For What It’s Worth

A paper received from Natal Africa contains an article by Rev. Josiah Tyler on the similarity of Jewish and Zulu customs. Among them we mention several: The feast of first fruits, rejection of swine’s flesh, right of circumcision, the slayer of the king not allowed to live, Zulu girls go upon the mountains and mourn days and nights, saying ‘Hoi! Hoi!’ like Jepthah’s daughter, traditions of the universal deluge, and of the passage of Red Sea; great men have servants to pour water on their hands; the throwing stones into a pile; blood sprinkled on houses. The authors’ belief is that the Zulus were cradled in the land of the Bible. Certain customs are mentioned which may be ascribed to the primitive tribal organism. These are as follows: Marriages commonly among their own tribe; uncle called father, nephew a son, niece a daughter; inheritance descends from father to eldest son. If there are no sons it goes to the paternal uncle. A surmise has been advanced by some that the relics of the Queen of Sheba’s palace may be found in certain ancient ruins described by Peterman, Baines and others, and the Ophir of scripture has been located at Sofala, an African port.

— The American Antiquarian, January 1885

| Oddities · Religion

Stealth Hoover

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=qCI1AAAAEBAJ

You want to vacuum your dog, but your dog is afraid of vacuums. What do you need? A dog-shaped vacuum!

Anne Margaret Zaleski’s 1973 invention permits dog owners to clean up clipped hair and the like without alarming their pets:

It will be readily obvious that other shapes of dogs, not shown, may be used instead, preferably one to correspond to the particular type dog to be groomed so that he will feel more friendly toward it.

He may get a bit nervous again when he sees that his new friend’s tail is a retractable suction nozzle.

| Technology

Mater Goose

Studious John Horner,
Of Latin no scorner,
In the second declension did spy
How nouns there are some
Which ending in um
Do not make their plural in i.

Jack and Jill
Have studied Mill,
And all that sage has taught, too.
Now both promote
Jill’s claim to vote,
As every good girl ought to.

— Harper’s, quoted in William T. Dobson, Poetical Ingenuities and Eccentricities, 1882

scripta mathematica - twinkle poem

— Ralph Barton, Science in Rhyme and Without Reason, 1924, reprinted in Scripta Mathemetica, October 1936

| Poems

In a Word

bubulcitate
v. to cry like a cowboy

(That’s from Henry Cockeram’s English Dictionary of 1623, so it doesn’t refer to a cowboy of the American West. What it does refer to is unclear. Cockeram said he included “even the mocke-words which are ridiculously used in our language,” but this word appears never to have been published outside of his dictionary, so we don’t know what a “cowboy” is or why he might cry. Make up your own meaning.)

| Language

“This Prodigious Child”

http://books.google.com/books?id=NdQ5AAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false

Born to an Enfield miller in February 1779, Thomas Hills Everitt began to grow apace after six weeks, and it soon became clear that he was a young giant. When he reached 9 months and 2 weeks a local surgeon compared his dimensions to those of a 7-year-old boy:

http://books.google.com/books?id=NdQ5AAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false

His height at that point was 3 foot 1, and his weight was estimated at 9 stone.

Eventually his parents moved to London and began to exhibit him to the public; he was said to be well proportioned, with fine hair, pure skin, an expressive face, and a good temper, and he “subsisted entirely on the breast.” The surgeon hoped he might live to some enormous maturity, but he died in 1780, at about 18 months.

| Oddities

Hose and Cons

Sir John Cutler had pair of silk stockings, which his housekeeper, Dolly, darned for a long term of years with worsted; at the end of which time, the last gleam of silk had vanished, and Sir John’s silk stockings were found to have degenerated into worsted. Now, upon this, a question arose amongst the metaphysicians, whether Sir John’s stockings retained (or, if not, at what precise period they lost) their personal identity. The moralists again were anxious to know, whether Sir John’s stockings could be considered the same ‘accountable’ stockings from first to last. The lawyers put the same question in another shape, by demanding whether any felony which Sir John’s stockings could be supposed to have committed in youth, might legally be the subject of indictment against the same stockings when superannuated; whether a legacy left to the stockings in their first year, could be claimed by them in their last; and whether the worsted stockings could be sued for the debts of the silk stockings.

