Pasted Praise

This “parable against persecution” was a favorite of Benjamin Franklin, who would sometimes pretend to recite it out of a Bible as “the 51st chapter of Genesis.” He wrote that “the remarks of the Scripturians upon it … were sometimes very diverting”:

1. And it came to pass after these things, that Abraham sat in the door of his tent, about the going down of the sun.

2. And behold a man, bowed with age, came from the way of the wilderness, leaning on a staff.

3. And Abraham arose and met him, and said unto him, ‘Turn in, I pray thee, and wash thy feet, and tarry all night, and thou shalt arise early on the morrow, and go on thy way.’

4. But the man said, ‘Nay, for I will abide under this tree.’

5. And Abraham pressed him greatly; so he turned, and they went into the tent; and Abraham baked unleavened bread, and they did eat.

6. And when Abraham saw that the man blessed not God, he said unto him, ‘Wherefore dost thou not worship the most high God, creator of heaven and earth?’

7. And the man answered and said, ‘I do not worship the God thou speakest of; neither do I call upon his name; for I have made to myself a God, which abideth alway in mine house, and provideth me with all things.’

8. And Abraham’s zeal was kindled against the man; and he arose, and fell upon him, and drove him forth with blows into the wilderness.

9. And at midnight God called unto Abraham, saying, ‘Abraham, where is the stranger?’

10. And Abraham answered and said, ‘Lord, he would not worship thee, neither would he call upon thy name; therefore have I driven him out from before my face into the wilderness.’

11. And God said, ‘Have I borne with him these hundred ninety and eight years, and nourished him, and clothed him, notwithstanding his rebellion against me; and couldst not thou, that art thyself a sinner, bear with him one night?’

12. And Abraham said, ‘Let not the anger of my Lord wax hot against his servant; lo, I have sinned; forgive me, I pray thee.’

13. And Abraham arose, and went forth into the wilderness, and sought diligently for the man, and found him, and returned with him to his tent; and when he had entreated him kindly, he sent him away on the morrow with gifts.

14. And God spake again unto Abraham, saying, ‘For this thy sin shall thy seed be afflicted four hundred years in a strange land;

15. ‘But for thy repentance will I deliver them; and they shall come forth with power, and with gladness of heart, and with much substance.’

(In reality it’s thought to have originated with the Persian poet Saadi.)

| Hoaxes · Religion

Posturing

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

“Almost all absurdity of conduct,” wrote Dr. Johnson, “arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.”

When a bout of rheumatic fever in 1867 left the Princess of Wales with a limp, London society ladies began to copy her gait. This grew so popular that it became known as “the Alexandra limp.”

The affectation was widely derided — John Stephen Farmer called it “an erstwhile fit of semi-imbecility” by “a crowd of limping petticoated toadies” — but it was followed almost immediately by the “Grecian bend,” in which ladies began stooping forward from the waist. Albert Jones Bellows described a sighting in Boston:

She waddled a few rods past the store, and then turned round, smiling, or rather smirking, complacently on her ‘crowd of admirers,’ with an expression of face which seemed to say, … ‘All my torture is repaid by the admiration I excite.’ And I wanted to quote the apostrophe of Burns to the louse:–

‘O, wad some power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An’ foolish notion:
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,
And e’en devotion!’

| Society

Knot Mirage

For years Raymond Smullyan sought a “metaparadox,” a statement that is paradoxical if and only if it isn’t. He arrived at this:

Either this sentence is false, or (this sentence is paradoxical if and only if it isn’t).

