a rat, and they do it in 2 minutes.”
C. “2 cats are needed, and they do it in 3 minutes.”
D. “Each cat kills a rat all by itself, and takes 6 minutes to do it.”

Now try to apply these to our conclusion that 12 cats can kill 100 rats in 50 minutes. Cases A and B work out, but Case C can work only if we understand that fractional deaths are possible: that 2 cats could kill two-thirds of a rat in 2 minutes. Similarly, Case D works only if a cat can kill one-third of a rat in 2 minutes.

The only way to resolve this absurdity, it seems, is to supply extra cats. “In case C less than 2 extra cats would be of no use. If 2 were supplied, and if they began killing their 4 rats at the beginning of the time, they would finish them in 12 minutes, and have 36 minutes to spare, during which they might weep, like Alexander, because there were not 12 more rats to kill. In case D, one extra cat would suffice; it would kill its 4 rats in 24 minutes, and have 24 minutes to spare, during which it could have killed another 4. But in neither case could any use be made of the last 2 minutes, except to half-kill rats — a barbarity we need not take into consideration.”

“To sum up our results: If the 6 cats kill the 6 rats by method A or B, the answer is ’12’; if by method C, ’14’; if by method D, ’13’.”

(Another problem: “If a cat can kill a rat in a minute, how long would it be killing 60,000 rats? Ah, how long, indeed! My private opinion is that the rats would kill the cat.”)

October 28, 2016October 27, 2016 | Science & Math

In a Word

celsitude
n. height; elevation; altitude

faineant
n. one who does nothing; an idler

ataraxia
n. a pleasure that comes when the mind is at rest

October 27, 2016 | Language