“Quiet Fun”
My son Augustus, in the street, one day,
Was feeling quite exceptionally merry.
A stranger asked him: “Can you tell me, pray,
The quickest way to Brompton Cemetery?”
“The quickest way? You bet I can!” said Gus,
And pushed the fellow underneath a bus.
— Harry Graham
True Colors
In the early 1900s, Prussian authorities forbade Danes living in North Frisia from raising the Danish flag, above.
So they bred flag-colored pigs, below. The “Danish protest pig” was probably developed by crossbreeding Jutlandian and Holsteinian marsh pigs, red individuals from the Angeln Saddleback breed, and Tamworth pigs from England. Only around 140 individuals exist worldwide, but Schleswig-Holstein is trying to preserve the breed for its cultural value.
Ride Sharing
You and I have to travel from Startville to Endville, but we have only one bicycle between us. So we decide to leapfrog: We’ll leave Startville at the same time, you walking and I riding. I’ll ride for 1 mile, and then I’ll leave the bicycle at the side of the road and continue on foot. When you reach the bike you’ll ride it for 1 mile, passing me at some point, then leave the bike and continue walking. And so on — we’ll continue in this way until we’ve both reached the destination.
Will this save any time? You say yes: Each of us is riding for part of the distance, and riding is faster than walking, so using the bike must increase our average speed.
I say no: One or the other of us is always walking; ultimately every inch of the distance between Startville and Endville is traversed by someone on foot. So the total time is unchanged — leapfrogging with the bike is no better than walking the whole distance on foot.
Who’s right?
Love Walks In
Personal ads from the New York Herald in the 1860s:
IF THE LADY WHO, FROM AN OMNIBUS, SMILED on a gentleman with a bunch of bananas in his hand, as he crossed Wall street, corner of Broadway, will address X., box 6,735 Post office, she will confer a favor. (March 21, 1866)
ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON A LADY WITH black silk quilted hat walked nearly side by side with a gentleman in a drab overcoat from Tenth to Fourteenth street, in Broadway. Both were annoyed by the wind and dust. Her smile has haunted him ever since. Will she send her address to Carl, Union square Post office? (March 8, 1861)
BOOTH’S THEATRE, THURSDAY EVENING, 11TH. Will the lady who met the gent’s gaze through an opera glass and smiled please address, in confidence, Harry Wilton, Herald office? (March 13, 1869)
A YEAR AGO LAST SEPTEMBER OR OCTOBER TWO ladies with a child were travelling on the Hudson River cars, one of whom offered a seat to a middle aged gentleman, with light whiskers or goatee, slightly gray, who kindly pointed out to her the red leaved trees, and said he had a number of them on his place, and made himself otherwise agreeable; and when she was leaving him (ten miles this side of where he stopped) gave her a parting embrace, which she has never been able to forget. If the gentleman has any recollection of the circumstance he will greatly oblige by addressing a note to Lena Bigelow, Madison square Post office, giving some description of the lady, also name of the paper he gave her. (Jan. 25, 1862)
In a Word
macrotous
adj. having large ears
capitose
adj. large-headed
dolichoderous
adj. long-necked
ventripotent
adj. having a large belly
dolichopodous
adj. having long feet
sciapodous
adj. “That resembles the Sciapodes; having very large feet.”
Making Pi
We’ve mentioned before that you can estimate π by dropping needles on the floor. (Reader Steven Karp also directed me to this remarkable solution, from Daniel A. Klain and Gian-Carlo Rota’s Introduction to Geometric Probability [1997].)
Here’s a related curiosity. If a circle of diameter L is placed at random on a pattern of circles of unit diameter, which are arranged hexagonally with centers C apart, then the probability that the placed circle will fall entirely inside one of the fixed circles is
If we put k = C/(1 – L), we get
And a frequency estimate of P will give us an estimate of π.
Remarkably, in 1933 A.L. Clarke actually tried this. In Scripta Mathematica, N.T. Gridgeman writes:
His circle was a ball-bearing, and his scissel a steel plate. Contacts between the falling ball and the plate were electrically transformed into earphone clicks, which virtually eliminated doubtful hits. With student help, a thousand man-hours went into the accumulation of N = 250,000. The k was about 8/5, and the final ‘estimate’ of π was 3.143, to which was appended a physical error of ±0.005.
“This is more or less the zenith of accuracy and precision,” Gridgeman writes. “It could not be bettered by any reasonable increase in N — even if the physical error could be reduced, hundreds of millions of falls would be needed to establish a third decimal place with confidence.”
(N.T. Gridgeman, “Geometric Probability and the Number π,” Scripta Mathematica 25:3 [November 1960], 183-195.)
Forward and Back
When my brother and I built and flew the first man-carrying flying machine, we thought that we were introducing into the world an invention which would make further wars practically impossible. That we were not alone in this thought is evidenced by the fact that the French Peace Society presented us with medals on account of our invention. We thought governments would realize the impossibility of winning by surprise attacks, and that no country would enter into war with another of equal size when it knew that it would have to win by simply wearing out its enemy.
— Orville Wright to C.M. Hitchcock, June 21, 1917
Podcast Episode 58: English as She Is Spoke
In 1855 Pedro Carolino decided to write a Portuguese-English phrasebook despite the fact that he didn’t actually speak English. The result is one of the all-time masterpieces of unintentional comedy, a language guide full of phrases like “The ears are too length” and “He has spit in my coat.” In this episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll sample Carolino’s phrasebook, which Mark Twain called “supreme and unapproachable.”
We’ll also hear Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” rendered in jargon and puzzle over why a man places an ad before robbing a bank.
A Passing Wave
A puzzle from J.A.H. Hunter’s Fun With Figures (1956):
A man paddling a canoe upstream sees a glove in the water as he passes under a bridge. Fifteen minutes later, he turns around and paddles downstream. He passes under the bridge and travels another mile before reaching the rock from which he started, which the glove is just passing. If he paddled at the same speed the whole time and lost no time in turning around, what is the speed of the current?