Elevation

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

Queen Elizabeth acceded up a tree. When her father, George VI, died in 1952, the princess was staying at the Treetops Hotel in Kenya, essentially an enormous treehouse built into a fig in the Aberdare National Park. While she returned quickly to Britain, hunter Jim Corbett wrote in the visitors’ logbook:

“For the first time in the history of the world, a young girl climbed into a tree one day a Princess and after having what she described as her most thrilling experience she climbed down from the tree next day a Queen — God bless her.”

| History

Point of Information

Sexauer is an ordinary German name referring to one who came from Sexau, in Germany. Looking for a Mr. Sexauer, a man in Washington called at the Senate Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee. Helping him, a girl employee called the Banking and Currency Committee by telephone to check, and inquired politely, ‘Do you have a Sexauer over there?’

‘Listen,’ the girl switchboard operator snapped, ‘We don’t even have a ten-minute coffee break anymore.’

— Elsdon C. Smith, Treasury of Name Lore, 1967

| Language

Classical Works

In 1989, the Finnish news service Nuntii Latini began broadcasting the news in Latin.

Not to be outdone, in 1995 Finnish literature professor Jukka Ammondt recorded an album of Elvis songs sung in Latin. It includes Nunc Hic Aut Numquam (“It’s Now or Never”), Non Adamare Non Possum (“Can’t Help Falling in Love”), Cor Ligneum (“Wooden Heart”), and Tenere Me Ama (“Love Me Tender”).

“Two years later,” writes linguist Mikael Parkvall, “he followed up the success with the album Rocking in Latin, featuring classics such as Quate, Crepa, Rota (better known as ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’).”

Lewis Carroll’s uncle Hassard Dodgson rendered one of his nephew’s poems into Latin elegiacs. Do you recognize it?

Hora aderat briligi. Nunc et Slythæia Tova
Plurima gyrabant gymbolitare vabo;
Et Borogovorum mimzebant undique formae,
Momiferique omnes exgrabuêre Rathi.

“Cave, Gaberbocchum moneo tibi, nate cavendum
(Unguibus ille rapit. Dentibus ille necat.)
Et fuge Jubbubbum, quo non infestior ales,
Et Bandersnatcham, quae fremit usque, cave.”

Ille autem gladium vorpalem cepit, et hostem
Manxonium longâ sedulitate petit;
Tum sub tumtummi requiescens arboris umbrâ
Stabat tranquillus, multa animo meditans.

Dum requiescebat meditans uffishia, monstrum
Praesens ecce! oculis cui fera flamma micat,
Ipse Gaberbocchus dumeta per horrida sifflans
Ibat, et horrendum burbuliabat iens!

Ter, quater, atque iterum cito vorpalissimus ensis
Snicsnaccans penitus viscera dissecuit.
Exanimum corpus linquens caput abstulit heros
Quocum galumphat multa, domumque redit.

“Tune Gaberbocchum potuisti, nate, necare?
Bemiscens, puer! ad brachia nostra veni.
Oh! frabiusce dies! iterumque caloque calâque
Laetus eo!” ut chortlet chortla superba senex.

Hora aderat briligi. Nunc et Slythæia Tova
Plurima gyrabant gymbolitare vabo;
Et Borogovorum mimzebant undique formae,
Momiferique omnes exgrabuêre Rathi.

| Language

The Author’s Eye

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

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

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_Dean_Howells_in_1866.jpg

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

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1353560

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