In probability theory, the formula for the Poisson distribution is
Pm(n) = mne–m/n!
Pleasingly, the mnemonic for this is mnemonic: “m to the n, e to the –m over n factorial.” Arguably the factorial sign even resembles an inverted i.
Now we just need a way to remember that …
(From M.H. Greenblatt, Mathematical Entertainments, 1965.)
In 1926, Mexican physician Luis Cervantes met Concepción Jurado, a 61-year-old schoolteacher who was impersonating a bearded Spanish count at a party. Impressed by her performance, Cervantes convinced Jurado to partake in an ongoing hoax. He invented a character, Count Carlos Balmori, and engaged prominent Mexicans to underwrite the story of Balmori’s wealth and power. Reporters planted stories of the count’s wealth and travels, bankers forged bankbooks, and judges and politicians provided official papers when needed.
Then, each week, Cervantes would choose a victim and stage a “Balmoreada,” a special evening in which the count would approach one guest and offer a fabulous sum in return for a ridiculous favor. He would induce a hacienda owner to shave his beard, a general to lead a revolution against Mexico, a Chilean diplomat to denounce his country, all in return for great wealth.
It’s said that only one guest in 20 refused the offer. As soon as the victim had accepted the proposal, Jurado would reveal her disguise and the dupe was admitted to the club, sworn to secrecy and invited to each future Balmoreada as a guest.
This went on for fully five years, until Jurado’s death of cancer in 1931. The society of the gullible greedy grew to include matadors, bankers, and police officials. Onetime President Plutarco Elías Calles is even said to have attended the meetings. Its members have now dwindled away, but Jurado’s tomb, in the largest cemetery in Mexico City, commemorates it with cartoons of both her personalities.
When Essex grocer Edward Bright died in November 1750, he weighed more than 600 pounds; his coffin was three feet deep and required 12 men to draw it to the church.
The following month, to settle a bet, seven men were buttoned into Bright’s waistcoat.
In the engraving recording the feat, one onlooker says, “Sir you’ll allow that to be Fair.” His companion says, “I do Sir, & to me beyond Imagination.”
There was Diodorus Chronos, a most acute and subtle reasoner. He proved there was no such thing as motion. A body must move either in the place where it is or in the place where it is not. Now, a body cannot be in motion in the place where it is stationary, and cannot be in motion in the place where it is not. Therefore, it cannot move at all. …
Diodorus was brought up roundly by another densely practical intelligence. Having dislocated his shoulder, he sent for a surgeon to set it. ‘Nay,’ said the practitioner, doubtful, perhaps, whether so subtle an intelligence might not euchre him out of his fee by some logical ingenuity, ‘your shoulder cannot possibly be put out at all, since it cannot be put out in the place in which it is, nor yet in the place in which it is not.’
— “Some Famous Paradoxes,” The Illustrated American, Nov. 1, 1890
In exploring the upper Orinoco around 1800, Alexander von Humboldt learned of a tribe, the Atures, that had recently died out there. Their language had died with them, but Humboldt was still able to hear it spoken: “At the period of our voyage an old parrot was shown at Maypures, of which the inhabitants related, and the fact is worthy of observation, that ‘they did not understand what it said, because it spoke the language of the Atures.'”
From a 19th-century poem:
Where are now the youths who bred him
To pronounce their mother tongue?
Where the gentle maids who fed him
And who built his nest when young?
Humboldt managed to record phonetically 40 words spoken by the parrot, and in 1997 artist Rachel Berwick painstakingly taught two Amazon parrots to speak them. Can a language be said to survive if no one knows its meaning?
A correspondent at Princeton College sent this conundrum to Sam Loyd:
“Supposing that a bird weighing one ounce flies into a box with only one small opening, and without resting continues to fly round and round in the box, would it increase or lessen the weight of the box?”
