lachschlaganfall
n. a condition in which a person falls unconscious due to violent laughter
Turning the Corner
Excerpts from the Harvard Economic Society’s Weekly Letter, 1929-1930:
- Nov. 16, 1929: “[A] severe depression like that of 1920-21 is outside the range of probability.”
- Jan. 18, 1930: “With the underlying conditions sound, we believe that the recession in general business will be checked shortly and that improvement will set in during the spring months.”
- May 17, 1930: “General prices are now at bottom and will shortly improve.”
- Aug. 30, 1930: “Since our monetary and credit structure is not only sound but unusually strong … there is every prospect that the recovery which we have been expecting will not be long delayed.”
- Sept. 20, 1930: “[R]ecovery will soon be evident.”
- Nov. 15, 1930: “[T]he outlook is for the end of the decline in business during the early part of 1931, and steady … revival for the remainder of the year.”
In 1931, strapped by the depression, the Letter ceased publication.
Moral Luck
You’re driving down the road and, in a moment of inattention, you run a red light. In one universe a cop pulls you over and gives you a ticket. In another universe you hit a little old lady and kill her.
In the first universe you’re just an ordinary motorist. In the second you’re a shameful monster. But you had no control over the presence of the little old lady; the same (small) list of controllable actions were available to you in both universes.
If our moral responsibility extends only to our voluntary actions, then in both universes your only transgression lies in running the red light. Why then do we assign additional blame for hitting the lady, an outcome over which you had no control?
Fruitful Dreams
In 1862, August Kekulé dreamed of a snake seizing its own tail; the vision inspired him to propose the structure of the benzene molecule.
Louis Agassiz had been struggling for two weeks to decipher the impression of a fossil fish in a stone slab when he dreamed on three successive nights of its proper character. When he chiseled away the stone he found that the hidden portions of the fish matched his nocturnal drawing.
William Watts had been forming lead shot mechanically when he dreamed he was caught in a cloudburst of molten metal. The image inspired him to develop the shot tower.
The best such story, alas, is false. It’s said that Elias Howe, frustrated in devising a sewing machine, dreamed he had been captured by an African tribe. He noticed that the menacing warriors’ spear-tips bore holes, and this inspired him to move the hole in his machine’s needle from the dull end (as in a hand needle) to the sharp one.
“This is not true,” writes Alonzo Bemis. “Mr. Howe was too much of a Yankee to place any dependence in dreams, and the needle idea was worked out by careful thought and countless experiments.”
Ship of State
There is a story to the effect that a statistician once found a very high correlation between the number of old maids and the size of the clover crop in different English counties. After puzzling over this relation for some time, he was able to trace what appeared to him to be the causal chain. Old maids, it appeared, kept cats; and cats ate mice. Field mice, however, were natural enemies of bumblebees, and these latter were, in turn, the chief agents in fertilizing the flowers of the clover plants. The implication, of course, is that the British Parliament should never legislate on the subject of marriage bonuses without first evaluating the effect upon the clover crop of reducing the spinster population.
— Herbert Simon, Administrative Behavior, 1997
Multitudes
USHERS contains five pronouns: HE, HER, HERS, SHE, US.
If rearranging letters is permitted, then SMITHERY contains 17: HE, HER, HERS, HIM, HIS, I, IT, ITS, ME, MY, SHE, THEIR, THEIRS, THEM, THEY, THY, YE.
Lincoln Seeks Equality
You’re in a pitch-dark room. On a table before you are 12 pennies. You know that 5 are heads up and 7 are tails up, but you don’t know which are which. By moving and flipping the coins you must produce two piles with an equal number of heads in each pile. How can you do this without seeing the coins?
No Argument There
‘Well, farmer, you told us your wood was good place for hunting. Now we’ve tramped through it for three hours and found no game.’ ‘Just so! Well, I suppose, as a general thing, the less game there is the more hunting you have.’
— Tit-Bits From All the Most Interesting Books, Periodicals and Newspapers in the World, March 25, 1882
In Memoriam
While Bret Harte was serving as proofreader for a provincial newspaper in Yreka, Calif., he was asked to consider a flowery obituary that contained the sentence “Even in Yreka her chastity was conspicuous.”
Harte realized with a smile that the writer had probably meant “charity,” so he underscored “chastity” and put a question mark in parentheses in the margin, to indicate that the word should be checked.
The following morning he picked up the paper and read: “Even in Yreka her chastity was conspicuous (?)”
Good News!
Cities will be provided with moving street-ways, always in action at two or more speeds; and we shall have learned to hop on and off the lowest speed from the stationary pavement, and from the lower speeds to the higher, without danger. When streets cross, one rolling roadway will rise in a curve over the other. There will be no vehicular traffic at all in cities of any size; all the transportation will be done by the roads’ own motion.
— T. Baron Russell, A Hundred Years Hence, 1906