He wrote, “I leave the proof to the reader.”

| Science & Math

Light Work

From Lewis Carroll:

I don’t know if you are fond of puzzles, or not. If you are, try this. … A gentleman (a nobleman let us say, to make it more interesting) had a sitting-room with only one window in it–a square window, 3 feet high and 3 feet wide. Now he had weak eyes, and the window gave too much light, so (don’t you like ‘so’ in a story?) he sent for the builder, and told him to alter it, so as only to give half the light. Only, he was to keep it square–he was to keep it 3 feet high–and he was to keep it 3 feet wide. How did he do it? Remember, he wasn’t allowed to use curtains, or shutters, or coloured glass, or anything of that sort.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Top Secret

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Colorful_dreidels2.JPG
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 1976, CUNY mathematician Robert Feinerman showed that the game of dreidel is fundamentally unfair.

Each player contributes one unit to the pot, and then all take turns spinning the top. Each spin produces one of four outcomes: the player does nothing, collects the entire pot, collects half the pot, or puts one unit into the pot. When a player collects the entire pot, then each player contributes one unit to form a new pot and play continues.

Feinerman found that, if Xn is the payoff on the nth spin and p is the number of players, the expected value of Xn is

dreidel expected value

Thus if there are more than two players, “the first player has an unfair advantage over the second player, who in turn has an unfair advantage over the third player, etc.”

Dreidel is booming nonetheless. A Major League Dreidel tournament has been held in New York City every Hanukkah since 2007. The official playing surface is called the Spinagogue, and the tournament slogan is “no gelt, no glory.”

(Robert Feinerman, “An Ancient Unfair Game,” American Mathematical Monthly 83:623-625.)

| Science & Math

Sea Mail

http://books.google.com/books?id=bbURAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&rview=1#v=onepage&q&f=false

At noon on the 12th of July, 1892, Mr. J.E. Muddock, the well-known novelist, then on his way home from Canada in the Sarna, threw into the icy Straits of Belle Isle a soda-water bottle containing a message, which, together with the bottle, is here shown. Exactly 485 days afterwards Mr. Muddock had a letter from Norway saying that his bottle had been picked up by a poor fisherman at the entrance to the Sogne Fiord, 2,500 miles in a straight line from the place where it was committed to the sea. Had it not been picked up it would have gone into the Arctic regions. This experiment was of real scientific value, since it was the means of settling certain matters relating to ocean currents.

— Strand, January 1898

| Oddities

Bzzzzzzzzz

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Culex_quinquefasciatus_E-A-Goeldi_1905.jpg

A mosquito was heard to complain
That a chemist had poisoned his brain;
The cause of his sorrow
Was paradichloro-
Diphenyltrichloroethane.

— Anonymous

From a remarkably bad poem by English naturalist Edward Newman (fl. 1840):

First of walkers come the Earwigs,
Earwigs or FORFICULINA;
At the tail we find a weapon,
Very like a pair of pincers,
And with this ’tis said the Earwigs
Open and fold up the hind wings;
You may watch them and observe it;
I have never had the pleasure.

| Poems

A Civilian Casualty

U-28 crocodile

On July 30, 1915, the German submarine U-28 torpedoed the British steamer Iberian in the North Atlantic. Captain Georg Günther Freiherr von Forstner and his crew watched the ship sink rapidly under the waves, stern first. Then, a surprise:

When the steamer had disappeared for about 25 seconds it exploded at a depth which we could not know, but one thousand meters will be a safe guess. Shortly afterwards pieces of wreckage, among them a huge marine animal which made violent movements, were thrown out of the water, flying approximately 20 or 30 meters high.

At this moment we were six men on the bridge, myself, the two officers of the watch, the chief engineer, the navigator and the helmsman. We at once centered our attention upon this marvel of the seas. Unfortunately we had not time to take a photograph because the animal disappeared in the water after 10 or 15 seconds. It was about 20 meters long, looked like a giant crocodile, and had four powerful paddle-like limbs and a long pointed head.

“The explanation of this event seems easy to me,” von Forstner wrote. “The explosion of, or in, the sinking steamer caught the ‘undersea-crocodile,’ as we called it, and forced it out of the water.” When the story was attacked, von Forstner stood firm, declaring that he “would not give up a single meter of the length of the animal.” What was it? Who knows?

| Oddities