Near Thing

‘Well, do you know the one,’ I began, ‘in which two geologists converse in a cafe? One of them says: ‘Yes, unfortunately fifteen billion years from now the Sun will cool, and then all life on Earth will perish.’ A card-player nearby has been half listening to the joke, and turns in terror to the geologist: ‘What did you say? In how many years will the Sun cool?’ ‘Fifteen billion years,’ the scientist replies. The card-player lets out a sigh of relief: ‘Oh, I was afraid you said fifteen million!’

— László Feleki in Impact of Science on Society, 1969

| Humor · Science & Math

Cool Runnings

http://www.google.com/patents/US4790531

Indoor ski slopes tend to be short because they’re expensive to build. In 1986 Nobuyuki Matsui proposed a space-saving solution: Arrange the slope in a helix or a figure eight around a support tower that contains an elevator. Skiers can ride to the top and enjoy a long continuous run back to the bottom. To reduce cooling costs, the whole thing can be built underground (with a ski lodge at the top) and all the snow-making accomplished within a special enclosure that works its way down the slope.

“In order to simulate actual outdoor skiing conditions, provisions are made to vary the steepness of the slope from place to place. In addition, facilities are provided to produce random simulated moguls or an entire mogul field. Thus, during one run of the slope, most, if not all, of the conditions encountered on natural outdoor slopes may be simulated and incorporated into the run.”

| Technology

No Sale

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:F%C3%A9lix_Valloton,_Portrait_of_Gertrude_Stein_1907.jpg

Ronald Knox reviews Gertrude Stein in the Dublin Review, 1927:

There is oddly not nearly so much difficulty about reading the beginning of a book by Gertrude Stein like this book of hers called Composition as Explanation (Hogarth Essays) as there is in reading it later on when it gets nearer the end. It is all written like this with no punctuation of course but it does sound as if it meant something. Every now and then a word or two is written twice over twice over but of course that may be the printer. It is a little confusing to be told that people are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living, but probably it all works out somehow. She goes on like this for about thirty pages and then she says now that is all. But it isn’t it isn’t it isn’t. It’s only about half. She starts putting in headlines after that to symbolically no doubt make her meaning clearer, but it isn’t clearer. It is ever so much not clearer. SITWELL EDITH SITWELL.

She says that quite suddenly in capitals as if it were a line of Onward Christian Soldiers. And in this part of the book all the parts of speech get mixed up anyhow as if she had been taking a lesson in typewriting. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog lazy dog lazy fox the quick jumps jumps brown. There is only one sentence in this part which is English, it says toasted susie is my ice-cream, and that is not sense, is it? So awfully not sense. I suppose she must either think it looks pretty or think it sounds pretty when you read it but it doesn’t it doesn’t either it really doesn’t.

“At dinner I sat next to James Branch Cabell who asked me, Is Gertrude Stein serious?” remembered Alice B. Toklas. “Desperately, I replied. That puts a different light on it, he said. For you, I said, not for me.”

| Literature

Spade Work

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Cocos_from_Pacific_Islands,_vol._2_(Geographical_Handbook_Series,_1943).jpg

August Gussler was persistent. Convinced that Costa Rica’s tiny Cocos Island hid the loot of generations of pirates, the German adventurer set up camp there and in 1889 started digging.

The island occupies only 9 square miles, but it’s crowded with the ghosts of wealthy criminals, including English buccaneers Edward Davis and Bartholomew Sharp, Portuguese pirate Benito Bonito, and Captain William Thompson, who, entrusted with $60 million during an uprising in Lima in 1820, had turned criminal and kept it for himself. All of these, it was said, had hid their loot in the caves of Cocos, whose location 500 miles off the coast had made it an ideal haven for pirates plying the South Seas.

To aid in his search, Gussler had made himself a student of the island’s history. Bonito, he told one visitor, had buried “three hundred thousand pounds’ weight of silver and silver dollars, in a sandstone cave in the side of the mountain. Then he laid kegs of powder on top of the cave and blew away the face of the cliff. In another excavation he placed gold bricks, 733 of them, four by three inches in size, and two inches thick, and 273 gold-hilted swords, inlaid with jewels. On a bit of land in the little river, he buried several iron kettles filled with gold coin.”

Alas, it was hidden remarkably well. In 1908, when Gussler gave up his quest, he had found six gold coins.

| Oddities

Target Practice

From Henry Fowler’s immortal 1906 Modern English Usage, a table of commonly confused terms:

fowler table

“So much has been written upon the nature of some of these words, and upon the distinctions between pairs or trios among them, that it would be both presumptuous and unnecessary to attempt a further disquisition,” Fowler wrote. “But a sort of tabular statement may be of service against some popular misconceptions.”

| Language · Society

Trompe L’Oeil

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

This is not a photograph, it’s an oil painting. Irish-American painter William Harnett (1848–1892) produced works of such startling verisimilitude that his paintings of American currency, like the one below, nearly got him arrested for counterfeiting. In 1886 the Secret Service visited him at his studio:

While one of them was asking my name, the other as suspiciously poking his cane into the corners of my room. ‘Have you got any more of them here?’ he asked, after he had finished a hasty search. ‘More of what?’ I replied. ‘Those counterfeits!’ he answered. Then the other detective, for both were Special Treasury officers, explained their mission. I was suspected of turning out counterfeit bank notes and they had come to arrest me and seize whatever illegal property they could find. They were very polite but extremely firm and I went down-town with them to Chief Drummond’s office. I explained to the chief how I happened to do the work and I showed him the harmless nature of it. Harmless though it was, it was clearly against the law, and I was let go with a warning not to paint any more life-like representations of the national currency — a warning it is almost needless to say that it was conscientiously heeded.

To be fair, Harnett was not representing his work as currency — but the Secret Service was on the trail of an even more ambitious artist.

harnett five-dollar bill

| Art · Crime

Road Rules

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Zoomandbored.jpg

Guidelines adopted by director Chuck Jones in making Warner Bros.’ Road Runner-Wile E. Coyote cartoons, from Jones’ 1999 memoir Chuck Amuck:

  1. The Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going “beep-beep!”
  2. No outside force can harm the Coyote — only his own ineptitude or the failure of the Acme products.
  3. The Coyote could stop anytime — if he were not a fanatic. (Repeat: “A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.” — George Santayana)
  4. No dialogue ever, except “beep-beep!”
  5. The Road Runner must stay on the road — otherwise, logically, he would not be called road runner.
  6. All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters — the southwest American desert.
  7. All materials, tools, weapons, or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the Acme Corporation.
  8. Whenever possible, make gravity the Coyote’s greatest enemy.
  9. The Coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.

“The Road Runner and Coyote cartoons are known and accepted throughout the world,” Jones wrote. “Perhaps the lack of dialogue is one reason. If you want to laugh, you can do so at any time, whether in Danish, French, Japanese, Urdu, Navajo, Eskimo, Portuguese, or Hindi. ‘Beep-Beep!’ is the Esperanto of comedy.”

| Entertainment