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A Hidden Puzzle

Lewis Carroll sent this poem to Mabel and Emily Kerr on May 20, 1871. He titled it “A Double Acrostic” — but where is the acrostic?

Thanks, thanks, fair Cousins, for your gift
So swiftly borne to Albion’s isle —
Though angry waves their crests uplift
Between our shores, for many a league!

(“So far, so good,” you say: “but how
Your Cousins?” Let me tell you, Madam.
We’re both descended, you’ll allow,
From one great-great-great-grandsire, Noah.)

Your picture shall adorn the book
That’s bound, so neatly and moroccoly,
With that bright green which every cook
Delights to see in beds of cauliflower.

The carte is very good, but pray
Send me the larger one as well!
“A cool request!” I hear you say.
“Give him an inch, he takes an acre!

“But we’ll be generous because
We well remember, in the story,
How good and gentle Alice was,
The day she argued with the Parrot!”

Lewis Carroll

The last word in each stanza is a red herring. Replace each with the proper rhyme and then list these five words:

Mile
Adam
Broccoli
Ell
Lory

Their first and last letters spell MABEL and EMILY.

| Poems

Skyward

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An aviators’ drinking song from World War I, from James Gilbert’s 1978 anthology Skywriting:

A young aviator lay dying
At the end of a bright summer’s day.
His comrades had gathered around him
To carry his fragments away.

The aeroplane was piled on his wishbone,
His Lewis was wrapped round his head,
He wore a spark plug in each elbow,
‘Twas plain he would shortly be dead.

He spat out a valve and a gasket
As he stirred in the sump where he lay,
And then to his wondering comrades
These brave parting words did he say:

“Take the manifold out of my larynx
And the butterfly valve off my neck.
Remove from my kidneys the camrods;
There’s a lot of good parts in this wreck.

“Take the piston rings out of my stomach,
And the cylinders out of my brain.
Extract from my liver the crankshaft,
And assemble the engine again.

“Pull the longeron out of my backbone,
The turnbuckle out of my ear,
From the small of my back take the rudder —
There’s all of your aeroplane here.”

| Poems · Technology

Foregone Conclusions

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Here’s the opening of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do; once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading.

Choose any of the first 12 words and tap your way forward in the sentence from that point, tapping one word for each letter. So, for example, if you choose the word Alice, which has five letters, you’d tap was, beginning, to, get, and land on very. Then do the same thing with that word, advancing four letters to land on by. If you keep this up you’ll always arrive at the word sister.

That’s from Martin Gardner; the same trick works with “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” the opening of the Bible, and countless other texts.

It’s less surprising than it seems — it’s based on a principle called the Kruskal count, proffered originally by Rutgers physicist Martin Kruskal as a card trick. In each case various tributaries merge into a common stream that arrives at a predictable destination. Here’s an analysis (PDF).

| Science & Math

Unquote

Further excerpts from the notebooks of English belletrist Geoffrey Madan (1895-1947):

“Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral.” — George Eliot

Wit is a new and apt relation of ideas: humour, of images.

Use of words “vision” and “supremely” an infallible sign of the uneducated.

“No great country was ever saved by good men, because good men will not go the length that may be necessary.” — Horace Walpole

“Precautions are always blamed. When successful, they are said to be unnecessary.” — Benjamin Jowett

“Some speak and write as if they wanted to say something: others as if they had something to say.” — Archbishop Richard Whately

“A rose has no back.” — Chinese reply if you apologize for turning your back

Reasonable to ask young people to be adventurous, to go to the North Pole, say: but religion asks them to start off, without being sure if there is a North Pole.

Three pieces of earnest advice from the Revd. H.J. Bidder, aged 86, after sitting silent, with a crumpled face, all through dinner, and once loudly asking the man opposite who I was:

1. Never drink claret in an East wind.
2. Take your pleasures singly, one by one.
3. Never sit on a hard chair after drinking port.

| Quotations

Podcast Episode 91: Voyage of the Damned

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In 1939, an ocean liner carrying 900 Jewish refugees left Nazi Germany seeking sanctuary in North America, but it was turned away by every nation it appealed to. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow the so-called “voyage of the damned” and the plight of its increasingly desperate passengers.

We’ll also discuss the employment prospects for hermits in Seattle and puzzle over the contentment of a condemned woman.

See full show notes …

| History · Podcast

Figures

The word cliché was originally the French name for a printing plate that was prepared for convenience to print a commonly used phrase. The plates clicked as they were being used, and cliché is the past participle of clicher, a variant of cliquer, “to click.”

Interestingly, another name for this plate is stereotype.

| Language

Podcast Episode 90: The Candy Bar War

candy bar war

In 1947, the price of a candy bar in British Columbia rose from 5 to 8 cents, and the local teenagers organized a surprisingly effective “strike” that soon spread across the country. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow Canada’s unlikely “candy bar war,” which gripped the nation for 10 days before ending with a surprising twist.

We’ll also take a grueling automobile ride across 1903 America and puzzle over the intentions of a masked man.

See full show notes …

| Podcast

Podcast Episode 87: A Sleuthing Cabbie, Edward VI’s Homework, and a Self-Aware Crow

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blackbird_by_Thomas_Bewick.jpg

In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll share seven oddities from Greg’s research, from Arthur Conan Doyle’s encounter with a perceptive Boston cabbie to a computer’s failed attempts to rewrite Aesop’s fables.

We’ll also hear boxer Gene Tunney’s thoughts on Shakespeare and puzzle over how a man on a park bench can recognize a murder at sea.

See full show notes …

| Podcast

Bad Music

In the November 2009 issue of Word Ways, Richard Lederer lists his favorite “eye rhymes” — if English made any sense, these would sound alike:

  • hoist–soloist
  • unit–whodunit
  • cared–infrared
  • stately–philately
  • radios–adios
  • only–wantonly
  • overage–coverage

Even worse: beat–great–sweat–caveat–whereat and bough–dough–enough–hiccough– lough–through–trough–thorough.

And shouldn’t encourage rhyme with entourage?

12/15/2015 A related image, from reader Jon Jerome:

radio shack adios

| Language

Best Laid Plans

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Suppose you hire two proofreaders to go through the same manuscript independently. The first reports A mistakes, the second reports B mistakes, and C mistakes are reported by both. How can you estimate how many errors remain undiscovered?

Let M be the total number of mistakes in the manuscript. Then the number undiscovered by the two proofreaders is M – (A + B – C). Let p and q be the probabilities that the first and second proofreaders, respectively, notice any given mistake. Then A ≈ pM and B ≈ qM. And because they work independently, the chance that they both find a given mistake is C ≈ pqM.

But now

\displaystyle M = \frac{pM \times qM}{pqM} \approx \frac{AB}{C},

and the number of misprints that remain unnoticed is just

\displaystyle M - (A + B - C) \approx \frac{AB}{C} - (A + B - C) = \frac{(A-C)(B-C)}{C}.

This means that as long as the proofreaders work independently, you can estimate the number of errors they’ve overlooked without even knowing how skillful they are. If they find a large number of mistakes in common but relatively few independently, then the manuscript is probably relatively clean. But if they generate large independent lists of errors with few in common, there are probably many mistakes remaining to be found (which matches our intuition).

(George Pólya, “Probabilities in Proofreading,” American Mathematical Monthly 83:1 [January 1976], 42.)

| Science & Math