“There is a danger in being persuaded before one understands.” — Thomas Wilson
“Very Sensible”
It was well remarked by an intelligent old farmer, ‘I would rather be taxed for the education of the boy, than the ignorance of the man. For one or the other I am compelled to pay.’
— Southern Cultivator, January 1848
Home Cooking
The map of the continental United States contains an elf making chicken.
He’s known as Mimal, after the states that make him up: Minnesota (hat), Iowa (head), Missouri (shirt), Arkansas (pants), and Louisiana (boots).
Fittingly, the chicken is Kentucky and the tin pan is Tennessee.
In a Word
naufrague
n. a shipwrecked person
Podcast Episode 42: The Balmis Expedition: Using Orphans to Combat Smallpox
In this episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell how Spanish authorities found an ingenious way to use orphans to bring the smallpox vaccine to the American colonies in 1803. The Balmis Expedition overcame the problems of transporting a fragile vaccine over a long voyage and is credited with saving at least 100,000 lives in the New World.
We’ll also get some listener updates to the Lady Be Good story and puzzle over why a man would find it more convenient to drive two cars than one.
Black and White
Colloquy
“How old are you?”
“I’m five. How old are you?”
“I’m either four or five. I don’t know which.”
“Do women bother you?”
“No.”
“You’re four.”
— Anonymous, Colorado Flatiron, 1959
Sound Measure
On Nov. 11 each year the British Commonwealth observes two minutes’ silence to remember the fallen in World War I. Of the first observance, in 1919, the Daily Express wrote, “There is nothing under heaven so full of awe as the complete silence of a mighty crowd.”
In 2001, artist Jonty Semper released Kenotaphion, a two-CD collection of these silences drawn from 70 years of BBC, British Movietone, and Reuters broadcasts — he had spent four years assembling every surviving recording. “I really don’t think people will find it boring,” he told the Guardian. “This is raw history.”
Is this a contradiction, an audio recording of an absence of sound? “Unlike the Cenotaph at Whitehall, these recordings are far from empty, with Big Ben drowning out the coughs and uncomprehending children of the reverent, amid atmospheric weather effects, broadcast static, startled birds, and rifle reports,” notes Craig Dworkin in No Medium (2013). “The only truly silent Armistice minutes occurred during the Second World War, from 1941 to 1944, when the ceremony was suspended. Absent from Semper’s discs, those years speak the loudest and are by far the most moving.”
A Human Cantilever
To illustrate the design principle behind Scotland’s Forth Bridge, engineer Sir Benjamin Baker offered a personal demonstration. Sir John Fowler (left) and Baker (right) each hold two wooden poles with outstretched arms, forming two diamond shapes. When construction foreman Kaichi Watanabe sits in the center, the diamonds are prevented from tipping inward because their outer ends are anchored.
It worked. The bridge, opened in 1890, held the record as the world’s longest single cantilever bridge span for 17 years.
“The All-Purpose Calculus Problem”
A “calculus problem to end all calculus problems,” by Dan Kennedy, chairman of the math department at the Baylor School, Chattanooga, Tenn., and chair of the AP Calculus Committee:
A particle starts at rest and moves with velocity 
along a 10-foot ladder, which leans against a trough with a triangular cross-section two feet wide and one foot high. Sand is flowing out of the trough at a constant rate of two cubic feet per hour, forming a conical pile in the middle of a sandbox which has been formed by cutting a square of side x from each corner of an 8″ by 15″ piece of cardboard and folding up the sides. An observer watches the particle from a lighthouse one mile off shore, peering through a window shaped like a rectangle surmounted by a semicircle.
(a) How fast is the tip of the shadow moving?
(b) Find the volume of the solid generated when the trough is rotated about the y-axis.
(c) Justify your answer.
(d) Using the information found in parts (a), (b), and (c) sketch the curve on a pair of coordinate axes.
From Math Horizons, Spring 1994.