Futility Closet

“It is human nature to hate those whom you have injured.” — Tacitus

Robert Peary’s attempts to reach the North Pole raised a curious question for Jewish scholars: How should Jewish law, which normally assumes a 24-hour day, be interpreted in the land of the midnight sun?

Writing in New Era in 1905, J.D. Eisenstein asked, “Which is the seventh day, or Sabbath? and when is Yom Kippur to be observed around the North Pole, where the day and night are of about six months’ duration?”

If one reckoned by daylight, “As to Yom Kippur, it would be obviously impossible to prolong the fast till the closing prayer of Neilah. Besides, one would have to wait for the following Yom Kippur, 354 to 384 years, figuring a year for a day, according to the Jewish calendar.”

According to Eisenstein, one rabbi advised that observing Jews should not settle in high latitudes at all, to avoid the question. The problem has not been entirely settled even today — indeed, it’s been compounded, as Jewish astronauts can now orbit the earth and may one day colonize other worlds.

For any convex polyhedron,

vertices – edges + faces = 2

In 1988, readers of the Mathematical Intelligencer judged this the world’s second most beautiful theorem — behind Euler’s identity.

A French versifier, equally deficient in poetic fire and worldly pelf, and whose nether garments were rather out of order, had commenced a series of epics on scriptural subjects. One was on the subject of Lot, and commenced,

L’amour a vaincu Loth.

On reading this aloud, his friend feigning to understand it thus,

L’amour a vingt culottes,

with a significant glance at his breeches, asked him why he did not borrow a pair. Can your critical French readers explain any difference in the sound of the two lines?

– The Kaleidoscope, Jan. 22, 1822

By the levee of the Missouri River in Fort Benton, Mont., stands a bronze statue of a vigilant sheepdog. It commemorates Shep, a dog who appeared at the town’s Great Northern Railway Station one day in August 1936 while workers were loading a casket onto a train. The dog watched the train depart, then turned and trotted off down the tracks.

Thereafter, for five and a half years, Shep would appear on the platform to meet four trains a day, scanning the passengers who alighted and then retiring under the platform. His master still had not returned when in January 1942 he slipped on the rails and disappeared under an engine.

A cynic might wonder how much of this story is tied up in Montana tourism. But plausible it certainly is: Essentially the same thing had happened 12 years earlier in Japan.