— Thomas de Quincey, “Autobiography of an English Opium-Eater,” from Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, September 1838

| Literature · Science & Math

The Hermit of Niagara

This is rather romantically obscure: On June 18, 1829, a stranger arrived on the American side of Niagara Falls and took a room at a local hotel. His name was Francis Abbott, and after viewing the falls he declared himself so enchanted that he extended his stay from a few days to a week, and then to a month. Eventually he took up residence in an old cottage on Goat Island, where he lived alone contemplating the falls for some 20 months. Occasionally he could be seen walking precariously along a single beam of timber that projected over the flood at the Terrapin Bridge. On June 10, 1831, he disappeared while bathing in the water, and on June 21 his body was discovered downstream at Fort Niagara.

Abbott had shunned society increasingly, but the villagers who had interacted with him could assemble a picture. He was an English gentleman of a finished education, skilled in music and drawing, and had visited Egypt, Palestine, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and France. He wrote in Latin but destroyed his compositions. When the villagers investigated his hut they found his dog at the door and his cat on the bed; his guitar, his violin, flutes, and music books were scattered about, but his portfolio and the leaves of a large book were blank.

“What, it will be asked, could have broken up and destroyed such a mind as Francis Abbott’s?” asked the New York Mirror. “What could have driven him from the society he was so well qualified to adorn — and what transform him, noble in person and in intellect, into an isolated anchorite, shunning the association of his fellow-men? The history of his misfortunes is not known, and the cause of his unhappiness and seclusion will, undoubtedly, to us be ever a mystery.”

| Oddities

Clued In

Insider trading, like blackmail, is something everyone abhors and no one can say why. Economists have shown that under a variety of plausible circumstances insider trading is actually beneficial for all shareholders and investors, because, for instance, it can be used as a particularly efficient form of incentive compensation for corporate executives. For this reason many shareholders would be perfectly agreeable if their corporation would add a provision into its charter expressly authorizing its executives to engage in insider trading. Yet many people, even after they have grasped the economic case to be made for insider trading, continue to regard it as somehow immoral even if economically desirable. And the law certainly forbids companies to allow their executives to engage in insider trading, even if their shareholders should expressly authorize it. But no one to date has been able to explain why insider trading is immoral and why it continues to be immoral even if the shareholders unanimously authorize the management to engage in it.

— Leo Katz, Ill-Gotten Gains, 1996

| Society

Moonlighting

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

J.J. Sylvester was a brilliant mathematician but, by all accounts, a lousy poet. The Dictionary of American Biography opines delicately that “Most of Sylvester’s original verse showed more ingenuity than poetic feeling.”

What it lacked, really, was variety. His privately printed book Spring’s Debut: A Town Idyll contains 113 lines, every one of which rhymes with in.

Even worse is “Rosalind,” a poem of 400 lines all of which rhyme with the title character’s name. In his History of Mathematics, Florian Cajori reports that Sylvester once recited “Rosalind” at Baltimore’s Peabody Institute. He began by reading all the explanatory footnotes, so as not to interrupt the poem, and realized too late that this had taken an hour and a half.

“Then he read the poem itself to the remnant of his audience.”

See Poetry in Motion.

| Literature · Science & Math

The Problem of the Calissons

A calisson is a flat French candy traditionally manufactured in the shape of two equilateral triangles joined along an edge. Suppose a quantity of these are packed randomly into a hexagonal container:

problem of the calissons

Each candy must take one of three orientations: east-west, northeast-southwest, or northwest-southeast.

As it happens, no matter how the candies are packed into the hexagon, an equal number will take each of these three orientations.

In the May 1989 issue of the American Mathematical Monthly, Guy David and Carlos Tomei demonstrated this with a beautifully intuitive “proof without words.” What had they seen?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles