“If I don’t know I don’t know, I think I know. If I don’t know I know, I think I don’t know.” — R.D. Laing
Podcast Episode 74: Charley Parkhurst’s Secret
“One-Eyed Charley” Parkhurst drove a stagecoach throughout California during the height of the Gold Rush, rising to the top of a difficult, dangerous, and highly competitive profession at its historic peak. Only after his death in 1879 at age 67 was it discovered that Charley was a woman. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast, we’ll tell what’s known of Charley Parkhurst’s courageous and enigmatic life story.
We’ll also hear listeners’ input on the legalities of an anti-Christian town and puzzle over a lucky driver and his passenger.
Ancient Wordplay
The 19th canto of the Sanskrit epic poem Shishupala Vadha is a tour de force of ingenious wordplay, including double meanings, constrained writing, and concrete poetry. The 27th stanza has been called “the most complex and exquisite type of palindrome ever invented” — it produces the same text when read forward, backward, down, or up:
“[That army], which relished battle, contained allies who brought low the bodies and gaits of their various striving enemies, and in it the cries of the best of mounts contended with musical instruments.”
The Babylonian Theodicy is a cuneiform poem of 27 stanzas of 11 lines each. All the sentences in each stanza begin with the same sign, and if these signs are read in order, they produce an acrostic that identifies the author:
a-na-ku sa-ag-gi-il-ki-i-na-am-ub-bi-ib ma-áš-ma-šu ka-ri-bu ša i-li ú šar-ri
“I, Saggil-kīnam-ubbib, the incantation priest, am adorant of the god and the king.”
See also The Star Gauge. (Thanks, Sujan.)
A Late Plea
On July 21, 1904, the London Times published a curious letter from H. Rider Haggard. On the night of Saturday, July 9, he said, he had gone to bed at about 12:30 “and suffered from what I took to be a nightmare”:
I dreamed that a black retriever dog, a most amiable and intelligent beast named Bob, which was the property of my eldest daughter, was lying on its side among brushwood, or rough growth of some sort, by water. In my vision the dog was trying to speak to me in words, and, failing, transmitted to my mind in an undefined fashion the knowledge that it was dying. Then everything vanished, and I woke to hear my wife asking me why on earth I was making those horrible and weird noises. I replied that I had had a nightmare about a fearful struggle, and that I had dreamed that old Bob was in a dreadful way, and was trying to talk to me and to tell me about it.
The following morning Haggard and his wife told the story to their daughters, and it was not until that evening that the family realized that Bob was missing. Haggard began to investigate, and on Thursday morning he and a groom discovered the dog’s body floating in the River Waveney about a mile and a quarter from the author’s home. Haggard was also approached by two railway plate-layers who on Monday had found the dog’s collar atop a bridge that crossed the water between Ditchingham and Bungay. “It would seem that the animal must have been killed by an excursion train that left Ditchingham at 10.25 on Saturday night, returning empty from Harlestone a little after 11.” This was the last train that ran that night, and no trains ran on Sunday.
It appeared that the train had knocked the dog into the reedy margin of the water, where, if it was still alive, “it must have suffocated and sunk, undergoing, I imagine, much the same sensations as I did in my dream, and in very similar surroundings to those that I saw therein — namely, amongst a scrubby growth at the edge of water.”
I am forced to conclude that the dog Bob, between whom and myself there existed a mutual attachment, either at the moment of his death, if his existence can conceivably have been prolonged till after one in the morning, or, as seems more probable, about three hours after that event, did succeed in calling my attention to its actual or recent plight by placing whatever portion of my being is capable of receiving such impulses when enchained by sleep, into its own terrible position.
The full letter is here. Haggard added a certificate by a veterinary surgeon, affirming that Bob must have been in the water three days; from his wife and children, confirming his description of the nightmare on Sunday morning; from the plate-layer who discovered the collar; and from the groom who had found the dog with him. Draw your own conclusions.
