paraskavedekatriaphobia
n. fear of Friday the 13th
Tall Order
[H]e drew our attention to the vast difference the position of the shoulders make in a man’s height. This he illustrated by walking from the audience with his shoulders in their natural position, until, having traversed half the length of the room, he suddenly raised them, as represented in the accompanying sketches. The effect was quite startling, and very ludicrous.
— Frank Bellew, The Art of Amusing, 1866
Bah!
For the past 25 years, PNC Bank has calculated an annual “Christmas price index,” adding up the total cost of all the gifts mentioned in “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” In 1984 the total was $12,623.10; by 2008 it had risen to $21,080.10.
This assumes that you’d hire the drummers, pipers, lords, ladies, and maids, rather than buying slaves or creating them in some kind of lab. And “Omitting the seven swans a-swimming may be a tempting way for a true love to hold the line on costs,” says the bank, “but one would be advised to proceed with caution.”
Also, the estimates above assume you’ll give 78 gifts total, but strictly speaking that’s not accurate — the song calls for one partridge on day one, a second on day two, etc. Add up all these multiples and you must give 364 gifts altogether, for a total cost of $86,608.51 — or $131,150.76 if you buy online.
“A Crime Story”
From the American journal Scripta Mathematica:
An elementary school teacher in New York state had her purse stolen. The thief had to be Lilian, Judy, David, Theo, or Margaret. When questioned, each child made three statements:
Lilian:
(1) I didn’t take the purse.
(2) I have never in my life stolen anything.
(3) Theo did it.
Judy:
(4) I didn’t take the purse.
(5) My daddy is rich enough, and I have a purse of my own.
(6) Margaret knows who did it.
David:
(7) I didn’t take the purse.
(8) I didn’t know Margaret before I enrolled in this school.
(9) Theo did it.
Theo:
(10) I am not guilty.
(11) Margaret did it.
(12) Lillian is lying when she says I stole the purse.
Margaret:
(13) I didn’t take the teacher’s purse.
(14) Judy is guilty.
(15) David can vouch for me because he has known me since I was born.
Later, each child admitted that two of his statements were true and one was false. Assuming this is true, who stole the purse?
A Mountain’s Ghost
Visit the top of Adam’s Peak in Sri Lanka and you’ll see a striking sight — at sunrise the mountain’s own shadow is caught in the morning mist before you.
“The shadow seemed to rise up and stand in front of us in the air,” wrote a correspondent to Nature in 1886, “with rainbow and spectral arms, and then to fall down suddenly to the earth as the bow disappeared.”
Stop the World
Arguments against Galileo:
“Animals, which move, have limbs and muscles; the earth has no limbs or muscles, therefore it does not move.” — Scipio Chiaramonti, University of Pisa, 1633
“Buildings and the earth itself would fly off with such a rapid motion that men would have to be provided with claws like cats to enable them to hold fast to the earth’s surface.” — Libertus Fromundus, Anti-Aristarchus, 1631
“If we concede the motion of the earth, why is it that an arrow shot into the air falls back to the same spot, while the earth and all the things on it have in the meantime moved very rapidly toward the east? Who does not see that great confusion would result from this motion?” — Polacco, Anticopernicus Catholicus, 1644
More recent:
“[Astronomers give the rate of Earth’s rotation as 1,000 kilometers per hour.] An aircraft flying at this rate in the same direction as that of the rotation could not cover any ground at all. It would remain suspended in mid-air over the spot from which it took off, since both speeds are equal. There would, in addition, be no need to fly from one place to another situated on the same latitude. The aircraft could just rise and wait for the desired country to arrive in the ordinary course of the rotation, and then land; although it is difficult to see how any plane could manage to touch ground at all on an airfield which is slipping away at the rate of 1,000 kilometers per hour. It might certainly be useful to know what people who fly think of the rotation of the earth.” — Gabrielle Henriet, Heaven and Earth, 1957
See No Spin Zone.
Trivium
Twenty-one U.S. states have names that end in A.
Thanks Anyway
In 1776, Viennese schoolmaster Antonio Felkel factored every number up to 408,000. Few people bought the book, though, so the treasury recalled it and used the paper to make ammunition cartridges.
University of Prague professor J.P. Kulik spent 20 years extending the work to 100,000,000. He published it in six volumes in 1867.
Volume 2 has been lost.
Unquote
“The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.” — Tacitus
Giving Pause
Harold Ross personally edited every issue of the New Yorker between 1925 and 1951. Unfortunately, he was a fiend for commas, peppering every sentence until all possible ambiguity was removed. An example from 1948:
“When I read, the other day, in the suburban-news section of a Boston newspaper, of the death of Mrs. Abigail Richardson Sawyer (as I shall call her), I was, for the moment, incredulous, for I had always thought of her as one of nature’s indestructibles.”
His writers hated this. James Thurber revised Wordsworth:
She lived, alone, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be,
But, she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference, to me.
And E.B White wrote, “Commas in the New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.”
But Ross was immovable. “We have carried editing to a very high degree of fussiness here,” he acknowledged to H.L. Mencken, “probably to a point approaching the ultimate. I don’t know how to get it under control.”
So on it went. A correspondent once asked Thurber why Ross had added the comma to the sentence “After dinner, the men went into the living-room.” Thurber responded, “This particular comma was Ross’s way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.”