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

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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

Following Orders

A Roman Catholic who had filled up the measure of his iniquities as far as he dared went to the priest to confess and obtain absolution. He entered the apartment of the priest and addressed him thus, ‘Holy father, I have sinned.’

The priest bade him kneel before the penitential chair. The penitent was looking about, and saw the priest’s gold watch lying upon the table within his reach; he seized it and put it in his bosom. The priest approached him and requested him to acknowledge the sins for which he wished absolution.

‘Father,’ said the rogue, ‘I have stolen, and what shall I do?’ ‘Restore,’ said the priest, ‘the thing you have stolen to its rightful owner.’ ‘Do you take it,’ said the penitent. ‘No, I shall not,’ said the priest; ‘you must give it to the owner.’ ‘But he has refused to take it.’ ‘If this be the case you may keep it.’

The priest granted him full absolution; and the penitent knelt and kissed his hand, craved his benediction, crossed himself, and departed with a clear conscience, and a very valuable gold watch into the bargain.

— Walter Baxendale, Dictionary of Anecdote, Incident, Illustrative Fact, 1888

| Humor

Say When

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Here’s an ingenious way to limit your drinking — this cup, credited to Pythagoras of Samos, works fine if you fill it no higher than the dotted line. If you add more, the liquid spills over the elbow joint and a siphon effect pours the cup’s entire contents onto your lap.

“It takes only one drink to get me drunk,” said George Burns. “The trouble is, I can’t remember if it’s the thirteenth or the fourteenth.”

| Technology

Painting the Lily

About 50 years after Shakespeare’s death, John Dryden’s brother-in-law James Howard rewrote Romeo and Juliet as a tragicomedy in which the lovers are happily married. His production was so unpopular that the play was performed as a tragedy on alternate evenings, but it was enough to inspire a series of dramatists to try their hands at revising the Bard.

British poet laureate William Davenant added dancing and singing to Macbeth, all reportedly “excellently performed, being in the nature of an opera.” In Irish poet Nahum Tate’s 1681 revision of King Lear, the fool is absent, the king survives, Cordelia marries Edgar, and the three sisters are reconciled. In the 1740s, David Garrick raised Juliet’s age to 18, dropped the bedroom scene, removed Rosaline, and added a brief reunion between the lovers in the tomb. (He considered these changes “few and trifling.”)

The one really interesting such idea lay with Lewis Carroll, who dreamed of “Bowldlerising Bowldler,” “i.e. of editing a Shakespeare which shall be absolutely fit for girls.” He planned to “erase ruthlessly every word in the play that is in any degree profane, or coarse, or in any sense unsuited for a girl of from 10 to 15; and then to make the best I can of what is left.” Alas, he never completed the project.

| Literature

Right Thinking

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At a London dinner, Sydney Smith overheard the woman next to him decline gravy. He turned to her and said, “Madam, I have been looking all my life for a person who disliked gravy–let us swear eternal friendship.”

Sir Humphrey Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.

— Edmund Clerihew Bentley

| Literature

C Sickness

“Light crosses space with the prodigious velocity of 6,000 leagues per second.”

— La Science Populaire, April 28, 1881

“A typographical error slipped into our last issue that it is important to correct: the speed of light is 76,000 leagues per hour — and not 6,000.”

— La Science Populaire, May 19, 1881

“A note correcting a first error appeared in our issue number 68, indicating that the speed of light is 76,000 leagues per hour. Our readers have corrected this new error. The speed of light is approximately 76,000 leagues per second.”

— La Science Populaire, June 16, 1881

| Literature · Science & Math