A Narrowing Window

In 2006 I noted this excerpt from Lillie de Hagermann-Lindencrone’s 1912 book In the Courts of Memory:

I sang, and thought I sang very well; but he just looked up into my face with a very quizzical expression, and said, ‘How long have you been singing, Mademoiselle?’

The bolded section is a “pangrammatic window,” a string of naturally occurring text that contains all the letters of the (English) alphabet. This one is 56 letters long.

That was nine years ago. Can we do better? In 2012 a 42-letter example was discovered in Piers Anthony’s novel Cube Route:

‘We are all from Xanth,’ Cube said quickly. ‘Just visiting Phaze. We just want to find the dragon.’

Last year, Jesse Sheidlower wrote a bot that retweets pangrams that it finds on Twitter. Inspired by this, Google software engineer Malcolm Rowe set out to search first Project Gutenberg and then the web for the shortest possible window. Remarkably, he found one of only 36 letters, in a review of the film Magnolia by Todd Ramlow, for PopMatters:

Further, fractal geometries are replicated on a human level in the production of certain ‘types’ of subjectivity: for example, aging kid quiz show whiz Donnie Smith (William H. Macy) and up and coming kid quiz show whiz Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman) are connected (or, perhaps, being cloned) in ways they couldn’t possibly imagine.

(The link seems to be down at the moment.)

“I’m pretty impressed by this result,” Rowe writes. “It’s only one letter longer than “The quick brown fox …”, and while that’s not the shortest possible pangram by far, it is one of the more coherent ones.”

(Thanks, Malcolm.)

| Language

Square Routes

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pascal%27s_triangle_pathways.svg

If you fit Pascal’s triangle into a grid, then each cell displays the number of distinct paths that lead to that cell from the upper left (assuming only rightward and downward movements and no backtracking).

So, above, the cell marked 4 in the second row, fourth column, can be reached in 4 ways: 1-1-1-4, 1-1-3-4, 1-2-3-4, and 1-2-3-4.

| Science & Math

No Waiting

https://www.flickr.com/photos/stewf/1479856780
Image: Flickr

For Fuse 18, the experimental typographic publication that appeared in February 2001, type designer Matthew Carter reflected on the grand lettering that appears on public buildings: It’s meant to last for eternity, but inevitably it’s effaced by weather, by other inscriptions, and by the graffiti of vandals.

So, wryly, he offered DeFace, which speeds up the process.

“This typeface,” he wrote, “contains a set of inscriptional capitals that are self-vandalizing: each letter has graffiti associated with it that deface neighboring letters. Depending on the text, the graffiti can vandalize both the underlying capitals and other graffiti to make a palimpsest of marks that are individually legible but obscure in combination.”

| Art

Podcast Episode 74: Charley Parkhurst’s Secret

2015-09-21-podcast-episode-74-charley-parkhursts-secret-1

“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.

See full show notes …

| Podcast

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shishupala_Vadha#Linguistic_ingenuity

“[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.)

| Language

A Late Plea

http://www.futilitycloset.com/2009/08/16/a-late-visitor/

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.

| Oddities

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?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Decisions

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

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.)

| Science & Math

A Tone Palette

In his Musical Biography of 1824, John R. Parker attempts to characterize musical keys in words:

parker keys

“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.”

| Art