Progress

Deposition of Elizabeth Brett, a Hertfordshire farmer’s servant, regarding an alarming experience on Sept. 15, 1784:

This deponent, on her oath, saith, that on Wednesday the 15th day of September instant, between four and five o’clock in the afternoon, she, this deponent, being then at work in her master’s brewhouse, heard an uncommon and loud noise, which, on attending to it, she conceived to be the sound of men singing as they returned from harvest-home. That upon going to the door of the house she perceived a strange large body in the air, and, on approaching it in a meadow-field near the house, called Long Mead, she perceived a man in it; that the person in the machine, which she knew not what to make of, but which the person in it called an air-balloon, called to her to take hold of the rope, which she did accordingly; that John Mills and George Philips, labourers with said Mr. Thomas Read, came up soon after, and, being likewise requested to assist in holding the rope, both made their excuses, one of them, George Philips, saying he was too short, and John Mills saying that he did not like it; that this deponent continued to hold the rope till some other harvest-men of Mr. Benjamin Robinson, of High Cross, came up, by whose assistance the machine was held down till the person got out of the machine. And this deponent further, on her oath, saith, that the person now present and shown to her by William Baker, Esq., the justice of peace before whom this deposition is taken, as Mr. Vincent Lunardi, and in her presence declares himself to be Mr. Vincent Lunardi, was the person who called to me from the machine, as above stated, and who descended therefrom in the said field called Long Meadow.

Other witnesses acknowledged that Lunardi had told them “that he had set out from the Artillery Ground in London, a little before two o’clock in the afternoon of the said day, in the machine, and had travelled through the air to the place where they found him.” He later described his view of the city from this new perspective.

From Christopher H. Turnor’s Astra Castra, 1865, via Humphrey Jennings, Pandaemonium, 1985.

| History · Technology

When in Rome …

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Columba_livia_-flight-4.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Oxford zoologists Tim Guilford and Dora Biro discovered a surprise in 2004: Homing pigeons sometimes just follow roads like the rest of us. Although the birds have inbuilt magnetic compasses, they fall back on the known landscape when they’re in familiar territory, following the lines of motorways and trunk roads.

Guilford and Biro strapped cameras and GPS devices to pigeons’ backs and watched them follow the A34 Oxford Bypass, turning at traffic lights and curving around roundabouts. They write, “One dominant linear feature, the A34 Oxford Bypass, appears to be associated with low entropy for much of its length, even where individual birds fly along or over it for a relatively short distance.”

“In fact, you don’t need a mini-GPS to find the circumstantial evidence” of this phenomenon, writes Joe Moran in On Roads. “You will often see seagulls in landlocked Birmingham because they have flown up the Bristol Channel and followed the M5, mistaking it for a river.”

(Tim Guilford et al., “Positional Entropy During Pigeon Homing Ii: Navigational Interpretation of Bayesian Latent State Models,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 227:1 [2004], 25-38.)

| Science & Math

Collared

A puzzle from R.M. Abraham’s Diversions & Pastimes, 1933:

A prisoner escapes from Dartmoor Prison and has half-an-hour’s start of two warders and a bloodhound who race after him. The warders’ speed is 4 miles per hour; the dog’s 12 miles per hour, but the prisoner can only do 3 miles per hour. The dog runs up to the prisoner and then back to the warders, and so on back and forth until the warders catch the prisoner. How far does the dog travel altogether?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Classic

Hungarian physician Alexander Lenard spent seven years translating Winnie-the-Pooh into Latin:

‘Quid ergo est, Porcelle?’ dixit Christophorus Robinus lectulo exsurgens.

‘Heff,’ dixit Porcellus anhelitum ducens ut vix loqui posset, ‘heff — heff — heffalumpus!’

‘Ubi?’

‘Illic,’ exclamavit ungulam agitans Porcellus.

‘Qualum praebet speciem?’

‘Sicut — sicut — habet maximum caput quod unquam vidisti. Aliquid magnum et immane — sicut — sicut nihil. Permagnum — sane, putares — nescio — permagnum nihil. Sicut caccabus.’