Getting More Fiber
You’re locked on the roof of a building that’s 800 feet tall, and you want to reach the ground uninjured. You can safely fall only about 5 feet. The walls of the building are completely smooth and featureless, except that one wall has a small ledge that’s 400 feet above the ground. There’s a hook on this ledge, and another hook directly above it at the edge of the roof.
You have 600 feet of rope and a knife. How can you reach the ground?
Decisions
A man who enters a public restroom has to make a complex choice quickly. He wants to choose a urinal that maximizes his chances of maintaining privacy — that is, that minimizes the chance that someone will occupy a urinal next to him. Which choice is best?
Computer scientists Evangelos Kranakis and Danny Krizanc modeled a number of strategies: lazily choosing the closest urinal that provides privacy; tacitly cooperating in the decision with other men; maximizing one’s distance from other occupants; and making the choice randomly. Happily, their findings support the general intuition:
Our main conclusion is that when faced with the decision of what urinal to choose upon entering the men’s room, in order to maximize your privacy, you should probably choose the one furthest from the door if it is available and the one next to it is unoccupied. For a vast majority of the (what we consider) natural behaviors that men choosing urinals might follow, this choice is optimal.
Related: In 1984 Donald E. Knuth noticed that the toilet paper dispensers in Stanford’s computer science department hold two rolls of tissue, both of which are available for use. Suppose there are two sorts of people in the world, those who are disposed to draw from the larger roll and those who draw from the smaller roll, and that each user takes exactly one sheet from his favored roll. What’s the expected number of sheets remaining just after one of the two rolls has been emptied? Donald E. Knuth’s Toilet Paper Problem.
(Evangelos Kranakis and Danny Krizanc, “The Urinal Problem,” in Paolo Boldi and Luisa Gargano, eds., Fun With Algorithms: 5th International Conference, Fun 2010, Iscia, Italy, June 2010: Proceedings.)
A Tone Palette
In his Musical Biography of 1824, John R. Parker attempts to characterize musical keys in words:
“It is sufficient to have hinted at these effects,” he writes. “To account for them, is difficult; but every musician is sensible of their existence.”
In a Word
battailous
adj. ready for battle; warlike
scious
adj. possessing knowledge
didascalic
adj. pertaining to a teacher
Among Union Army regiments, the 33rd Illinois became known as the “brains” regiment because it contained so many teachers. “It was stated derisively that the men would not obey orders which were not absolutely correct in syntax and orthography and that men who were discharged from it for mental incapacity, at once secured positions as officers in other regiments.” Many of them came from Illinois State Normal University; of the 97 teachers and pupils on the university’s rolls in 1860-1861, 53 entered the army.
(Charles A. Harper, Development of the Teachers College in the United States, With Special Reference to the Illinois State Normal University, 1935.)
Looking Back
Amazingly, we have a photograph of a man who crossed the Delaware with George Washington. This is Conrad Heyer, born in 1749 and photographed in 1852 at age 103. He served in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, crossed the Delaware with Washington in December 1776, and fought in several major battles. The Maine Historical Society says that this makes him the earliest-born human being ever to be photographed.
The footage below shows Despina, the grandmother of Balkan film pioneers Yanaki and Milton Manaki, spinning and weaving in the Ottoman Balkans in 1905. She was 114 years old at the time, which means we have video of a person born in the 1700s.
Heart and Head
Just offering this as a curiosity:
It was devised by the late Japanese cryptogramist Kyoko Ohnishi, and praised by puzzle maven Nob Yoshigahara. If each letter stands for a unique digit, what product is encoded here?
When this appeared in MIT Technology Review in November 2012, it attracted 20 responses, but it appears that all of them used computers to find the solution. If there’s a way to reason it out, I don’t think anyone has found it yet.
If we assume that neither of the factors has a leading zero, and that the partial products have five and four digits, as shown, then the solution is unique. I’ll put it in the spoiler box below, in case you want to work on it yourself.