Private Line

In 1980, Morris Davie was accused of setting forest fires and brought to the headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to take a lie detector test. He was left alone in a room, where a hidden camera recorded him dropping to his knees and saying, “Oh God, let me get away with it just this once.”

At trial, his lawyer objected to this evidence, arguing that it violated a Canadian law that prohibited the interception of private communications “made under circumstances in which it is reasonable for the originator thereof to expect that it will not be intercepted by any person other than the person intended by the originator thereof to receive it.”

Is God a person? The trial judge thought so — he held the videotape inadmissible and Davie was acquitted. The British Columbia Court of Appeal disagreed, however, deciding that a private communication requires an “intended human recipient.”

“In my opinion,” wrote Justice J.A. Hutcheon, “the word ‘person’ is used in the statutes of Canada to describe someone to whom rights are granted and upon whom obligations are placed. There is no earthly authority which can grant rights or impose duties upon God. I can find no reason to think that the Parliament of Canada has attempted to do so in the enactment of sections of the Criminal Code dealing with the protection of privacy.” He ordered a new trial.

| Religion · Society

Unquote

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NASA-Apollo8-Dec24-Earthrise-b.jpg

“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.'” — Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell

(Thanks, Hugh.)

| Society

Pen Fatigue

To autograph seekers, Mark Twain would return a typewritten message:

I hope I shall not offend you; I shall certainly say nothing with the intention to offend you. I must explain myself, however, and I will do it as kindly as I can. What you ask me to do I am asked to do as often as one half-dozen times a week. Three hundred letters a year! One’s impulse is to freely consent, but one’s time and necessary occupations will not permit it. There is no way but to decline in all cases, making no exceptions; and I wish to call your attention to a thing which has probably not occurred to you, and that is this: that no man takes pleasure in exercising his trade as a pastime. Writing is my trade, and I exercise it only when I am obliged to. You might make your request of a doctor, or a builder, or a sculptor, and there would be no impropriety in it, but if you asked either for a specimen of his trade, his handiwork, he would be justified in rising to a point of order. It would never be fair to ask a doctor for one of his corpses to remember him by.

| Literature

Through and Through

3139971973786634711391448651577269485891759419122938744591877656925789747974914319
422889611373939731 is prime, whether it’s spelled forward or backward. Further, if it’s cut into 10 pieces:

through and through - reversible primes

… each row, column, and diagonal is itself a reversible prime.

Discovered by Jens Kruse Andersen.

| Science & Math

A Man’s Home …

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tour_bollingen_CGJung.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 1922, after the death of his mother, Carl Jung felt “I had to achieve a kind of representation in stone of my innermost thoughts and of the knowledge I had acquired. Or, to put it another way, I had to make a confession of faith in stone.”

He began to build a structure on the shores of Lake Zurich in Switzerland. It began as a regular two-story house, “a maternal hearth,” but over the years he added a towerlike annex with a “retiring room” for withdrawal and contemplation, and a courtyard and loggia.

At 80, after his wife’s death, “I suddenly realized that the small central section which crouched so low, so hidden, was myself!” He added an upper story, an extension of his own personality no longer hidden behind the “maternal” and “spiritual” towers. “Now it signified an extension of consciousness achieved in old age. With that the building was complete.”

The final building, he saw, symbolized the structure of his own psyche, the full emergence of his personality in adulthood. “Unconsciously built at the time, only afterward did I see how all the parts fitted together and that a meaningful form had resulted: a symbol of psychic wholeness.” “At Bollingen,” he wrote, “I am in the midst of my true life, I am most deeply myself.”

| Science & Math

Meant to Be

In 2007 Gordon Bonnet was going through some genealogical records when he ran across a marriage record for Edward DeVere Stewart and Etta Grace Staggers.

“It was only when I was putting the names in my database that I noticed something odd about them. What is it?”

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

An Obscure Exit

On June 3, 1872, retired Navy captain George Colvocoresses bought a ticket for the boat from Bridgeport, Conn., to New York, where he had an appointment the next day with an insurance agent. He put a leather valise in his stateroom and dined in the restaurant, where he was observed to keep a small morocco traveling bag in his lap. At 10:30 a local druggist sold him some writing paper and envelopes and indicated the best route back to the boat. Just as the boat was putting off, a pistol shot was heard, and a policeman found Colvocoresses dying in the street.

His clothing was unbuttoned, and his shirt was on fire at the point where the bullet had entered, about 6 inches below the left breast. His possessions were near him except for the traveling bag, which was later found on a Naugatuck wharf, cut open with a dull knife. Diagonally across the street from the body was a large old-fashioned horse pistol. On the following day, percussion caps, a bullet, and a powder horn were found about 60 feet from where the body had been discovered.

Was this murder or suicide? Colvocoresses had recently increased the insurance on his life to $198,500, and it was claimed that the pistol’s hammer fitted an indentation in his bag. But a physician testified that it would be impossible for a man to shoot himself and then throw the pistol across the street, and the captain was healthy, on good terms with his family, and had adequate means.

After a long fight the insurance companies agreed to pay 50 cents on the dollar. That’s all we know.

| Crime · Oddities