Social Studies

From Benoni Lanctot’s Chinese and English Phrase Book (1867), phrases for English-speaking employers of Chinese-Americans:

  • Can you get me a good boy?
  • He wants $8.00 per month.
  • He ought to be satisfied with $6.00.
  • When I find him useful, I will give him more.
  • I think he is very stupid.
  • Do you know how to count?
  • If you want to go out, you must ask me.
  • Come at seven every morning.
  • Go home at eight every night.
  • This lamp is not clean.
  • See that the money is weighed.
  • If there is any thing short, I will make him pay the difference.
  • Take this plate away.
  • Change this napkin.
  • Did you prepare any toast?
  • The tea is too strong.
  • Make me a pigeon pie.
  • Get a bottle of beer.
  • Please carve that capon.
  • Tell the cook to roast it better next time.
  • This wine glass is not clean.
  • The cook is very strange.
  • Sometimes he spoils the dishes.
  • Tell the cook to fry some pancakes.
  • Don’t burn them.
  • He did very bad last time.
  • I want to cut his wages.
  • This tea is very bad.
  • Get out of the way.
  • Don’t speak with me.
  • Who gives you permission?
  • Don’t be lazy.
  • You ought not to do so.
  • Pick this up.
  • This is nothing to you.
  • He is fit for nothing.
  • That belongs to me.
  • Carry it up stairs.
  • You ought to be contented.

Phrases for Chinese speakers:

  • Good morning sir.
  • When shall I begin?
  • I beg your pardon.
  • Lunch is on the table, sir.
  • I beg you to consider again.
  • It is my duty.
  • Sir, what will you have for dinner to-day?
  • You must excuse me.
  • You must not strike me.
| Society

Shop Talk

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Americana_1920_Theodore_Roosevelt.jpg

From a letter from Theodore Roosevelt to his son Kermit, Oct. 2, 1903:

There! You will think this a dreadfully preaching letter! I suppose I have a natural tendency to preach just at present because I am overwhelmed with my work. I enjoy being President, and I like to do the work and have my hand on the lever. But it is very worrying and puzzling, and I have to make up my mind to accept every kind of attack and misrepresentation. It is a great comfort to me to read the life and letters of Abraham Lincoln. I am more and more impressed every day, not only with the man’s wonderful power and sagacity, but with his literally endless patience, and at the same time unflinching resolution.

| History

Corner Market

corner market diagram

From Martin Gardner, via Michael Stueben: Obtain a slab of gold measuring 10″ x 11″ x 1″. Divide it diagonally and then cut a triangular notch in two corners as shown. Remove these notches as profit, and slide the remaining halves together to produce a new 10″ x 11″ x 1″ slab. The process can be repeated to yield any amount of money you like!

| Science & Math

Podcast Episode 5: Mailing People, Alien Shorthand, and Benjamin Franklin

Henry Brown found a unique way to escape slavery: He mailed himself to Pennsylvania. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll accompany Brown on his perilous 1849 journey from Richmond to Philadelphia, follow a 5-year-old Idaho girl who was mailed to her grandparents in 1914, and delve deeper into a mysterious lion sighting in Illinois in 1917.

We’ll also decode a 200-year-old message enciphered by Benjamin Franklin, examine an engraved ball reputed to have fallen out of the Georgia sky in 1887, and present the next Futility Closet Challenge.

See full show notes …

| Podcast

Unquote

“Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.” — J.M. Barrie

“No, Sir, not a day’s work in all my life. What I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn’t have done it.” — Mark Twain, New York Times interview, 1905

From a letter by Isaac Asimov, July 20, 1965:

You have a vacation when you do something you like better than your work. But there isn’t anything I like better than my work. My vacation therefore exists all year long — except when I am forced to go away.

But James Thurber wrote, “I suppose that even the most pleasurable of imaginable occupations, that of batting baseballs through the windows of the RCA Building, would pall a little as the days ran on.”

| Quotations

Another Equivoque

This poem takes a pretty dark view of marriage — unless you read only the alternate lines:

That man must lead a happy life
Who’s free from matrimonial chains,
Who is directed by a wife
Is sure to suffer for his pains.
Adam could find no solid peace
When Eve was given for a mate;
Until he saw a woman’s face
Adam was in a happy state.
In all the female race appear
Hypocrisy, deceit, and pride;
Truth, darling of a heart sincere,
In woman never did reside.
What tongue is able to unfold
The failings that in woman dwell;
The worths in woman we behold
Are almost imperceptible.
Confusion take the man, I say,
Who changes from his singleness,
Who will not yield to woman’s sway,
Is sure of earthly blessedness.

— W.S. Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1892

| Language

Absentee Ballots

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

Can one generation bind another, and all others, in succession forever? I think not. The Creator has made the earth for the living, not the dead. Rights and powers can only belong to persons, not to things, not to mere matter, unendowed with will. The dead are not even things. The particles of matter which composed their bodies, make part now of the bodies of other animals, vegetables, or minerals, of a thousand forms. To what then are attached the rights and powers they held while in the form of men? A generation may bind itself as long as its majority continues in life; when that has disappeared, another majority is in place, holds all the rights and powers their predecessors once held, and may change their laws and institutions to suit themselves. Nothing then is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.

— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Maj. John Cartwright, June 5, 1824

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes — our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around.

— G.K. Chesterton

| History · Society

No Attraction

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kepler%27s_law_2_ru.svg

Kepler’s second law holds that a line segment connecting an orbiting planet to its sun sweeps out equal areas in equal periods of time: In the diagram above, if the time intervals t are equal, then so are the areas A.

If gravity were turned off, would this still be true?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles · Science & Math

Shy

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mona_Lisa,_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci,_from_C2RMF_retouched.jpg

Pretend that you’ve never seen this before and that it’s an actual living person whose personality you’re trying to read. If you look directly at her face, she seems to hesitate, but if you look near it, say beyond her at the landscape, and try to sense her mood, she smiles at you.

In studying this systematically, Harvard neurobiologist Margaret Livingstone found that “if you look at this painting so that your center of gaze falls on the background or her hands, Mona Lisa’s mouth — which is then seen by your peripheral, low-resolution, vision — appears much more cheerful than when you look directly at it, when it is seen by your fine-detail fovea.

“This explains its elusive quality — you literally can’t catch her smile by looking at it. Every time you look directly at her mouth, her smile disappears because your central vision does not perceive coarse image components very well. People don’t realize this because most of us are not aware of how we move our eyes around or that our peripheral vision is able to see some things better than our central vision. Mona Lisa smiles until you look at her mouth, and then her smile fades, like a dim star that disappears when you look directly at it.”

(From her book Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing, 2002.)

| Art · Science & Math