Early Adopter

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Mark Twain boasted both that “I was the first person in the world that ever had a telephone in his house” and that “I was the first person in the world to apply the type-machine to literature.” The latter may be true — Twain began experimenting with a Remington No. 2 typewriter in 1874. He reckoned that the book must have been Tom Sawyer; in fact it was probably Life on the Mississippi.

Other writers have been slower to adopt new technology. “This is a nervous letter,” wrote Flannery O’Connor to Cecil Dawkins in 1959. “I am congratulating you on the electric typewriter. It is very nice but I am not used to it yet. I keep thinking about all the electricity that is being wasted while I think what I am going to say next.”

| Literature · Technology

The Weight of the World

kinmont 8 natural handstands

In 1969 artist Robert Kinmont produced 8 Natural Handstands, a series of photographs of himself standing on his hands in various locations.

Each, he said, depicted an upside-down view of Atlas holding up the earth.

“This world,” wrote Thoreau, “is but canvas to our imaginations.”

| Art

Public Enemy

In his 1880 autobiography, Henry Armitt Brown recalls a strange incident from his student days. While a law student in November 1865, he had gone to bed one midnight and dreamed that he was lying on the cobblestones of a narrow street, held down by a “low-browed, thick-set man” who was bent on killing him. He threw the man off and bit at his throat, but the man smiled and brought out a bright hatchet. Brown’s friends leaped to his aid, but as they did so “I saw the hatchet flash above my head and felt instantly a dull blow on the forehead.” He tasted blood and seemed to hover in the air over his own body, where he could see “the hatchet sticking in the head, and the ghastliness of death gradually spreading over the face.”

The following morning, as they walked to school, a friend of his remarked that he’d had a strange dream that night. “I fell asleep about twelve and immediately dreamed that I was passing through a narrow street, when I heard noises and cries of murder. Hurrying in the direction of the noise, I saw you lying on your back fighting with a rough laboring man, who held you down. I rushed forward, but as I reached you he struck you on the head with a hatchet, and killed you instantly.” At Brown’s inquiry he described the murderer as “a thick-set man, in a flannel shirt and rough trousers: his hair was uncombed, and his beard was grizzly and of a few days’ growth.”

A week later Brown called at a friend’s house in New Jersey:

‘My husband,’ said his wife to me, ‘had such a horrid dream about you the other night. He dreamed that a man killed you in a street fight. He ran to help you, but before he reached the spot your enemy had killed you with a great club.’

‘Oh, no,’ cried the husband across the room; ‘he killed you with a hatchet.’

“I remembered the remark of old Artaphernes,” Brown wrote, “that dreams are often the result of a train of thought started by conversation or reading, or the incidents of the working time, but I could recall nothing, nor could either of my friends cite any circumstance ‘that ever they had read, had ever heard by tale or history,’ in which they could trace the origin of this remarkable dream.”

| Oddities

The Friendship Theorem

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

If every pair of people in a group have exactly one friend in common, then there’s always one person who is a friend to everyone.

This rather heartwarming fact was proven by Paul Erdős, Alfréd Rényi, and Vera T. Sós in 1966. It’s sometimes more cynically known as the paradox of the politician.

The Erdős proof uses combinatorics and linear algebra, but in 1972 Judith Longyear published a proof using elementary graph theory.

See The Elevator Problem.

| Science & Math

Unquote

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“The origin of science is in the desire to know causes; and the origin of all false science and imposture is in the desire to accept false causes rather than none; or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance.” — William Hazlitt

| Quotations · Science & Math

An Attorney’s Night Before Christmas

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WHEREAS, on an occasion immediately preceding the Nativity Festival, throughout a certain dwelling unit, quiet descended, in which would be heard no disturbance, not even the sound emitted by a diminutive rodent related to, and in form resembling, a rat; and

WHEREAS, the offspring of the occupants had affixed their tubular, closely knit coverings for the nether limbs to the flue of the fireplace in the expectation that a personage known as St. Nicholas would arrive; and

WHEREAS, said offspring had become somnolent and were entertaining nocturnal hallucinations re: saccharine-flavored fruit; and

WHEREAS, the adult male of the family, et ux, attired in proper headgear, had also become quiescent in anticipation of nocturnal inertia; and

WHEREAS, a distraction on the snowy acreage outside aroused the owner to investigate; and

WHEREAS, he perceived in a most unbelieving manner a vehicle propelled by eight domesticated quadrupeds of a species found in arctic regions; and

WHEREAS, a most odd rotund gentleman was entreating the aforesaid animals by their appellations, as follows: “Your immediate cooperation is requested, Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, and Vixen, and collective action by you will be appreciated, Comet, Cupid, Donder, and Blitzen”; and

WHEREAS, subsequent to the above, there occured a swift descent to the hearth by the aforementioned gentleman, where he proceeded to deposit gratuities in the aforementioned tubular coverings,

NOW, THEREFORE, be ye advised: That upon completion of these acts, and upon his return to his original point of departure, he proclaimed a felicitation of the type prevalent and suitable to these occasions, i.e., “Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”

(I’m not sure who came up with this — I’ve seen several versions.)

| Poems

The Death Mask Stamps

In 1903 Serbian king Alexander I and his queen were murdered in their palace. Alexander’s successor, Peter Karageorgevich, rescinded postage stamps bearing the dead king’s portrait and marked his own coronation with this stamp, depicting twin profiles of himself and his ancestor Black George, a Serbian patriot:

karageorgevich stamp

If he’d hoped this would allay suspicion, he was mistaken. In Through Savage Europe (1907), writer Harry De Windt notes that when the stamp is turned upside down, “the gashed and ghastly features of the murdered King stand out with unmistakable clearness”:

karageorgevich stamp - inverted

That’s a bit overstated. Here’s Alexander’s original stamp and the purported “death mask” — gaze at it blankly and Alexander’s features will emerge from the noses, brows, and chins:

alexander and the "death mask"

“Needless to state, the issue was at once prohibited.”

| Death · History · Oddities

Observations

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More maxims of La Rochefoucauld:

  • “We endeavour to get Reputation by those Faults we won’t amend.”
  • “We never desire vehemently what we desire rationally.”
  • “Whatever Distrust we may have of People’s Sincerity, we always believe they are more ingenuous with us than with any body else.”
  • “We promise according to our Hopes, and perform according to our Fears.”
  • “Repentance is not so much Remorse for what we have done, as Fear of its Consequences.”
  • “Our Enemies come nearer the Truth in their Judgment of us, than we do ourselves.”
  • “We don’t despise all those who have Vices, but we despise all those who have no Virtues.”
  • “None but such as are contemptible are apprehensive of Contempt.”
  • “That Conduct often seems ridiculous the secret Reasons of which are wise and solid.”
  • “Censorious as the World is, it oftner shews Favour to false Merit, than it does Injustice to true.”
  • “Our Fancy sets the Value on all we receive from Fortune.”

And “We take less Pains to be happy, as to appear so.”

| Quotations · Society