In 1952, New Zealander Tom Neale set out to establish a solitary life for himself on a remote island in the South Pacific. In all he would spend 17 years there, building a fulfilling life fending entirely for himself. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe Neale’s adventures on the island and his impressions of an isolated existence.
We’ll also revisit Scunthorpe and puzzle over a boat’s odd behavior.
Attractive people are more likely to be rated as having higher intelligence, greater loyalty, more dependability, and stronger leadership skills than others, regardless of their actual qualities. Teachers are more likely to rate attractive students as diligent, engaged, hard-working, and intelligent, and students rate attractive teachers as more likable and appealing. Attractive job applicants are more likely to be rated as qualified and competent, regardless of their actual experience or skills. Once hired, attractive employees get more opportunities and higher salaries and are more likely to be rated as more knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and effective. Attractive spokespeople bring greater trust and better evaluations to a product, attractive political candidates are overwhelmingly more likely to be elected, and jurors are less likely to believe that an attractive person is guilty of a crime.
In the United States, physically attractive people are thought to be smarter, warmer, happier, healthier, more sociable, less lonely, and less anxious than others. They’re less likely to be identified as psychopaths or mentally unbalanced, and they’re thought to have better prognoses in the face of physical or psychological problems.
These expectations can fulfill themselves. For example, attractive people haven’t actually been found to be more intelligent than unattractive people, but they do tend to achieve more: “Since attractive people are perceived to have superior intelligence, they are likely given more opportunities, more support, and more encouragement, all prerequisites for short- and long-term success.”
(Rachelle M. Smith, The Biology of Beauty: The Science Behind Human Attractiveness, 2018.)
Every year since 1991, a panel of German linguists has identified a term that violates human rights or infringes democratic principles:
1991: ausländerfrei (“free of foreigners”)
1992: ethnische Säuberung (“ethnic cleansing”)
1996: Rentnerschwemme (“flood of senior/retired citizens”)
1999: Kollateralschaden (“collateral damage”)
2005: Entlassungsproduktivität (“layoff productivity,” a surge in productivity induced by laying off workers)
2008: notleidende Banken (“suffering/needy banks”)
2014: Lügenpresse (“lying press”)
2019: Klimahysterie (“climate hysteria”)
The terms are usually German, but not always. In 1994 the word was peanuts, after Deutsche Bank’s chairman used that term to refer to 50 million Deutsche Marks.
Carved into a hill in Dorset is the Cerne Abbas Giant, a 55-meter nude figure that carries a club and is rather obviously male. In November 1932 the Home Office received a letter from local resident Walter L. Long on which he’d sketched the giant. He wrote:
If this sketch offends, please remember that we have the same subject, representing a giant 27,000 times life size, facing the main road from Dorchester to Sherborne, and only some quarter to half a mile distant.
With the support of the Bishop of Salisbury, another Bishop, and representatives of other religions, I appealed to the National Trust, but this society exists only to preserve that which is entrusted to it, and consequently does not consider the obscenity of this figure is a matter on which I can act. In this figure’s counterpart in Sussex, Sex has been eliminated altogether; the other extreme.
Were the Cerne Giant converted into a simple nude, no exception would be taken to it. It is its impassioned obscenity that offends all who have the interest of the rising generation at heart, and I, we, appeal to you to make this figure conform to our Christian standards of civilization.
Archival records show that the matter was referred to one S.W. Harris, who debated what would satisfy Mr. Long. Should they call the police? Plant some strategic fig trees? He noted that the figure had stood without complaint for two or three thousand years, “or from 1/3 to one half the Biblical age of the Earth.” At last he sent this reply:
With reference to your letter of 14th November, I am directed by the Secretary of State to say that he has caused inquiry to be made and finds that the prehistoric figure of which you complain — the Giant of Cerne — is a national monument, scheduled as such, and vested in the National Trust. In the circumstances the Secretary of State regrets that he cannot see his way to take any action in the matter.
Seven years later Harris shared Long’s letter with a colleague, who wrote of the giant, “He is an old scandal, but he has stood there and scandalised for thousands of years and I hope [he] will do so for thousands more.”
(National Archives, In Their Own Words: Letters From History, 2016.)
When dredging began off the south Devon village of Hallsands in the 1890s, it destabilized the beach, permitting storms to reach the town. A strong storm in 1917 washed away 37 homes, but a single cottage on a hill was left standing, and a single resident, Elizabeth Prettejohn, lived alone in the ruined village for 47 years, until her death in 1964 at age 80.
“I have all my memories here, but it’s no good sitting down moping,” she said shortly before she died. “It was the dockyard that took all our beach. It blew for four days and four nights. The sea was like mountains. I prayed god that the wind would stop. … Once I thought of moving to Dartmouth, but this is where I belong with my memories.”
