Three coins are lying on a table: a quarter, a half dollar, and a silver dollar. You claim one coin, I’ll claim the other two, and then we’ll toss all three. A coin that lands tails counts zero, and a coin that lands heads wins its value (in cents, 25, 50, or 100) for its owner. Whichever of us has the larger score wins all three coins. If all three coins land tails then we toss again.
Which coin should you claim to make the game fair — that is, so that each of us has an expected win of zero?
In 1916 an American circus elephant named Mary was hanged before a crowd of 3,000 onlookers. In this week’s podcast we’ll review the sad series of events that led Mary to a Tennessee railroad crane.
We’ll also get an update on a very inventive bank robbery and puzzle over the escalators in London’s Tube stations.
From a letter from Adam Sedgwick to his niece Fanny Hicks, July 23, 1846:
The miserable damp weather made me rheumatic and low-spirited, so I nursed one day in Carnarvon and then drove to Pwllheli. What a charming name! In order to pronounce the first part (Pwll), you must blow out your cheeks just as you do when puffing at a very obstinate candle; then you must rapidly and cunningly put your tongue to the roof of your mouth behind the fore teeth, and blow hard between your cheeks and your tongue, holding your tongue quite steady all the while, as a man does a spade just before he is going to give it a good thrust with his right foot. With such a beautiful direction you cannot fail to pronounce Pwll quite like a genuine Celt. Should the word be Bwlch, take care to observe the previous directions, only, in addition, while the wind is whistling between your rigid tongue (sticking forwards spade-fashion), and your distended cheeks, contrive by way of a finale to give a noise with your throat such as you make when an intrusive fishbone is sticking in it.
He added, “If you put off writing for a day or two, why then address me at Post Office, Machynlleth, North Wales. … yn is sounded as the grunt given by a broken-winded pavier.”
A puzzle by Anatoly Savin: Using each of the digits 1, 2, 3, and 4 twice, write out an eight-digit number in which there is one digit between the 1s, two digits between the 2s, three digits between the 3s, and four digits between the 4s.
In 1969, as a joke, Rolling Stone published a review of a nonexistent album by a nonexistent band, a supposed “supergroup” made up of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, and Bob Dylan. Editor Greil Marcus had intended this as a self-evident parody of groups like Blind Faith and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, but readers began clamoring for the album. So Marcus and editor Langdon Winner recruited a Berkeley skiffle band and retroactively recorded a few of the songs that had been mentioned in the review.
When California radio stations began to play these songs, the hoax took on a life of its own. Marcus began to shop the band to major labels, and Warner Bros. won the contract with a $15,000 advance. The Masked Marauders came out that November with liner notes making it clear that the whole thing was a joke. Nonetheless, on the strength of its own bootstrapped glamor the record sold 100,000 copies and spent 12 weeks on the Billboard charts.
Related: In 2004 Dave Stewart and Kara DioGuardi invented a band called Platinum Weird that they insisted had existed in 1974. Supposedly it had been a partnership between Stewart and a mysterious singer/songwriter named Erin Grace who, among other accomplishments, had introduced Stevie Nicks to Lindsey Buckingham. In July 2006 VH1 even aired a documentary in which Ringo Starr, Bob Geldof, Elton John, and Mick Jagger pretended to reminisce about the band. On the same day, though, Stewart admitted to the Los Angeles Times that the whole thing had been a hoax.
“Lots of artists from the ’60s created mythology about themselves,” he said. “We’re in our own perception of our own world. So what’s reality and what’s not?”
(Thanks, Jeremy.)
As Shakespeare couldn’t write his plays
(If Mrs. Gallup’s not mistaken),
I think how wise in many ways
He was to have them done by Bacon;
They might have moldered on the shelf,
Mere minor dramas (and he knew it!),
If he had written them himself
Instead of letting Bacon do it.
And if it’s true, as Brown and Smith
In many learned tomes have stated,
That Homer was an idle myth,
He ought to be congratulated,
Since thus, evading birth, he rose
For men to worship at a distance;
He might have penned inferior prose
Had he achieved a real existence.
To him and Shakespeare men agree
In making very nice allusions;
But no one thinks of praising me,
For I compose my own effusions;
As others wrote their works divine
And they immortal thus today are,
Perhaps had someone written mine
I might have been as great as they are.
— Arthur St. John Adcock
Arrange three congruent equilateral triangles so that their corners meet at a point, like the red triangles above. The arrangement doesn’t have to be symmetric; the triangles can even overlap. Now draw lines BC, DE, and FA to complete a hexagon inscribed in a circle. The midpoints of these three lines will form the vertices of an equilateral triangle.
That’s called the asymmetric propeller theorem, and it’s been known since the 1930s. But in 1979 Beverly Hills dentist and geometry enthusiast Leon Bankoff told Martin Gardner of some further discoveries. Bankoff never found time to write them up, so after the dentist’s death in 1997 Gardner published them in the College Mathematics Journal:
Given all this flexibility, Gardner asked, do the propellers even have to be triangles? It turns out that the answer is yes. Still, the discoveries above form a fitting tribute to Bankoff, whom Gardner called “one of the most remarkable mathematicians I have been privileged to know.”
(Martin Gardner, “The Asymmetric Propeller,” College Mathematics Journal 30:1 [January 1999], 18-22.)
It was a good answer that was made by one who when they showed him hanging in a temple a picture of those who had paid their vows as having escaped shipwreck, and would have him say whether he did not now acknowledge the power of the gods, — ‘Aye,’ asked he again, ‘but where are they painted that were drowned after their vows?’ And such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like; wherein men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, though this happens much oftener, neglect and pass them by.
— Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620
The pickle industry’s “man of the year” in 1948 was named Dill L. Pickle.
I can’t think of anything to say about this.
pseudery
n. intellectual or social pretension or affectation; pseudo-intellectual speech, writing, debate, etc.
literose
adj. pretentiously or affectedly literary
morosoph
n. a learned fool
