stillicide
n. the dropping of rainwater from the eaves of a house upon another’s land or roof
sub tegmine fagi
adv. under the cover of a beech tree
tenson
n. a contest in verse between rival troubadours
Happy Returns
Famously, in a group of 23 randomly chosen people, the chance is slightly higher than 50 percent that two will share a birthday.
Here’s an interesting variant: If the group consists of an equal number of girls and boys, what’s the minimum size at which it’s probable that a girl and a boy share a birthday?
Surprisingly, the answer is only 32 (16 girls and 16 boys). If we want a girl and a boy to share the same birth month, we need only 6 children before this becomes probable.
(Tony Crilly and Shekhar Nandy, “The Birthday Problem for Boys and Girls,” Mathematical Gazette 71:455 [March 1987], 19-22. See Shared Birthdays.)
Infinite Digest
To mark the 30th anniversary of Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s sprawling 1996 novel, Brooklyn-based data visualization artist and design professor Christian Swinehart is creating a graphical companion to the book.
Infinite Digest is a series of interactive visualizations of the novel’s plotlines, characters, and self-referential structure. The first two installments, exploring the book’s timeline and its many footnotes, are currently live, and more will appear over the next few months.
(Thanks, Christian.)
Testimonial
The gift which I am sending you is called a dog, and is in fact the most precious and valuable possession of mankind. For while other animals are each of them of use to us in virtue of one particular quality, and possess a special and distinguishing excellence, this one animal is responsible for greatest and highest points of excellence. A lion excels in courage, an ox in reliability and adaptability to agriculture, the horse in intelligence and speed, the ass and mule, as is stated by the poets, in patience and hard work; and other animals have other good points: this one animal combines the excellence of all others without one exception. He is naturally, suitable for war work and the pursuits of peace, and equally fitted to be of use and to be a pleasant companion. It would not be easy, as you will believe, to enumerate all the excellences and all the services to ourselves of this animal.
— Theodorus Gaza, Laudatio Canis, 1482
A Folded Story
Christopher Nolan’s 2000 film Memento, about a man who has lost his memory, tells a coherent story in a disjointed order (click to enlarge). Scenes from the first half of the story, shot in black and white, are presented in chronological order. Scenes from the second half, shot in color, are presented in reverse chronology. The film alternates between these two timelines, beginning at the start/end and arriving at the middle — which acknowledges the advent of color with the development of a Polaroid photograph.
Fair Enough
According to John McPhee’s 1993 essay “Irons in the Fire,” the Austin, Nevada, ranching family Saralegui used to identify its cattle with the brand COW.
Amity
In 2011 I wrote about the Flemish municipality of Baarle-Hertog, a complex of Belgian exclaves surrounded by the Netherlands.
Reader Serge De Man tells me that residents have now installed a swing on the border, so it’s possible to swing between countries.
There’s a pun here, but I can’t find it.
Roman Surprise
What’s the largest number that can be expressed in Roman numerals? If no single letter can appear more than three times in a row, then the highest we can go is 3,999, or MMMCMXCIX.
These 3,999 values contain in total 30,000 characters, and, pleasingly, reader Ian Duff finds that 5,600 are Is, 2,000 are Vs, 6,000 are Xs, 2,000 are Ls, 6,000 are Cs, 2,000 are Ds, and 6,400 are Ms.
(Thanks, Ian.)
The Numerosity Adaptation Effect
Fixate on the top figure for 30 seconds and then look at the bottom figure. Though the two circles in the lower figure contain the same number of dots, those on the left appear more numerous. This suggests that the visual system has adapted to the number of items seen in the priming phase, and that, like color, number is a primary attribute of vision.
Psychologists David Burr and John Ross write, “We propose that just as we have a direct visual sense of the reddishness of half a dozen ripe cherries, so we do of their sixishness. In other words there are distinct qualia for numerosity, as there are for color, brightness, and contrast.
“One of the more fascinating aspects of this study … is that although the total apparent number of dots is greatly reduced after adaptation, no particular dots seem to be missing. This reinforces old and more recent evidence suggesting that the perceived richness of our perceptual world is very much an illusion.”
(David Burr and John Ross, “A Visual Sense of Number,” Current Biology 18:6 [March 25, 2008], 425-428.)