(Thanks, Cathy.)
1930 saw the quiet conclusion of a remarkable era. The tiny population of St. Kilda, an isolated Scottish archipelago, decided to end their thousand-year tenure as the most remote community in Britain and move to the mainland. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe the remarkable life they’d shared on the island and the reasons they chose to leave.
We’ll also track a stork to Sudan and puzzle over the uses of tea trays.
If we’re committed to individual rights, then we want a society in which freedoms are not arbitrarily restricted; you should get to exercise your preferences so long as this doesn’t harm someone else. But consider a tiny society of only two people, Lewd and Prude, and a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lewd would prefer to read the book rather than have it disposed of unread, but even more than that he’d love to see Prude forced to read it:
Prude reads > Lewd reads > no one reads
Prude would like to see the book disposed of but, short of this, would prefer reading it himself to seeing Lewd enjoy it:
no one reads > Prude reads > Lewd reads
How should a social planner rank these three outcomes? If we’re determined to respect individual rights, then Lewd and Prude should each get to decide whether to read the book; Lewd shouldn’t be prevented from reading it, but Prude shouldn’t be forced to. So we’ll let Lewd’s preference decide between the outcomes “Lewd reads” and “no one reads,” and we’ll let Prude’s decide between “Prude reads” and “no one reads.” But that gives
Lewd reads > no one reads
and
no one reads > Prude reads,
so, for consistency, the social planner arrives at the ranking
Lewd reads > no one reads > Prude reads
and gives the book to Lewd to read.
But both Lewd and Prude would have preferred that Prude be given the book! Harvard economist Amartya Sen argues that this challenges the notion that markets can allocate resources efficiently while respecting individual freedoms.
(Amartya Sen, “The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal,” Journal of Political Economy 78:1 [1970], 152-157.)
Architect Raymond Hood’s 1927 proposal “City of Towers” would have turned Manhattan into a forest of needles — it would encourage developers to release some land area to public ownership in return for permission to build higher:
Whole blocks would soon develop of their own accord, where two or three towers would provide more floor space than there is in the average block of today, and there would be ten times as much street area round about to take care of the traffic.
He surpassed that four years later with the “City Under a Single Roof,” in which each resident would spend as much time as possible in a single vertical building: “The Unit Building, covering three blocks of ground space, will house a whole industry and its auxiliary businesses. Only elevator shafts and stairways reach the street level. The first ten floors house stores, theaters and clubs. Above them is the industry to which the Building is devoted. Workers live on the upper floors.”
In a later proposal these enormous buildings merge into 38 “mountains,” positioned on alternate avenues at every 10th street. This would finally transcend the “congestion barrier”: The old bustle of the streets would now be moved permanently indoors.
On January 3, 1917, L.H. Luksich, a Coast Guard recruiter in New York, spotted a man wiping his muddy hands on an American flag and knocked him down. Luksich was not a native-born American; he was a naturalized citizen from Austria. The Treasury Department sent him an official commendation in which Assistant Secretary A.J. Peters wrote:
The department desires to commend you for the spirit of loyalty and patriotism which impelled your ready defense of the national colors, and in voicing this commendation I am not unmindful that you are a naturalized American citizen, for the reason that the incident is rendered the more conspicuous by this fact, and affords gratifying evidence of your assimilation of the spirit and best traditions of the country of your adoption.
The following year, a Montana mob demanded that local man E.V. Starr kiss the flag to prove his loyalty. He replied, “What is this thing anyway? Nothing but a piece of cotton with a little paint on it, and some other marks in the corner there. I will not kiss that thing. It might be covered with microbes.” Under a state law he was convicted of sedition, sentenced to 10–20 years at hard labor, and fined $500 plus court costs. Federal judge George M. Bourquin called the sentence “horrifying” and compared the mob to “heresy hunters” and “witch burners” but said he was powerless to intervene. Starr served 35 months before Governor Joseph M. Dixon commuted his sentence.
Architect Leroy L. Warner introduced a new concept in 1950: “Park at Your Desk.” The center of the Cafritz office building in Washington, D.C., was a multi-story parking garage with a helical ramp, and set around this core was a ring of shallow day-lit offices. So each worker could drive into the building, drive up to their floor, park their car, and then walk just a few meters to the office.
Why didn’t this catch on? Architect Philip Steadman points out that the design constraints allowed for 150 people per floor but only 29 parking spaces, a bad mismatch. (Also, “One wonders about air quality in the offices.”)
(From Philip Steadman, Why Are Most Buildings Rectangular?, 2017.)
