Anthropology

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pink_bathroom_Second_Life.png
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Beneath the charm-box is a small font. Each day every member of the family, in succession, enters the shrine room, bows his head before the charm-box, mingles different sorts of holy water in the font, and proceeds with a brief rite of ablution. The holy waters are secured from the Water Temple of the community, where the priests conduct elaborate ceremonies to make the liquid ritually pure.

— Horace Miner, “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema,” American Anthropologist, June 1956

(It’s satire. What’s Nacirema spelled backward?)

| Humor

Oh

https://books.google.com/books?id=wygDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA38

Something alarming washed up on a beach near Cherbourg in 1934 — a 25-foot carcass with a camel’s head, a three-foot neck, two shoulder fins, and a seal’s tail. Its bluish-gray skin was covered with what appeared to be fine white hairs, and its liver was 15 feet long.

Was it a sea serpent? A relative of the Loch Ness Monster? Probably not: A local biologist guessed that a whale had pursued herring into local waters and been killed by a liner.

Thirteen years later a 40-foot carcass washed up on the shore near Effingham on Vancouver Island, Canada. At first rumored to be the remains of Caddy, the sea serpent that supposedly haunts Cadboro Bay, it was later identified as a shark.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Effingham_carcass.JPG

See The St. Augustine Monster.

| Oddities

More Postal Torture

https://archive.org/details/strand-1899-v-17/page/236/mode/2up?view=theater

Addressing communications to the post just for the pleasure of seeing whether the hard-worked authorities will be equal to deciphering them is perhaps not very considerate, but the officials are so very rarely found at fault that the laugh is almost always on their side. This phonographic postcard was delivered at the house of Mr. E.H. King, of Belle View House, Richmond, Surrey, who sent us the card within an hour and a half after he had posted it to himself locally.

That’s from the Strand, February 1899. “Phonographic” refers to a system of phonetic shorthand; this one must have been fairly well known if the G.P.O. deciphered it so quickly. Charles Dickens had to learn an early alphabetical shorthand for his work as a journalist; he adapted this later into a system of his own, some of which remains undeciphered.

| Language

Stiff Upper Lip

During the Battle of Waterloo, a cannon shot struck the right leg of Henry Paget, Second Earl of Uxbridge, prompting this quintessentially British exchange:

Uxbridge: By God, sir, I’ve lost my leg!

Wellington: By God, sir, so you have!

That may be apocryphal, but the leg went on to a colorful career of its own.

The single most British conversation in the history of human civilization, in my judgment, took place on the Upper Nile in 1899, when starving explorer Ewart Grogan stumbled out of the bush and surprised one Captain Dunn, medical officer of a British exploratory expedition:

Dunn: How do you do?

Grogan: Oh, very fit thanks; how are you? Had any sport?

Dunn: Oh pretty fair, but there is nothing much here. Have a drink? You must be hungry; I’ll hurry on lunch.

“It was not until the two men had almost finished the meal that Dunn thought it excusable to enquire about the identity and provenance of his guest.”

| Society

Advice

In his 1986 commonplace book Hodgepodge, J. Bryan lists this as one of his favorite typographical errors:

‘Carolyn B—-, who spoke on ‘Looking Ahead,’ said that the three qualities necessary for success are faith, determination and Charles McFee.

“I can’t classify it or explain it at all. I can only quote it.” I haven’t been able to find the original source.

| Humor

Thinking

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:P_L_Martin_des_Amoignes_In_the_classroom_1886.jpg

The problem of indoctrination is this: in a modern democratic society, the desired goal of education is that each student develop a set of beliefs that are rationally grounded and open to change when challenged by better-grounded beliefs. In order to develop such students, however, it would seem that they must acquire a belief in rational methods of knowing which must itself be beyond challenge, i.e., held in a manner inconsistent with its own content. Thus, students must be indoctrinated in order not to be indoctrinated: a pedagogical dilemma or paradox.

— Charles James Barr Macmillan, “‘On Certainty’ and Indoctrination,” Synthese 56:3 (September 1983), 363-372

| Society

The Münchhausen Trilemma

Commonly we demonstrate the truth of a proposition by providing proof. But our doubter might then turn his skepticism on the proof in its turn. It seems there are only three ways to reach the end of the business:

  • by a circular argument, in which the proof of a proposition presupposes its truth
  • by a regressive argument, in which each proof requires a further proof, and so on forever
  • by a dogmatic argument, in which precepts are asserted rather than defended

This is called the Münchhausen trilemma after Baron Münchhausen, who tried to lift himself and his horse out of a mire by pulling on his own hair. Any attempt to justify knowledge must start from a position of ignorance. Without firm ground to stand on, it seems, there’s no way to “bootstrap” ourselves into confident assertions.

| Science & Math