Advice

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More wisdom from Poor Richard’s Almanack:

  • Thirst after desert — not reward.
  • Gifts much expected, are paid not given.
  • Children and princes will quarrel for trifles.
  • Praise little, dispraise less.
  • The Child thinks 20 Shillings and 20 Years can scarce ever be spent.
  • Industry need not wish.
  • ‘Tis great Confidence in a Friend to tell him your Faults, greater to tell him his.
  • Neglect kills Injuries, Revenge increases them.
  • Observe all men; thyself most.
  • Do not do that which you would not have known.
  • He that resolves to mend hereafter, resolves not to mend now.
  • The honest Man takes Pains, and then enjoys Pleasures; the knave takes Pleasure, and then suffers Pains.
  • All would live long, but none would be old.
  • Nothing more like a fool, than a drunken man.
  • As often as we do good, we sacrifice.
  • There is much difference between imitating a good man, and counterfeiting him.

And “Cut the Wings of your Hens and Hopes, lest they lead you a weary Dance after them.”

| Literature

Podcast Episode 14: The Unsinkable Violet Jessop

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Stewardess Violet Jessop was both cursed and blessed — during the 1910s she met disaster on all three of the White Star Line’s Olympic class of gigantic ocean liners, but she managed to escape each time.

In this episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll accompany Violet on her three ill-fated voyages, including the famous sinkings of the Titanic and the Britannic, and learn the importance of toothbrushes in ocean disasters.

We’ll also play with the International Date Line and puzzle over the identity of Salvador Dalí’s brother.

See full show notes …

| Podcast

Milestones

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A conundrum by French puzzle maven Pierre Berloquin:

Caroline leaves town driving at a constant speed. After some time she passes a milestone displaying a two-digit number. An hour later she passes a milestone displaying the same two digits but in reverse order. In another hour she passes a third milestone with the same two digits (in some order) separated by a zero.

What is the speed of Caroline’s car?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

A New Commute

http://books.google.com/books?id=uFk2AQAAMAAJ

In 1914, Russian physicist Boris Weinberg proposed an electromagnetic vacuum train that could move an individual passenger from New York to San Francisco in half a day. Reasoning that air resistance and friction are the greatest enemies to speed, Weinberg envisioned using electromagnets to suspend a car in a tube from which the air had been partially exhausted. An individual passenger would lie prone in a 300-pound iron cylinder drawn along by a series of solenoids. New passengers could be introduced into the system through an airlock at a rate as high as 12 per minute, “the whole proceeding being not unlike that of feeding cartridges from a belt or clip to a machine gun.”

Weinberg estimated a maximum speed of 500 mph. “Think what that means!” he wrote in The Popular Science Monthly. “New York would be no more distant from Chicago than it is now from Philadelphia, so far as relative times are concerned. Florida might easily become a kind of winter Coney Island for all New York.”

He built a model of the system at the Technological Institute of Tomsk, but the project never got off the ground (so to speak). One reason may have been the cost: In order to slow the cars gradually, each station would have to be 2 miles long.

| Technology

Money Market

A curious bet was made in one of the London clubs, some years ago, that will doubtless point a moral. It was that a certain member could not, within two hours, on London-bridge, sell one hundred new guineas at a penny apiece.

The man took his place on the bridge with a little tray on which he had the coins. He informed the passers-by that they were genuine gold coins from the Bank of England, and that they were to be had for a penny each.

The cartmen and policemen laughed at him. When the time had expired, such is human incredulity, that he had sold but two, which a maid-servant bought to amuse her two little charges.

— London Reader, July 11, 1885

| Society

Bard to Worse

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Dismissals of Shakespeare:

  • “An upstart crow beautified with our feathers.” — Robert Greene
  • “The most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.” — Samuel Pepys, on A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  • “His rude unpolished style and antiquated phrase and wit.” — Lord Shaftesbury
  • “A disproportioned and misshapen giant.” — David Hume
  • “Shakespeare never had six lines together without a fault. Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion.” — Samuel Johnson
  • “I cannot read him, he is such a bombast fellow.” — George II
  • “Was there ever such stuff as the greater part of Shakespeare? Only one must not say so.” — George III
  • “Shakespeare — what trash are his works in the gross.” — Edward Young
  • “One of the greatest geniuses that ever existed, Shakespeare, undoubtedly wanted taste.” — Horace Walpole
  • “I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.” — Darwin, Autobiography
  • “The undisputed fame enjoyed by Shakespeare as a writer is, like every other lie, a great evil.” — Tolstoy
  • “If all the work of Shakespeare could be gathered up and burned in one pile, the world would witness the most beneficial action for the sake of literature since the invention of alcohol.” — Waterloo, Iowa, Times-Tribune, 1920

After seeing Henry Irving’s production of Cymbeline, George Bernard Shaw wrote, “With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. The intensity of my impatience with him occasionally reaches such a pitch, that it would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him, knowing as I do how incapable he and his worshippers are of understanding any less obvious form of indignity.”

| Literature

Dust to Dust

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Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born — a hundred million years — and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

— Mark Twain, Autobiography

| Death