The Author’s Eye

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Excerpts from Somerset Maugham’s notebook:

  • “No action is in itself good or bad, but only such according to convention.”
  • “People are never so ready to believe you as when you say things in dispraise of yourself; and you are never so much annoyed as when they take you at your word.”
  • “An action is not virtuous merely because it is unpleasant to do.”
  • “The more intelligent a man is the more capable is he of suffering.”
  • “However harmless a thing is, if the law forbids it most people will think it wrong.”
  • “I don’t know why it is that the religious never ascribe common sense to God.”
  • “All this effort of natural selection, wherefore? What is the good of all this social activity beyond helping unessential creatures to feed and propagate?”
  • “I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.”
| Literature

The Infected Checkerboard

the infected checkerboard

From the Soviet magazine KVANT, 1986:

On an n × n checkerboard, a square becomes “infected” if at least two of its orthogonal neighbors are infected. For example, if the main diagonal is infected (above), then the infection will spread to the adjoining diagonals and on to the whole board. Prove that the whole board cannot become infected unless there are at least n sick squares at the start.

The key is to notice that when a square is infected, at least two of its edges are absorbed into the infected area, while at most two of its edges are added to the boundary of the infection. Thus the perimeter of the infected area can’t increase; in order for the full board (with perimeter 4n) to become infected, there must be at least n infected squares to begin with.

| Science & Math

Outreach

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In 1880 Mark Twain invited William Dean Howells to join him in a club in which “the first & main qualification for membership is modesty.”

“At present,” he wrote, “I am the only member; & as the modesty required must be of a quite aggravated type, the enterprize did seem for a time doomed to stop dead still with myself, for lack of further material; but upon reflection I have come to the conclusion that you are eligible.”

Howells responded, “The only reason I have for not joining the Modest Club is that I am too modest: that is, I am afraid that I am not modest enough. … If you think I am not too modest, you may put my name down, and I will try to think the same of you.”

| Literature

Exit Strategies

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The Roman senator who dies as a result of plunging a dagger into his heart commits suicide. He kills himself. But what about the twentieth-century suicide who places his head on the railway line and is crushed to death by the train he normally catches each morning to the office? Wasn’t he killed by the train? Then did he kill himself into the bargain too? Exactly what was it that killed him? What do you have to have done in order to count as having killed yourself?

— T.S. Champlin, Reflexive Paradoxes, 1988

| Death · Science & Math

Gunslinger Chic

http://www.google.com/patents?id=bxduAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

With Mark L. Winn’s shampooing apparatus, “a person may have his hair washed, brushed, showered with water, and, lastly, dried while retaining an easy and comfortable sitting position.” That would be impressive today, but Winn patented this in 1871. Essentially it consists of a watertight helmet in which the hair is washed and then rinsed with a detachable sprinkler, with the dirty water discharged through a pipe; there’s no need for a sink.

The drier is “heated by caloric introduced through pipes, or by a flame from a spirit-lamp.” I wonder whether he tested this …

| Technology

This Scepter’d Isle

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English history as reported by American schoolchildren in 1887, from Caroline Bigelow Le Row, English as She Is Taught: Genuine Answers to Examination Questions in Our Public Schools:

  • “England was named by the Angels.”
  • “The Celts were driven out of England into Whales.”
  • “Julius Caesar invaded England 400 years B.C. The English condition was in a rude state.”
  • “The Brittains were the Saxons who entered England in 1492 under Julius Caesar.”
  • “The Britains conquered Julius Caesar and drove him ignominiously from his dominions.”
  • “The Britons founded the Druids. They ust to hold religious services out of doors.”
  • “The Druids were supposed to be Roman Catholicks.”
  • “The Crusaders were fanatics who fought in tournaments.”
  • “The Habeas Corpus Act said that a body whether alive or dead could be produced in court.”
  • “Alfred the Great reigned 872 years. He was distinguished for letting some buckwheat cakes burn and the lady scolded him.”
  • “Rufus was named William on account of his red hair. He established the curfew fire bell.”
  • “William the Conqueror was the first of the Mormons.”
  • “Edward the black Prince was famous for founding chivalry.”
  • “Chivalry is a fight on horseback between two horsemen in an open plain.”
  • “A night errant is a man who goes around in the night in search of adventures.”
  • “The Middle Ages come in between antiquity and posterity.”
  • “The War of the Roses was between the white and the red.”
  • “Henry Eight was famous for being a great widower having lost several wives.”
  • “Lady Jane Grey studied Greek and Latin and was beheaded after a few days.”
  • “Queen Mary married the Dolphin.”
  • “Elizabeth was called the Virgin queen because of her many accomplishments and she had a great many fine dresses.”
  • “The unfortunate Charles First was executed and after he was beheaded he held it up exclaiming Behold the head of a trater!”
  • “Cromwell was only a parallel with Bonaparte.”
  • “Queen Victoria was the 4th son of George Third the Duke of Kent.”
  • “John Bright is noted for an incurable disease.”
  • “Lord James Gordon Bennett instigated the Gordon Riots.”
| History

“Stealing the Bell Ropes”

A puzzle by Henry Dudeney:

A robber broke into the belfry of a church, and though he had nothing to assist him but his pocket-knife, he contrived to steal nearly the complete lengths of the two bell-ropes, which passed through holes in the lofty boarded ceiling. How did he effect his purpose? Of course, there was no ladder or aught else to assist him. It is easy to understand that he might steal one rope and slide down the other, but how he cut the two, or any considerable portion of them, without a bad fall, is perplexing.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

The Arrow Paradox

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At any given instant, an arrow in flight is where it is, occupying a space equal to itself. It cannot move during the instant, for that would require the instant to have parts.

This seems to mean that motion is impossible. Aristotle writes, “If everything, when it is behaving in a uniform manner, is continually either moving or at rest, but what is moving is always in the now, then the moving arrow is motionless.”

Bertrand Russell adds, “It is never moving, but in some miraculous way the change of position has to occur between the instants, that is to say, not at any time whatever. … The more the difficulty is meditated, the more real it becomes.”

| Science & Math

Unquote

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“I have never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from other men. There is not much harm in a lion. He has no ideals, no religion, no politics, no chivalry, no gentility; in short, no reason for destroying anything that he does not want to eat.” — George Bernard Shaw

| Quotations