Loyd said he was open to argument, but “the preponderance of opinion is so overwhelmingly in favor of the weight of the bird being added to that of the box, that it would be difficult to present reasonable argument for the other side, despite of the popular belief that such would be the case. … The bird is heavier than the air and supports itself by striking down upon the air and the power of such strokes would undoubtedly show on the dial the difference in weight between the bird and its displacement of air.”
A related problem from Clark Kinnaird’s Encyclopedia of Puzzles and Pastimes (1946):
“A vagrant who stole three melons weighing three pounds each, came to a bridge which was just strong enough to hold him and six pounds. Without throwing any of the melons across the bridge, how did the vagrant cross the bridge with the melons, none of which touched the bridge?”
Kinnaird’s answer: He juggled them.
After leaving a Cambridge party, H.G. Wells realized he had picked up the wrong hat. The owner’s name was inside the brim, but the hat fit well, and Wells liked it. So he sent a note instead:
“I stole your hat; I like your hat; I shall keep your hat. Whenever I look inside it I shall think of you and your excellent sherry and of the town of Cambridge. I take off your hat to you.”
Letter from Mark Twain to William Dean Howells, London, July 3, 1899:
Dear Howells,— … I’ve a lot of things to write you, but it’s no use — I can’t get time for anything these days. I must break off and write a postscript to Canon Wilberforce before I go to bed. This afternoon he left a luncheon-party half an hour ahead of the rest, and carried off my hat (which has Mark Twain in a big hand written in it). When the rest of us came out there was but one hat that would go on my head — it fitted exactly, too. So wore it away. It had no name in it, but the Canon was the only man who was absent. I wrote him a note at 8 p.m.; saying that for four hours I had not been able to take anything that did not belong to me, nor stretch a fact beyond the frontiers of truth, and my family were getting alarmed. Could he explain my trouble? And now at 8.30 p.m. comes a note from him to say that all the afternoon he has been exhibiting a wonder-compelling mental vivacity and grace of expression, etc., etc., and have I missed a hat? Our letters have crossed.
Yours ever,
Mark.
There’s a girl out in Ann Arbor, Mich.,
To meet whom I never would wich.
She’d gobble ice cream
Till with colic she’d scream,
Then order another big dich.
A handsome young gent down in Fla.
Collapsed in a hospital ca.
A young nurse from Me.
Sought to banish his pe.
And shot him. Now what could be ha.?
There was a young lady from Del.
Who was most undoubtedly wel.
That to dress for a masque
Wasn’t much of a tasque,
But she cried, “What the heck will my fel.?”
There are plenty of people in Md.
Who think that their state is a fd.
It seems odd to find
That they don’t really mind
That Wis., not Md., is Dd.
See This Sceptred Isle.
In 1889 Fredericka Beardsley Gilchrist advanced a theory that the entire meaning of Hamlet has been confused because of a typographical error. In Act I, Scene V, the ghost reveals to Hamlet his mother’s adultery and his father’s murder. Hamlet responds:
O all you host of heaven! O earth! what else?
And shall I couple hell? O fie!
Gilchrist maintains that the second line should read:
And shall I couple? Hell! O fie!
In other words, “And after this shall I also marry? No!” He gives up his love for Ophelia, and the rest of the play is the story of “an unhappy lover.”
For Gilchrist this is “the one key that unlocks every difficulty in the play”: “For nearly three hundred years it has been possible to misunderstand, not special passages only, but the fundamental intention of the play; during that time no satisfactory explanation of all its obscurities has been advanced. I believe this theory explains them; and this belief, based on careful study and comparison, ought to excuse the seeming vanity and presumption of the preceding statement.”
Decide for yourself — her book is here.
1212 + 1388 + 2349 = 4949; 49493 = 121213882349
1287 + 1113 + 2649 = 5049; 50493 = 128711132649
1623 + 2457 + 1375 = 5455; 54553 = 162324571375
1713 + 2377 + 1464 = 5554; 55543 = 171323771464
3689 + 1035 + 2448 = 7172; 71723 = 368910352448