To Whom It May Concern

On Jan. 9, 1793, two astonished farmers in Woodbury, N.J., watched a strange craft descend from the sky into their field. An excited Frenchman greeted them in broken English and gave them swigs of wine from a bottle. Unable to make himself understood, he finally presented a document:

http://books.google.com/books?id=Lb88AAAAIAAJ

The farmers helped the man fold his craft and load it onto a wagon for the trip back to Philadelphia. Before leaving, the Frenchman asked them to certify the time and place of his arrival. These details were important — he was Jean-Pierre Blanchard, and he had just completed the first balloon flight in North America.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Glenn_With_T.J._O%27Malley_and_Paul_Donnelly_in_Front_of_-_GPN-2002-000049.jpg

One hundred sixty-nine years later, when John Glenn went into orbit aboard Friendship 7 in 1962, mission planners weren’t certain where he’d come down. The most likely sites were Australia, the Atlantic Ocean, and New Guinea, but it might be 72 hours before he could be picked up.

Glenn worried about spending three days among aborigines who had seen a silver man emerge from “a big parachute with a little capsule on the end,” so he took with him a short speech rendered phonetically in several languages. It read:

“I am a stranger. I come in peace. Take me to your leader, and there will be a massive reward for you in eternity.”

| Science & Math

Podcast Episode 8: Owney the Mail Dog, Candy Bombers, and Bertrand Russell

In 1888 a mixed-breed terrier appointed himself mascot of America’s railway postal service, accompanying mailbags throughout the U.S. and eventually traveling around the world. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll recount Owney’s postal adventures and the wave of human affection that followed him.

We’ll also look at an Air Force pilot who dropped candy on parachutes to besieged German children in 1948, learn the link between drug lord Pablo Escobar and feral hippos in Colombia, and present the next Futility Closet Challenge.

See full show notes …

| Podcast

Three Theorems

http://www.freeimages.com/photo/1421981

Theorem 1. A crocodile is longer than it is wide.

Proof. A crocodile is long on the top and bottom, but it is green only on the top; therefore a crocodile is longer than it is green. A crocodile is green along both its length and width, but it is wide only along its width; hence a crocodile is greener than it is wide. Therefore a crocodile is longer than it is wide.

Theorem 2. Napoleon was a poor general.

Proof. Most men have an even number of arms. Napoleon was warned that Wellington would meet him at Waterloo. To be forewarned is to be forearmed. But four arms is a very odd number of arms for a man. The only number that is both even and odd is infinity. Therefore, Napoleon had an infinite number of arms in his battle against Wellington. A general who loses a battle despite having an infinite number of arms is very poor general.

Theorem 3. If 1/0 = ∞, then 1/∞ = 0.

Proof. Given:

three theorems 2

Rotate both sides 90° counterclockwise:

three theorems 3

Subtract 8 from both sides:

three theorems 4

Now reverse the rotation:

three theorems 5

| Science & Math

Unquote

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Golubinaya_kniga.jpg

“I find all books too long.” — Voltaire

“The covers of this book are too far apart.” — Ambrose Bierce

“A big book is a big nuisance.” — Callimachus

“Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wants to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.” — E.M. Forster

“I made this letter very long, because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter.” — Pascal

“Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.” — Samuel Johnson

| Literature · Quotations

The Outer Dark

Gustav Holst created a unique effect for the conclusion of his orchestral suite The Planets. He stipulated that the women’s chorus was “to be placed in an adjoining room, the door of which is to be left open until the last bar of the piece, when it is to be slowly and silently closed,” and that the final bar, performed by chorus alone, was “to be repeated until the sound is lost in the distance.”

Although familiar today, the effect thrilled audiences at the time. In her 1938 biography of her father, Imogen Holst recalls a 1918 performance by the London Symphony Orchestra: “But it was the end of Neptune that was unforgettable, with its hidden chorus of women’s voices growing fainter and fainter in the distance, until the imagination knew no difference between sound and silence.”

(Thanks, Ben.)

| Art

A New Life

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carl_Wimar_Abduction_of_Boones_Daughter_detail_Amon_Carter_Museum.jpg

Life was so hard in Puritan New England that children who were abducted by Native Americans often refused to come back. Eunice Williams, abducted in 1704 at age 7, refused to leave the Kahnawake Mohawks despite her father’s pleas — he found she had forgotten the English language and adopted Indian clothing and hairstyle. “She is obstinately resolved to live and dye here,” he wrote, “and will not so much as give me one pleasant look.” The Mohawks were much more indulgent to children than the colonists, and women were counted equal to men and played an integral role in society and politics. Eunice married a Mohawk and lived with him for half a century.

A returned captive named Titus King reported that many young captives responded similarly: “In Six months time they Forsake Father & mother, Forgit thir own Land, Refuess to Speak there own toungue & Seeminly be Holley Swallowed up with the Indians.” In 1753 Ben Franklin wrote:

When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble there is no perswading him ever to return. … When white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of Life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.

A 14-year-old named James McCullough, who lived with the Indians for eight years, had to be brought back in fetters, his legs tied under his horse’s belly and his arms tied behind his back. Even so he escaped and returned to his Indian family. Children “redeemed” by the English often “cried as if they should die when they were presented to us.” The Indians freed children of the work obligations they faced in the colonies — boys hunted, caught fish, and gathered nuts; and girls cultivated corn but had no master “to oversee or drive us, so that we could work as leisurely as we pleased.”

(From Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood, 2004.)

| History · Society

One Solution

Excerpt from the 1791 will of an English gentleman who had been sent unwillingly to live in Tipperary:

I give and bequeath the annual sum of ten pounds, to be paid in perpetuity out of my estate, to the following purpose. It is my will and pleasure that this sum shall be spent in the purchase of a certain quantity of the liquor vulgarly called whisky, and it shall be publicly given out that a certain number of persons, Irish only, not to exceed twenty, who may choose to assemble in the cemetery in which I shall be interred, on the anniversary of my death, shall have the same distributed to them. Further, it is my desire that each shall receive it by half-a-pint at a time till the whole is consumed, each being likewise provided with a stout oaken stick and a knife, and that they shall drink it all on the spot. Knowing what I know of the Irish character, my conviction is, that with these materials given, they will not fail to destroy each other, and when in the course of time the race comes to be exterminated, this neighbourhood at least may, perhaps, be colonized by civilized and respectable Englishmen.

From Virgil McClure Harris, Ancient, Curious and Famous Wills, 1911.

| Death · Society

A Gum Holster

https://www.google.com/patents/US2484892

Reva Keston patented this “chewed gum receptacle” in 1949. “It has always been a problem for those addicted to the habit of chewing gum, when tired of chewing, where to store the same until again wanted or as to how to finally dispose of it.” Keston’s solution was a cardboard blank scored for folding: Impale your gum on the barb, fold up the flaps, and you can carry the wad around unstickily until it’s wanted again. “The receptacle may be carried in a purse or pocket or it may be provided with a safety pin for attaching the same to a piece of clothing.”

This would have been handy in Singapore, which has banned chewing gum since vandals began sticking it on the door sensors of MRT trains in the 1990s. No gum can be bought or sold inside the country. “If you can’t think because you can’t chew,” said former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, “try a banana.”

| Society · Technology