I leave my front door, run on a level road for some distance, then run to the top of a hill and return home by the same route. I run 8 mph on level ground, 6 mph uphill, and 12 mph downhill. If my total trip took 2 hours, how far did I run?
Sweet Science
Sahara geology presented as a flan recipe, from French naturalist Théodore Monod’s Méharées: Explorations au vrai Sahara, 1937:
Take a flan-tray, which represents the basement (our Mauretanian and Tuareg granites).
- Place some pastry in the flan-tray in irregular masses (A) — these are the Precambrian mountain chains, the Saharides.
- Level this off with a knife (B) so that the folds, as in erosional peneplanation of the Sahara, are seen only in the ravines which cross the plain; the mountains are now vigorously planed down.
- First event: a tap (from which, fortunately, jam flows) floods the garnished mould (C). Similarly the sea at the beginning of the Palaeozoic invaded the Saharan basement, which it then partly occupied, until the middle Carboniferous — what an enormous amount of jam! All this time the Sahara is under water, and sandstones, limestones, conglomerates and shales were deposited — all the sediments of the Tuareg and Mauritanian plateaux.
- A new event (the djinns must have been at work here) — the bottom of the flan-tray experiences an uplift; the dish, pastry and jam emerge (D). This is the time of the coal measures; the sea retreats, and the Sahara is left high and dry, basking in the sun.
- But whoever says dry land, implies erosion; the sediments rise up, are corroded, and the spoon cuts so deeply that it exposes the jam, pastry, and sometimes even the metal of the flan-tray (E).
- And while this continues for millions of years, erosion is unable to evaporate its own debris and the eroded sediments are not washed away to the sea — they just accumulate, and what is lost in some districts is gained by others, whilst gradual infilling continues (F).
- Then one fine day, while iguanodons are blundering around in Picardy, and swarms of ammonites are scudding around in the Parisian sea, a second tap is turned on again and adds another layer, this time of cream (for convenience of explanation) (G). The sea re-invades a good part of the Sahara and deposits the usual sediments — Cretaceous and Eocene.
- A new retreat of the sea and a new continental phase occur, with customary erosion and deposition (H).
- Gradually, the country comes to be like it is today; sprinkle with granular sugar (fresh-water Quaternary deposits), and icing sugar dunes (I).
- And there we are! Serve hot or chilled.
“Very well — that will teach me to invent foolish nonsense for my neophyte when it is so easy to explain the influence of Saharidian tectonics on the orientation of Hercynian virgations, the suggestion of angular discordnce separating the basal congomerate of the continental beds from the post-Visean argillites, or more simply the origin of the bowlingite included in the pigeonite andesite with diabase facies of Telig. But I doubt that he would understand it any better …”
Unquote
“Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing that a tomato doesn’t belong in a fruit salad.” — Miles Kington
Boom Town
In the summer of 1903, the United States Cartridge Company of Tewksbury, Mass., noticed a stain on the floor of its gunpowder magazine. Apparently the dynamite magazine next door had been leaking nitroglycerine. The company asked the dynamite’s owner, American Powder Mills, to attend to the matter, and on July 29 Cartridge’s powder was loaded onto three wagons and moved a few hundred feet away, and an unlucky foreman named Goodwin entered the building, poured a solution on the stain, and began to sweep it with a broom. The spot began to smoke.
The ensuing blast killed 20 people and flattened a score of houses. “Buildings were shaken and windows broken in hundreds of places within a radius of fifteen miles,” reported New England Magazine. “People as far away as Dedham on the south and the mid-New Hampshire towns on the north, felt the shock and guessed at reckless blasts or earthquakes.”
It appears that the fire had caused the dynamite magazine to explode, which set off the three wagons of gunpowder, which set off a third magazine, leased by the Dupont Powder Company. “The ruin caused by the accident was appalling in its perfection,” notes the report. “Three acres of ground were entirely laid waste, the trees and bushes in a considerable radius being torn and blasted as by a breath from a huge furnace.”
The magazines had been built 30 years earlier, when the area had been remote, and the town had grown up around them. “The only safe assumption is that sooner or later every magazine is bound to explode, and must therefore be kept a safe distance from dwelling houses and other buildings.”
(Thanks, Meredith.)
