Faded Glory

“It is a curious thing that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.” — Evelyn Waugh

“I have read descriptions of Paradise that would make any sensible person stop wanting to go there.” — Montesquieu

“In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

“Of the delights of this world man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven.” — Mark Twain

“I should have no use for a paradise in which I should be deprived of the right to prefer hell.” — Jean Rostand

January 5, 2016January 4, 2016 | Quotations · Religion

Moving Violation

A revealing anecdote from Mank, Richard Meryman’s 1978 biography of Herman J. Mankiewicz, co-writer of Citizen Kane:

Herman was a mischievous child. One day after some misdemeanor, Herman was confined to the house by his mother. To keep him there during her absence, she hid the long stockings he needed for his knickers. Herman went to his mother’s room, put on a pair of her stockings, got on his bike, and rode off to the Wilkes-Barre public library, where he loved to browse among the shelves and to read for hours. When he came out, the precious bike was gone — stolen. Herman’s punishment was permanent. His father never bought him another bike. His mother answered Herman’s pleas by telling him it was all his own fault.

Meryman concludes, “Rosebud, the symbol of Herman’s damaging childhood, was not a sled. It was a bicycle.”

January 5, 2016January 4, 2016 | Entertainment

Words and Numbers

If you write out the numbers from 1 to 5000 in American English (e.g., THREE THOUSAND EIGHT HUNDRED SEVENTY-THREE), it turns out that only one of them has a unique number of characters. Which is it? Spaces and hyphens count as characters.

	Select Click for Answer
Of the nine nonzero digits, three require three characters (1, 2, 6), three require four characters (4, 5, 9), and three require five characters (3, 7, 8). This means that the last digit of the number we’re looking for must be zero, because any other digit would have counterparts of equal length. EIGHTY-ONE, for instance, is the same length as EIGHTY-TWO and EIGHTY-SIX. (It’s true that there are some unusually named numbers between 10 and 20, but it turns out that only one of these has a unique number of characters — 17, with nine — and 42 also uses nine characters.) The tens digit must also be zero, for similar reasons: 20, 30, 80, and 90 all use six characters; and 40, 50, and 60 use five. 10 uses three characters, but this matches 1, 2, and 6. 70 uses 7 characters, but so does 15. The discussion above regarding the units digit applies also to the hundreds digit, so that too is zero, and the candidates we’re left with are 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000, and 5000. Of these, only 3000 has a unique length, with 14 characters. (Proposed in Pi Mu Epsilon Journal Spring 1985 by Harry Herein; solved in PMEJ Spring 1986 by Bob LaBarre.)

Click for Answer

January 4, 2016January 10, 2016 | Puzzles

Podcast Episode 88: Mrs. Wilkinson and the Lyrebird

edith wilkinson and james

Almost nothing was known about Australia’s elusive lyrebird until 1930, when an elderly widow named Edith Wilkinson encountered one on her garden path one February morning. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow the curious friendship that evolved between Wilkinson and “James,” which led to an explosion of knowledge about his reclusive species.

We’ll also learn how Seattle literally remade itself in the early 20th century and puzzle over why a prolific actress was never paid for her work.

See full show notes …

January 4, 2016October 19, 2017 | Podcast

Progress

hammer-wielding monkey

Hollinwood, near Manchester, was the scene of a rather novel rat killing match the other day, between Mr. Benson’s fox terrier dog, Turk, and a Mr. Lewis’ monkey, for £5. The conditions of the match were that each one had to kill twelve rats, and the one that finished them the quickest to be declared the winner. You may guess what excitement this would cause in the ‘doggy’ circle. It was agreed that Turk was to finish his twelve rats first, which he did, and in good time, too, many bets being made on the dog after he had finished them. After a few minutes had elapsed it now came the monkey’s turn, and a commotion it caused. Time being called, the monkey was immediately put to his twelve rats, Mr. Lewis, the owner, at the same time putting his hand in his coat pocket and handing the monkey a peculiar hammer. This was a surprise to the onlookers; but the monkey was not long in getting to work with his hammer, and, once at work, he was not long in completing the task set before him. You may talk about a dog being quick at rat killing, but he is really not in it with the monkey and his hammer. Had the monkey been left in the ring much longer you could not have told that his victims had been rats at all — he was for leaving them in all shapes. Suffice it to say the monkey won with ease, having time to spare at the finish. Most persons present (including Mr. Benson, the owner of the dog) thought the monkey would worry the rats in the same manner as the dog does; but the conditions said to kill, and the monkey killed with a vengeance, and won the £5, beside a lot of bets for his owner.

