The Renaissance mathematician Niccolò Tartaglia would use this bewildering riddle to assess neophytes in logic:
If half of 5 were 3, what would a third of 10 be?
What’s the answer?
Tilt
Here’s a philosophical question. Some pinball machines reward high scores with free replays. And in states with anti-gambling statutes, some prosecutors crack down on this feature, saying that it constitutes gambling.
Is this a coherent argument? If pinball is legal, then can more pinball be illegal?
“The prosecutors … believe that ‘more of the same’ can be too much of a good thing, and rather than multiply legal acts, actually cross the line of legality,” writes Peter Suber in The Paradox of Self-Amendment.
“A quantitative change becomes at some point a qualitative change, just as lowering the temperature of water by degrees gives us nothing but cold water for a while, and then suddenly gives us ice.”
Soul Mates
Lewis Carroll discerns a public danger in birthday toasts, from a letter to Gertrude Chataway, Oct. 13, 1875:
I am very much afraid, next time Sybil looks for you, she’ll find you sitting by the sad sea-wave, and crying ‘Boo! hoo! Here’s Mr. Dodgson has drunk my health, and I haven’t got any left!’ And how it will puzzle Dr. Maund, when he is sent for to see you! ‘My dear Madam, I’m very sorry to say your little girl has got no health at all! I never saw such a thing in my life!’ ‘Oh, I can easily explain it!’ your mother will say. ‘You see she would go and make friends with a strange gentleman, and yesterday he drank her health!’ ‘Well, Mrs. Chataway,’ he will say, ‘the only way to cure her is to wait till his next birthday, and then for her to drink his health.’
“And then we shall have changed healths. I wonder how you’ll like mine! Oh, Gertrude, I wish you wouldn’t talk such nonsense!”
Stride Right
A mother takes two strides to her daughter’s three. If they set out walking together, each starting with the right foot, when will they first step together with the left?
Unquote
“Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.” — George Jean Nathan
The Clipperton Survivors
On July 18, 1917, the U.S. Navy gunboat Yorktown called at Clipperton Island, a tiny coral atoll in the eastern Pacific. The ship’s commander, Harlan Page Perrill, sent two men ashore and was surprised to see them return with a complement of women and children. When his men made their report, Perrill later wrote, they revealed “a tale of woe absolutely harrowing in its details.”
The three women and eight children were the only survivors of the island’s original colony, which had once numbered 100. The last ship had visited the island three years ago, and their supplies had given out six months after that. Since that time they had survived on fish, fowl, and eggs. Scurvy and starvation killed much of the population; others died at sea while attempting to escape in a whaleboat. By 1917 lighthouse keeper Victoriano Álvarez was the only man on the island; he declared himself king and began terrorizing the women, threatening, beating, and sadistically raping them, even killing two.
Álvarez had promised to kill Alicia Arnaud, the governor’s wife, when help finally arrived, to prevent her talking to the authorities, but an odd quirk saved her. That very morning, finally determined to act, she and fellow survivor Tirza Randon had confronted Álvarez in his hut, where Randon had killed him with a hammer. Only minutes later, Arnaud’s son had spotted the Yorktown. “What if we had been an hour earlier!” Perrill reflected. “It is almost certain that the man would have killed Señora Arnaud.”
Risking court-martial, Perrill left Álvarez’s body to be devoured by crabs and omitted any mention of him in his official report, and he and the entire crew of the Yorktown kept the secret for 17 years. He later explained that “I was afraid of the effects it might have upon the fortunes of Tirza Randon.” “Had Perrill not sanitized his reports and included titllating details of Álvarez’s reign of terror,” wrote Jimmy Skaggs in his history of the island, “the story undoubtedly would have received far greater attention.”
A Double Mnemonic
George the Third said with a smile,
“Seventeen sixty yards to a mile.”
This gives two unrelated pieces of information: the date of George’s accession and the number of yards in a mile.
Free Enterprise
A man and a boy go into a barbershop.
After getting his haircut, the man says, “Now cut the boy’s hair too. I’ll be back soon.”
When he’s finished cutting the boy’s hair, the barber says, “When is your father coming back to pay?”
The boy says, “He’s not my father. He met me in the street and asked if I wanted a free haircut.”
(From Sion Rubi, Intelligent Jokes, 2004.)
Black and White
Burrowed Time
In September 1924, the wheels of a truck sank into the ground behind the Pelham Courts apartments in Washington, D.C. On investigating, the building’s manager and janitor discovered a mysterious brick-lined passageway that led to a bizarre network of concrete tunnels extending as much as 32 feet underground.
The discovery put Washington into two days of wild speculation. Was this a German plot? A relic of the Civil War? But then Smithsonian Institution entomologist Harrison G. Dyar came forward to admit that he had dug the tunnels when had lived in the capital 10 years earlier. From Modern Mechanix, August 1932:
Dyar’s obsession had begun innocently enough. He told the Washington Star that in 1906 he had dug a flowerbed for his wife, and “When I was down perhaps six or seven feet, surrounded only by the damp brown walls of old Mother Earth, I was seized by an undeniable fancy to keep on going.” He had continued the project in secret for 10 years, stopping only in 1915, when he moved out of the area.
“I did it for exercise,” he told the New York Times. “Digging tunnels after work is my hobby. There’s really nothing mysterious about it.”
(Thanks, Allyson.)