One World

In 1922, Baltic German teacher and linguist Edgar de Wahl offered a new language to facilitate communication between people from different nations. He called it Occidental, and designed it so that many of its words will be recognizable by those who already know a Romance language:

Li material civilisation, li scientie, e mem li arte unifica se plu e plu. Li cultivat europano senti se quasi in hem in omni landes queles have europan civilisation, it es, plu e plu, in li tot munde. Hodie presc omni states guerrea per li sam armes. Sin cessa li medies de intercomunication ameliora se, e in consequentie de to li terra sembla diminuer se. Un Parisano es nu plu proxim a un angleso o a un germano quam il esset ante cent annus a un paisano frances.

“Material civilization, science, and even art unify themselves more and more. The educated European feels himself almost at home in all lands that have European civilization, that is, more and more, in the entire world. Today almost all states war with the same armaments. Without pause the modes of intercommunication improve, and in consequence from that the world seems to decrease. A Parisian is now closer to an Englishman or a German than he was a hundred years before to a French peasant.”

It gained a small community of speakers in the 1920s and 1930s and had largely died out by the 1980s — but in recent years it’s seen a resurgence on the Internet as Interlingue.

| Language

Tribute

Every species of spider in the genus Predatoroonops takes its name from an element in John McTiernan’s 1987 film Predator:

Predatoroonops anna: For the character Anna Gonsalves, played by Elpidia Carrillo
Predatoroonops billy: For the character Billy Sole, played by Sonny Landham
Predatoroonops blain: For the character Blain Cooper, played by Jesse Ventura
Predatoroonops dillon: For the character George Dillon, played by Carl Weathers
Predatoroonops dutch: For the character “Dutch” Schaeffer, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger
Predatoroonops maceliot: For the character “Mac” Elliot, played by Bill Duke
Predatoroonops poncho: For the character “Poncho” Ramirez, played by Richard Chaves
Predatoroonops rickhawkins: For the character Richard Hawkins, played by Shane Black
Predatoroonops schwarzeneggeri: For Schwarzenegger
Predatoroonops vallarta: For Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, a filming location
Predatoroonops valverde: For Val Verde, the fictional country where the film takes place
Predatoroonops chicano: An alternate nickname for Poncho
Predatoroonops mctiernani: For McTiernan
Predatoroonops olddemon: In Anna’s village the Predator is known as a “demon who makes trophies of men”
Predatoroonops peterhalli: For Kevin Peter Hall, the actor who played the creature
Predatoroonops phillips: For the character Homer Phillips, played by R.G. Armstrong
Predatoroonops yautja: The name of the Predator species in the expanded universe

Also: In Predator 2, the Predator’s trophy case contains the head of an alien from the Alien franchise:

| Entertainment · Science & Math

Sesquipedalian

In the August 1841 issue of Graham’s Magazine, Edgar Allan Poe published a cryptogram composed by a Doctor Frailey of Washington and offered a year’s subscription to any reader who could solve it. In October he published the solution, which he’d managed to find:

In one of those peripatetic circumrotations I obviated a rustic whom I subjected to catechetical interrogation respecting the nosocomical characteristics of the edifice to which I was approximate. With a volubility uncongealed by the frigorific powers of villatic bashfulness, he ejaculated a voluminous replication from the universal tenor of whose contents I deduce the subsequent amalgamation of heterogeneous facts. Without dubiety incipient pretension is apt to terminate in final vulgarity, as parturient mountains have been fabulated to produce muscupular abortions. The institution the subject of my remarks, has not been without cause the theme of the ephemeral columns of quotidian journalism, and enthusiastic encomiations in conversational intercourse.

He was upbraided in November by a Richard Bolton of Pontotoc, Mississippi, who’d sent in a solution but received no credit. Poe redressed the error and added, “Your solution astonished me. You will accuse me of vanity in so saying — but truth is truth. I make no question that it even astonished yourself — and well it might – for from at least 100,000 readers — a great number of whom, to my certain knowledge, busied themselves in the investigation — you and I are the only ones who have succeeded.”

| Language · Science & Math

Podcast Episode 331: The Starvation Doctor

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In 1911 English sisters Claire and Dora Williamson began consulting a Seattle “fasting specialist” named Linda Burfield Hazzard. As they underwent her brutal treatments, the sisters found themselves caught in a web of manipulation and deceit. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the story of the Williamsons’ ordeal and the scheme it brought to light.

