A Thawing Drawing

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Image: Flickr

In 1917, railroad engineers at Nenana, Alaska, held a contest to guess when the Tanana River would break up. The winner won $800.

That contest has grown into an annual fundraising event. For $2.50 any Alaskan can enter; sometime in April or May a tripod will founder in the melting ice and stop a clock, and the guess that proves most accurate will win a prize. Last year the prize amounted to $279,030; in all, more than $11 million has been paid out during the contest’s 94 years.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center monitors the breakup dates as one measure of climate change in the region.

| Oddities · Science & Math

Party of One

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lonesome_George_-Pinta_giant_tortoise_-Santa_Cruz.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

The loneliest animal in the world is George, a 100-year-old Pinta Island tortoise who is thought to be the last of his subspecies. When goats overran their island in the Galápagos, George’s companions died out, and no one has discovered a Pinta female, despite a $10,000 reward. If none is found in time for George to breed, he’ll be the last of his kind.

The second loneliest animal is Khanzir, “the only pig in Afghanistan,” where pork products are illegal. Khanzir, whose name means “pig,” was one of a pair of white pigs that China donated to the Kabul zoo in 2002, but his mate has died.

See Spectacularly Bad Driving.

03/09/2018 UPDATE: George passed away in 2012, marking the extinction of the Pinta species.

| Science & Math

Some Mirror Puzzles

some mirror puzzles

Hold a match horizontally before a mirror. If the match’s head is to the right, then so is that of its reflection — the match is not reversed left to right. But now hold up the matchbox. Its writing is reversed. Why?

“Here is a related puzzle,” writes psychologist Richard Gregory in Mirrors in Mind (1997). “Hold a mug with writing on it to a mirror. What do you see in the mirror? The reflection of the handle is unchanged — but the writing is right-left reversed. Can a mirror read?!”

Set two mirrors together at a 60° angle and rotate the pair around your line of sight. Your image is preserved despite the mirrors’ rotation. This is not the case if the mirrors are set at 45° or 90°. Why?

| Science & Math

Uh-Oh

Can a fraction whose numerator is less than its denominator be equal to a fraction whose numerator is greater than its denominator? If not, how can

white fraction fallacy

In the proportion

+6 : -3 :: -10 : +5

is not either extreme greater than either mean? What has become of the old rule, ‘greater is to less as greater is to less’?

— William Frank White, A Scrap-Book of Elementary Mathematics, 1908

| Science & Math

“The Chemist to His Love”

I love thee, Mary, and thou lovest me–
Our mutual flame is like th’ affinity
That doth exist between two simple bodies:
I am Potassium to thine Oxygen.
‘Tis little that the holy marriage vow
Shall shortly make us one. That unity
Is, after all, but metaphysical.
Oh, would that I, my Mary, were an acid,
A living acid; thou an alkali
Endow’d with human sense, that, brought together,
We both might coalesce into one salt,
One homogeneous crystal. Oh, that thou
Wert Carbon, and myself were Hydrogen;
We would unite to form olefiant gas,
Or common coal, or naphtha–would to heaven
That I were Phosphorus, and thou wert Lime!
And we of Lime composed a Phosphuret.
I’d be content to be Sulphuric Acid,
So that thou might be Soda. In that case
We should be Glauber’s Salt. Wert thou Magnesia
Instead we’d form the salt that’s named from Epsom.
Couldst thou Potassa be, I Aqua-fortis,
Our happy union should that compound form,
Nitrate of Potash–otherwise Saltpetre.
And thus our several natures sweetly blent,
We’d live and love together, until death
Should decompose the fleshly tertium quid,
Leaving our souls to all eternity
Amalgamated. Sweet, thy name is Briggs
And mine is Johnson. Wherefore should not we
Agree to form a Johnsonate of Briggs?

— “A Rochester druggist,” quoted in The Medical Age, Oct. 11, 1886

| Poems · Science & Math

Great Men

Dr. Franklin had a party to dine with him one day at Passy, of whom one-half were Americans, the other half French, and among the last was the Abbé Raynal. During the dinner he got on his favorite theory of the degeneracy of animals, and even of man in America, and urged it with his usual eloquence. The Doctor, at length, noticing the accidental stature and position of his guests at table, ‘Come,’ says he, ‘M. l’Abbé, let us try this question by the fact before us. We are here one-half Americans and one-half French, and it happens that the Americans have placed themselves on one side of the table, and our French friends are on the other. Let both parties rise, and we will see on which side nature has degenerated.’ It happened that his American guests were Carmichael, Harmer, Humphreys, and others of the finest stature and form; while those on the other side were remarkably diminutive, and the Abbé himself particularly, was a mere shrimp. He parried the appeal by a complimentary admission of exceptions, among which the Doctor himself was a conspicuous one.

— Thomas Jefferson, quoted in James Parton, Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, 1864

| Science & Math