Black and White
Flux
Artist Pierre Vivant performed a sort of typographical sleight of hand in an Oxfordshire field in 1990. In early summer oilseed rape changes from green to yellow as its flowers open. Vivant cut the words GREEN and YELLOW into the flowering field so that each word bore the color it named. Over the ensuing month, the flowers faded and the field reverted to green while the plants in the areas that Vivant had cut grew and flowered. The end result was the reverse of what you see here: a green field in which the word GREEN is yellow and the word YELLOW is green.
The High Road
Editorial guidelines for Spicy Detective magazine, 1935:
- In describing breasts of a female character, avoid anatomical descriptions.
- If it is necessary for the story to have the girl give herself to a man, or be taken by him, do not go too carefully into details. …
- Whenever possible, avoid complete nudity of the female characters. You can have a girl strip to her underwear or transparent negligee or nightgown, or the thin torn shred of her garments, but while the girl is alive and in contact with a man, we do not want complete nudity.
- A nude female corpse is allowable, of course.
- Also a girl undressing in the privacy of her own room, but when men are in the action try to keep at least a shred of something on the girls.
- Do not have men in underwear in scenes with women, and no nude men at all.
“The idea is to have a very strong sex element in these stories without anything that might be intrepreted as being vulgar or obscene.”
(From Nicholas Parsons, The Book of Literary Lists, 1987.)
Podcast Episode 51: Poet Doppelgängers
In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll look at the strange phenomenon of poet doppelgängers — at least five notable poets have been seen by witnesses when their physical bodies were elsewhere.
We’ll also share our readers’ research on Cervino, the Matterhorn-climbing pussycat, and puzzle over why a man traveling internationally would not be asked for his passport.
The Paradox of Goals
Suppose that two teams of equal ability are playing football. If goals are scored at regular intervals, it seems natural to expect that each team will be in the lead for half the playing time. Surprisingly, this isn’t so: If a total of n = 20 goals are scored, then the probability that Team A leads after the first 10 goals and Team B leads after the second 10 goals is only 6 percent, while the probability that one team leads throughout the entire game is about 35 percent. (When the scores are equal, the leading team is considered to be the one that was leading before the last goal.) And the chance that one team leads throughout the second half is 50 percent, no matter how large n is.
Such questions began with a study of ballot problems: In 1887 Joseph Bertrand found that if in an election Candidate P scores p votes and Candidate Q scores q votes, where p > q, then the probability that P leads throughout the voting is (p – q)/(p + q).
But pursuing them has led to “conclusions that play havoc with our intuition,” writes Princeton mathematician William Feller. If Peter and Paul toss a coin 20,000 times, we tend to think that each will lead about half the time. But in fact it is 88 times more probable that Peter leads in all 20,000 trials than that each player leads in 10,000 trials. No matter how long the series of coin tosses runs, the most probable number of changes of lead is zero.
“In short, if a modern educator or psychologist were to describe the long-run case histories of individual coin-tossing games, he would classify the majority of coins as maladjusted,” Feller writes. “If many coins are tossed n times each, a surprisingly large proportion of them will leave one player in the lead almost all the time; and in very few cases will the lead change sides and fluctuate in the manner that is generally expected of a well-behaved coin.”
(Gábor J. Székely, Paradoxes in Probability Theory and Mathematical Statistics, 2001; William Feller, An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications, 1957.)
New Tropes for Old
In an 1810 satire, C.L. Pitt noted that “a novel may be made out of a romance, or a romance out of a novel with the greatest ease, by scratching out a few terms, and inserting others.” The steps below will, “like machinery in factories,” convert a Gothic romance into a sentimental novel:
Where you find: Put: A castle An house A cavern A bower A groan A sigh A giant A father A bloodstained dagger A fan Howling blasts Zephyrs A knight A gentleman without whiskers A lady who is the heroine Need not be changed, being versatile Assassins Telling glances A monk An old steward Skeletons, skulls, etc. Compliments, sentiments etc. A gliding ghost A usurer, or an attorney A witch An old housekeeper A wound A kiss A midnight murder A marriage
“The same table of course answers for transmuting a novel into a romance.”
(From a footnote in Pitt’s The Age: A Poem, Moral, Political, and Metaphysical, With Illustrative Annotations, 1810.)