When it reached the New York Times bestseller list in 1960, the Christian Science Monitor wrote, “It is hard to conceive of a Latin work more calculated than this attractive volume to fascinate the modern public, young and old.” Here it is.

| Language · Literature

In a Word

kirkify
v. to make like a Presbyterian church in appearance

(This is in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s English Note-Books of 1857: “Then we went to St Giles’s Cathedral, which I shall not describe, it having been kirkified into three interior divisions by the Covenanters.”)

| Language

Coming and Going

An anecdote from Oliviu Felecan and Alina Bughesiu’s Onomastics in Contemporary Public Space, 2013:

A Zulu owned a dog that used to roll in dirt and dung when it was young. When it came to the house, everyone shouted, “Phuma phela!”, meaning “Get out now!” or “Get out, then!” As the dog became more disciplined it was allowed into the house and the phrase simply became its name. But if Get Out Now was now the dog’s name (asked the confused interviewer), then surely it was used to call the dog into the house?

‘Yes, that is so,’ was the answer. Then what do they say now to get the dog out of the house, seeing that ‘get out now’ brings the dog in?

The answer to this question was simple, and perhaps predictable: ‘we say “Hheyi, voetsek wena!”‘

“That is to say, in order to chase away this particular dog, one would have to tell it that much in Afrikaans.”

(Steven Wright used to joke that he named his dog Stay so he could call, “Come here, Stay! Come here, Stay!” “Now he just ignores me and keeps on typing.”)

| Language

Face Value

Suppose that Schweitzer and Gandhi are equally saintly and that Green and White are equally unsavory characters with long criminal records. Suppose that on separate occasions Green gratuitously slaps Schweitzer in the face, Schweitzer gratuitously slaps White in the face, and Gandhi gratuitously slaps Schweitzer in the face. If guilt were proportional, not just to the offence, but to the moral uprightness of the offended party, then Green would incur more guilt and liability to punishment than would Schweitzer. For since Schweitzer is worthier than White, Green’s failure to show respect for Schweitzer was more grievous than Schweitzer’s failure to show respect for White. Similarly, Gandhi’s action would be more culpable than Schweitzer’s. In fact, I think we are more apt to consider guilt as directly proportional to the nature of the offender than to the nature of the offended party. Schweitzer’s action in slapping White is, if anything, more culpable than Green’s action in slapping Schweitzer. In view of Schweitzer’s long-standing habits of self-control and moral behaviour, we should expect more from him than from Green who has never developed these habits. Similarly, we should expect more from Gandhi. Nor would we say that Gandhi’s act was more culpable than Schweitzer’s. We might even have some inclination to be less outraged at Gandhi, since he was at least ‘picking on someone’ of his own moral stature.

— Marilyn McCord Adams, “Hell and the God of Justice,” Religious Studies 11:4 [December 1975], 433-447

| Society

Symmetry

The second act of Alban Berg’s 1937 opera Lulu includes a three-minute sequence that’s a musical palindrome — after the first 90 seconds, there’s an ascending piano arpeggio, a pause … and then the music unfolds in reverse, a perfect mirror image back to the start.

This music accompanies a silent film that is itself a palindrome in some ways — for example, three people arrest Lulu and put her in prison, and then three liberate her. And Lulu’s husbands in Act I are played by the same singers as her clients in Act III.

| Art

“Hiawatha’s Photographing”

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/651/651-h/651-h.htm#page66

Lewis Carroll was an early enthusiast of photography, though he seems to have found the social aspects trying — he published this poem in 1857:

