A New Deal

Playing cards were used as currency in early Canada. In 1685 the intendant of the French garrison in Quebec found that he had no money to pay his troops, “and not knowing to what saint to make my vows, the idea occurred to me of putting in circulation notes made of cards, each cut into four pieces; and I have issued an ordinance commanding the inhabitants to receive them in payment.”

This worked surprisingly well, so when funds ran short the following year they tried it again. The system continued intermittently for 70 years, collapsing finally only with the chaos of the Seven Years’ War.

| Oddities · Society

Performance Note

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Etude_10_5b.png

This is bar 66 of Chopin’s Étude Op. 10, No. 5. The red F is noteworthy because it’s the only point in the whole composition where the right hand touches a white key — apart from that, it plays black keys exclusively.

Jascha Heifetz once asked Ayke Agus to close her eyes while he played the piece for her. “It sounded strange,” she wrote, “and when I peeked I saw that he was playing it with an orange.”

| Art

“An Unsuspected Fact”

If down his throat a man should choose,
In fun, to jump or slide,
He’d scrape his shoes against his teeth,
Before he went inside.
But if his teeth were lost or gone,
And not a stump to scrape upon,
He’d see at once how very pat
His tongue lay there by way of mat,
And he would wipe his feet on that!

— Edward Cannon

| Poems

Seeing and Believing

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

John Dalton was a tornado of English science, exploring atomic theory, meteorology, perception, and the physics of gases with equal avidity.

But he was a Quaker, and when in 1834 he was invited to be presented to William IV, the question arose whether he could properly appear in the scarlet robes of an Oxford doctor of laws, as the color was forbidden to him.

Dalton solved this neatly: He pointed out that he was color-blind. “You call it scarlet,” he said. “To me its color is that of nature — the color of green leaves.”

| Religion · Science & Math

Borrowed Thunder

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_Dean_Howells_(ca1870).jp

Two letters written by Mark Twain in 1907:

To the New York Times:

Sir to you, I would like to know what kind of a goddam govment this is that discriminates between two common carriers and makes a goddam railroad charge everybody equal & lets a goddam man charge any goddam price he wants to for his goddam opera box.

W.D. Howells
Tuxedo Park Oct 4

To William Dean Howells:

Howells it is an outrage the way the govment is acting so I sent this complaint to N. Y. Times with your name signed because it would have more weight.

Mark

He wrote elsewhere: “When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.”

| Literature

Free Falling

Published in 1869, Edward Everett Hale’s story “The Brick Moon” described the launch of an artificial satellite nearly a century before Sputnik:

If from the surface of the earth, by a gigantic peashooter, you could shoot a pea upward from Greenwich, aimed northward as well as upward; if you drove it so fast and far that when its power of ascent was exhausted, and it began to fall, it should clear the earth, and pass outside the North Pole; if you had given it sufficient power to get it half round the earth without touching, that pea would clear the earth forever. It would continue to rotate above the North Pole, above the Feejee Island place, above the South Pole and Greenwich, forever, with the impulse with which it had first cleared our atmosphere and attraction. If only we could see that pea as it revolved in that convenient orbit, then we could measure the longitude from that, as soon as we knew how high the orbit was, as well as if it were the ring of Saturn.

Because the 200-foot brick sphere is accidentally launched with human occupants, Hale perhaps also deserves credit for anticipating the space station.

| Literature · Science & Math

Paper Work

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Intersecting_planes.svg

Rutgers mathematician E.P. Starke posed this question in the American Mathematical Monthly of July 1940:

“In high school geometry texts and elsewhere one frequently meets the statement that the reason for the straightness of the crease in a folded piece of paper is that the intersection of two planes is a straight line. This is fallacious. What is the correct reason?”

I was going to post this as a puzzle, but after much pondering I’ve been unable to make sense of the answer. Here it is:

“Let P, P′ be two points of the paper that are brought into coincidence by the process of folding. Then any point A of the crease is equidistant from P, P′, since the lines AP, AP′ are pressed into coincidence. Hence the crease, being the locus of such points A, is the perpendicular bisector of PP′.”

I agree that this is true, but I don’t see what’s wrong with the first answer. Any ideas?

UPDATE: The consensus seems to be that the first answer makes some invalid assumptions, including flat planes and Euclidean space, where Starke’s proof is more rigorous. Thanks to everyone who’s written in.

(Second update, on reflection: Presumably the books that Starke mentions were not claiming that all creases must be straight, only that a straight crease is so because two planes intersect in a line. That still seems reasonable to me.)

| Science & Math

“A Courtly Spaniard”

While the Duke de Villa Medina was at the English court, he was present, and took part at a tournament given by Elizabeth, where his gallantry and manly beauty made him the observed of all observers. At the close of the sports, as the duke came near to the queen, she said to him, pleasantly, that she would like to know who was the chosen mistress of so gallant a knight; whereupon he shook his head and would not further answer.

‘But,’ persisted Elizabeth, ‘there must be, somewhere, a lady whose beauty and perfection of character gives to her a deeper place in your heart than is yielded to another?’

‘Ah! yes gracious madam; there is one such.’

‘And may I know who she is?’

The duke reflected a moment, and then answered that he would inform her on the morrow.

And on the morrow he sent to the queen inclosed in a box of sandal-wood and mother-of-pearl a small mirror.

Those who know Elizabeth’s character can well imagine how deeply this exquisite bit of flattery must have touched her.

— The Lamp, 1881

| Society

Intercepted

In chess, a pawn may be captured “in passing” — when a pawn advances two squares from its initial position, it may be captured by an adjacent pawn as if it had advanced only one square.

This can lead to a curious state of affairs:

fraenkel en passant chess problem

From this position White plays 1. Bg2+ and declares checkmate. Black says “Au contraire,” plays 1. … d5, and announces checkmate himself. White shakes his head, plays 2. cxd6 e.p., and reasserts his own claim:

fraenkel en passant chess problem

Black claims that this last move is absurd. He says the game ended when he advanced his pawn to d5. But White argues that the pawn never reached d5 — in principle it was captured on d6, and thus could not stop White’s original mate.

So who won the game? It would seem to be a matter of opinion!

From Heinrich Fraenkel, Adventure in Chess, 1951.

| Oddities