— Illustrated Police News, Sept. 4, 1880

January 3, 2016January 2, 2016 | Oddities

Footwork

The first passenger railway in Australia was powered by convicts. Four-passenger carts ran on hardwood rails from the dock at the head of Norfolk Bay to the main settlement at Port Arthur, some 4.5 miles away. (Click the image to enlarge it.) On steep downhill slopes the carts could reach 30 mph, as observed by Col. Godfrey Mundy on an 1851 visit:

The prisoners seized certain bars crossing the front and back of the carriages, and after pushing them with great toil up a considerable plane, reached the top of a long descent, when, getting up their steam, down they rattled at tremendous speed — tremendous, at least, to lady-like nerves — the chains around their ankles chinking and clanking as they trotted along. … [T]he runners jumped upon the side of the trucks in rather unpleasant proximity with the passengers, and away we all went, bondsmen and freemen, jolting and swaying … a man sitting behind contrived, more or less, to lock a wheel with a wood crowbar when the descent became so rapid as to call for remonstrance.

He added, “Our poor beasts of burthen at the end of the traject seemed terribly jaded, running down with sweat, and saw one of them continually trying to shift his irons from a galled spot on his ankle.” On the return journey that afternoon, the leader asked whether they might stop briefly, as the men had had nothing to eat for 12 hours.

After visiting a similar railway at Ralph Bay Neck in 1847, Lt.-Gov. Sir William Denison wrote, “I must say that my feelings at seeing myself seated, and pushed along by these miserable convicts, were not very pleasant. It was painful to see them in the condition of slaves, which, in fact, they are, waiting for me up to their knees in water.”

(From Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore, 1987.)

January 2, 2016January 2, 2016 | Technology

“The Peace Problem”

bondarenko peace problem

In 1984, at the height of the Cold War, Ukrainian chess journalist F.S. Bondarenko dedicated this puzzle to English chess editor A.J. Roycroft in the spirit of peace and goodwill.

White’s army is arranged as above. Add Black’s army (the standard complement of 8 pieces and 8 pawns) so that no piece of either color is under attack.

	Select Click for Answer

December 31, 2015January 10, 2016 | Puzzles

Unquote

“Congress is so strange. A man gets up to speak and says nothing. Nobody listens — and then everybody disagrees.” — Russian actor Boris Marshalov, after visiting the House of Representatives

December 30, 2015December 28, 2015 | Quotations · Society

In a Word

agamy
n. absence of marriage; the state or condition of being unmarried

viripotent
adj. (of a woman) physically fit for marriage

affidation
n. sworn confirmation of one’s intent to marry

deuterogamy
n. marriage a second time

December 30, 2015December 28, 2015 | Language

Pascal’s Primes

In Pascal’s triangle, each number is the sum of the two immediately above it:

In 1972, Henry Mann and Daniel Shanks found a curious connection between the triangle and prime numbers. Stagger the triangle’s rows so that row n starts at column 2n:

pascal prime table

Now a column number is prime precisely when the numbers in that column are each divisible by their row number. For instance, in the diagram above, column 13 has two entries — 10, which is divisible by 5, and 6, which is divisible by 6 — so 13 is prime. The numbers in column 12 are not all evenly divisible by their row numbers, so 12 is not prime.

“It’s a nifty and surprising result,” writes James Tanton in Mathematics Galore! (2012), “but it is not a formula that allows us to find prime numbers with ease.”

(Henry B. Mann and Daniel Shanks, “A Necessary and Sufficient Condition for Primality, and Its Source,” Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A 13:1 [1972], 131-134.)

December 29, 2015December 28, 2015 | Science & Math