From his shoulder Hiawatha
Took the camera of rosewood,
Made of sliding, folding rosewood;
Neatly put it all together.
In its case it lay compactly,
Folded into nearly nothing;
But he opened out the hinges,
Pushed and pulled the joints and hinges,
Till it looked all squares and oblongs,
Like a complicated figure
In the Second Book of Euclid.
This he perched upon a tripod —
Crouched beneath its dusky cover —
Stretched his hand, enforcing silence —
Said, “Be motionless, I beg you!”
Mystic, awful was the process.
All the family in order
Sat before him for their pictures:
Each in turn, as he was taken,
Volunteered his own suggestions,
His ingenious suggestions.
First the Governor, the Father:
He suggested velvet curtains
Looped about a massy pillar;
And the corner of a table,
Of a rosewood dining-table.
He would hold a scroll of something,
Hold it firmly in his left-hand;
He would keep his right-hand buried
(Like Napoleon) in his waistcoat;
He would contemplate the distance
With a look of pensive meaning,
As of ducks that die ill tempests.
Grand, heroic was the notion:
Yet the picture failed entirely:
Failed, because he moved a little,
Moved, because he couldn’t help it.
Next, his better half took courage;
She would have her picture taken.
She came dressed beyond description,
Dressed in jewels and in satin
Far too gorgeous for an empress.
Gracefully she sat down sideways,
With a simper scarcely human,
Holding in her hand a bouquet
Rather larger than a cabbage.
All the while that she was sitting,
Still the lady chattered, chattered,
Like a monkey in the forest.
“Am I sitting still?” she asked him.
“Is my face enough in profile?
Shall I hold the bouquet higher?
Will it came into the picture?”
And the picture failed completely.
Next the Son, the Stunning-Cantab:
He suggested curves of beauty,
Curves pervading all his figure,
Which the eye might follow onward,
Till they centered in the breast-pin,
Centered in the golden breast-pin.
He had learnt it all from Ruskin
(Author of ‘The Stones of Venice,’
‘Seven Lamps of Architecture,’
‘Modern Painters,’ and some others);
And perhaps he had not fully
Understood his author’s meaning;
But, whatever was the reason,
All was fruitless, as the picture
Ended in an utter failure.
Next to him the eldest daughter:
She suggested very little,
Only asked if he would take her
With her look of ‘passive beauty.’
Her idea of passive beauty
Was a squinting of the left-eye,
Was a drooping of the right-eye,
Was a smile that went up sideways
To the corner of the nostrils.
Hiawatha, when she asked him,
Took no notice of the question,
Looked as if he hadn’t heard it;
But, when pointedly appealed to,
Smiled in his peculiar manner,
Coughed and said it ‘didn’t matter,’
Bit his lip and changed the subject.
Nor in this was he mistaken,
As the picture failed completely.
So in turn the other sisters.
Last, the youngest son was taken:
Very rough and thick his hair was,
Very round and red his face was,
Very dusty was his jacket,
Very fidgety his manner.
And his overbearing sisters
Called him names he disapproved of:
Called him Johnny, ‘Daddy’s Darling,’
Called him Jacky, ‘Scrubby School-boy.’
And, so awful was the picture,
In comparison the others
Seemed, to one’s bewildered fancy,
To have partially succeeded.
Finally my Hiawatha
Tumbled all the tribe together,
(‘Grouped’ is not the right expression),
And, as happy chance would have it
Did at last obtain a picture
Where the faces all succeeded:
Each came out a perfect likeness.
Then they joined and all abused it,
Unrestrainedly abused it,
As the worst and ugliest picture
They could possibly have dreamed of.
‘Giving one such strange expressions —
Sullen, stupid, pert expressions.
Really any one would take us
(Any one that did not know us)
For the most unpleasant people!’
(Hiawatha seemed to think so,
Seemed to think it not unlikely.)
All together rang their voices,
Angry, loud, discordant voices,
As of dogs that howl in concert,
As of cats that wail in chorus.
But my Hiawatha’s patience,
His politeness and his patience,
Unaccountably had vanished,
And he left that happy party.
Neither did he leave them slowly,
With the calm deliberation,
The intense deliberation
Of a photographic artist:
But he left them in a hurry,
Left them in a mighty hurry,
Stating that he would not stand it,
Stating in emphatic language
What he’d be before he’d stand it.
Hurriedly he packed his boxes:
Hurriedly the porter trundled
On a barrow all his boxes:
Hurriedly he took his ticket:
Hurriedly the train received him:
Thus departed Hiawatha.

He introduced it by writing, “In an age of imitation, I can claim no special merit for this slight attempt at doing what is known to be so easy. Any fairly practised writer, with the slightest ear for rhythm, could compose, for hours together, in the easy running metre of The Song of Hiawatha. Having then distinctly stated that I challenge no attention in the following little poem to its merely verbal jingle, I must beg the candid reader to confine his criticism to its treatment of the subject.”

| Poems · Society · Technology