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.
In a Word
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
Howdunit
Raymond Chandler’s 10 rules for writing a detective novel:
- It must be credibly motivated, both as to the original situation and the dénouement.
- It must be technically sound as to the methods of murder and detection.
- It must be realistic in character, setting and atmosphere. It must be about real people in a real world.
- It must have a sound story value apart from the mystery element: i.e., the investigation itself must be an adventure worth reading.
- It must have enough essential simplicity to be explained easily when the time comes.
- It must baffle a reasonably intelligent reader.
- The solution must seem inevitable once revealed.
- It must not try to do everything at once. If it is a puzzle story operating in a rather cool, reasonable atmosphere, it cannot also be a violent adventure or a passionate romance.
- It must punish the criminal in one way or another, not necessarily by operation of the law. … If the detective fails to resolve the consequences of the crime, the story is an unresolved chord and leaves irritation behind it.
- It must be honest with the reader.
That’s from Chandler’s notebooks. As it happens, Dashiell Hammett, Ronald Knox, and S.S. Van Dine all came up with similar lists. Mystery writers must be very methodical people.
Parrondo’s Paradox
Imagine a staircase with 1001 stairs, numbered -500 to 500. You’re standing in the middle, on stair 0, and you want to reach the top. On each step you can play either of two coin-flipping games — if the result is heads then you move up a step; if it’s tails then you move down a step:
- In game 1 you flip coin A, which is slightly biased: It comes up heads 49.5 percent of the time and tails 50.5 percent.
- In game 2 you use two coins, B and C. Coin B produces heads 9.5 percent of the time and tails 90.5 percent. Coin C produces heads 74.5 percent of the time and tails 25.5 percent. In game 2 if the number of the stair you’re on is a multiple of 3 then you flip coin B; otherwise you flip coin C.
Both of these are losing games — if you played either game 1 or game 2 exclusively, you’d eventually find yourself at the bottom of the staircase. But in 1996 Spanish physicist Juan Parrondo found that if you play the two games in succession in random order, keeping your place on the staircase as you switch between them, you’ll rise to the top of the staircase. It’s not, properly speaking, a paradox, but it’s certainly counterintuitive.
This example is from David Darling’s Universal Book of Mathematics. (Thanks, Nick.)
“What’ll Be the Title?”
O to scuttle from the battle and to settle on an atoll far from brutal mortal neath a wattle portal!
To keep little mottled cattle and to whittle down one’s chattels and not hurtle after brittle yellow metal!
To listen, non-committal, to the anecdotal local tittle-tattle on a settle round the kettle,
Never startled by a rattle more than betel-nuts a-prattle or the myrtle-petals’ subtle throttled chortle!
But I’ll bet that what’ll happen if you footle round an atoll is you’ll get in rotten fettle living totally on turtle, nettles, cuttle-fish or beetles, victuals fatal to the natal élan-vital,
And hit the bottle.
I guess I’d settle
For somewhere ethical and practical like Bootle.
— Justin Richardson
Arms Race
Fly-plagued and enterprising in 1919, G.W. Blake came up with this inventive solution. The spring-loaded pistol shoots a projectile bearing a woven wire screen fast enough to surprise an unwitting fly who might have been expecting a low-tech flyswatter.
Next I suppose the flies will start shooting us.
A Disturbing Dinner
When British traveler Richard Gordon Smith reached Japan’s Lake Biwa in 1906, he asked a local cook whether he could prepare the rare dish koi-no-ikizukuri (“a carp cut up alive”), which had been offered at nobles’ feasts in ancient times. The cook, delighted, brought in a red lacquered tray decorated to resemble the sea bottom. On it lay a carp that opened and shut its mouth and gills as if it were swimming in water. “The dish was really pretty in spite of the gasping fish which, however, showed no pain, and there was not a sign of blood or a cut.” But “Now we are ready,” said the cook, and he dribbled some soy sauce into the fish’s eye:
The effect was not instantaneous: it took a full two minutes as the cook sat over him, chopsticks in hand. All of a sudden and to my unutterable astonishment, the fish gave a convulsive gasp, flicked its tail and flung the whole of its skin on one side of its body over, exposing the underneath of the stomach parts, skinned; the back was cut into pieces about an inch square and a quarter of an inch thick, ready for pulling out and eating.
“Never in my life have I seen a more barbarous or cruel thing,” Smith wrote, “not even the scenes at Spanish bull fights. Egawa [his interpreter] is a delicate-stomached person and as he could eat none, neither could I. It would be simply like taking bites out of a large live fish. I took the knife from my belt and immediately separated the fish’s neck vertebrae, much to the cook’s astonishment and perhaps disgust.” He asked them to take it away. “You have certainly operated beautifully,” he said, “but the sooner a law is brought in to prevent such cruelty the better.”
(From Travels in the Land of the Gods: The Japan Diaries of Richard Gordon Smith, 1986.)
The Jeweler’s Observation
Prove that every convex polyhedron has at least two faces with the same number of sides.
Podcast Episode 59: The Wizard of Mauritius
In 1764 a French engineer on a tiny African island claimed that he could see ships beyond the horizon. In today’s show we’ll review the strange story of Étienne Bottineau and consider the evidence for his claims to have invented a new art.
We’ll also ponder a 400-year-old levitation trick and puzzle over why throwing a beer can at someone might merit a promotion.
Byplay
In illustrating his Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling hid messages in the runic characters accompanying some drawings. The tusk above illustrates “How the First Letter Was Written”:
Left side: “This is the stori of Taffimai all ritten out on an old tusk. If u begin at the top left hand corner and go on to the right u can see for urself things as the happened.”
Right side: “The reason that I spell so queerli is becase there are not enough letters in the Runic alphabet for all the ourds that I ouant to use to u o beloved.”
Bottom (barely visible here): “This is the identical tusk on ouich the tale of Taffimai was ritten and etched bi the author.”
The initial “H” at the start of the “Cat That Walked by Himself” hides another message using the same characters: “I, Rudiard Kipling, drew this, but because there was no mutton bone in the house I faked the anatomi from memori.”
“Are these really Runic letters or just an alphabet that Kipling made up for fun?” asked Maj. B.J. Bewley in the Kipling Journal in January 1928. “I think the chief interest lies in the almost boyish pleasure the author plainly took in writing in these strange characters. He must have done it entirely for his own amusement.”