We’ll also catch a criminal by the ear and puzzle over a prohibited pig.

See full show notes …

| History · Podcast

Spaceship Away

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

The standards for the British science fiction comic Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future were so high that the editors hired a young Arthur C. Clarke to serve as science and plot adviser. Clarke wrote to publisher Marcus Morris in spring 1950:

I think this might amuse you. Yesterday I was lecturing at the Royal Geographical Society on the problem of interplanetary navigation … After a highly technical series of remarks, [one of the other speakers] ended up by asking ‘Will Dan Dare reach Venus?’

He did. Clarke left the job after six months — he was said to have thought that “the standard of work and research was so high that they were wasting their money getting him to check it.”

(From Jason Dittmer, Comic Book Geographies, 2014.)

| Literature · Science & Math

The Short of It

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A boy, who kept watch on a flock of sheep, was heard from time to time to call out, ‘The Wolf! The Wolf!’ in mere sport. Scores of times, in this way, had he drawn the men in the fields from their work. But when they found it was a joke, they made up their minds that, should the boy call ‘Wolf’ once more, they would not stir to help him. The wolf, at last, did come. ‘The Wolf! The Wolf!’ shrieks out the boy, in great fear, but none will now heed his cries, and the wolf kills the boy, that he may feast on the sheep.

One knows not how to trust those who speak lies, though they may tell one the truth.

— From Lucy Aikin, Æsop’s Fables in Words of One Syllable, 1868

| Language · Literature

Elbow Room

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Visiting Thomas Povey in 1663, Samuel Pepys was surprised when his host opened a door to reveal an unsuspected region of the house.

At a second glance he saw that Povey had only opened a closet in which a large deceiving painting had been hung.

The painting, Samuel Dirksz van Hoogstraten’s View of a Corridor, still hangs at Dyrham Park today.

| Art

Back to Basics

When [Sir Richard Francis Burton] was in India he at one time got rather tired of the daily Mess, and living with men, and he thought he should like to learn the manners, customs, and habits of monkeys, so he collected forty monkeys of all kinds of ages, races, species, and he lived with them, and he used to call them by different offices. He had his doctor, his chaplain, his secretary, his aide-de-camp, his agent, and one tiny one, a very pretty, small, silky-looking monkey, he used to call his wife, and put pearls in her ears. His great amusement was to keep a kind of refectory for them, where they all sat down on chairs at meals, and the servants waited on them, and each had its bowl and plate, with the food and drinks proper for them. He sat at the head of the table, and the pretty little monkey sat by him in a high baby’s chair, with a little bar before it. He had a little whip on the table, with which he used to keep them in order when they had bad manners, which did sometimes occur, as they frequently used to get jealous of the little monkey, and try to claw her.

That’s from Isabel Burton’s Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, 1898. In her own biography of Burton, A Rage to Live, Mary S. Lovell says that Burton learned to imitate the monkeys’ sounds and believed that they understood some of them. He compiled a list of 60 words, but it was lost an 1860 fire that destroyed nearly all his papers.

| Oddities

A Promising Paradox

The dean of a university is searching for a new chair for his chemistry department. He offers the job to one candidate, who says she’ll accept only if she can hire three new faculty members. The dean makes a commitment to support these hires.

Such arrangements are common, but that’s troubling: By making a promise, the dean has made a future act obligatory for himself, and that changes its moral status. What if the promised act would otherwise have been wrong? In this case, what if the funding for these three hires ought otherwise properly to have gone to another department?

“The fact that our moral system permits agents to dictate in this manner the moral status of their future actions seems an astonishing power to build into a moral system,” writes University of Arizona philosopher Holly M. Smith. “It is especially troubling when one notes that agents apparently can exploit promises in order to legitimize otherwise objectionable courses of action. What would we say, for example, about a moral system in which an agent may render A obligatory by simply declaring, ‘My doing A next week will be, by virtue of this declaration, morally obligatory’?”

(Holly M. Smith, “A Paradox of Promising,” Philosophical Review 106:2 [April 1997], 153-196.)

| Society