“I wonder … that a soothsayer doesn’t laugh when he sees another soothsayer.” — Cicero
Pretending the Truth
In a 1988 experiment with 2-year-olds, psychologist Alan Leslie asked each child to “fill” two toy cups with imaginary “juice” or “tea” from a bottle. Leslie then said, “Watch this!”, upended one of the cups, shook it, and replaced it next to the other cup. Then he asked the child to point to the “full cup” and the “empty cup.” Though both cups had been empty throughout, all 10 of the 10 subjects indicated that the “empty” cup was the one that had been inverted.
“This leads to pretending something that is true, namely, that the empty cup is empty,” Leslie wrote. “At first glance, this may seem ridiculous. But there is, of course, an important difference between the empty cup is empty and pretending (of) the empty cup ‘it is empty.'” Children distinguish between pretense and reality even when the content of those beliefs is the same.
“These examples help us realize that, far from being unusual and esoteric, cases of ‘non-counterfactual pretence’, that is, pretending something is true when it is true, are ubiquitous in young children’s pretence and indeed has an indispensable role in the child’s ability to elaborate pretend scenarios.”
(Alan M. Leslie, “Pretending and Believing: Issues in the Theory of ToMM,” Cognition on Cognition [1995], 193-220.)
Misc
- The state sport of Maryland is jousting.
- North and South Dakota were established together, in 1889.
- NEAT TAILOR makes ALTERATION.
- Percentages are reversible: 25% of 16 is 16% of 25.
- “Success in research needs four Gs: Glück, Geduld, Geschick, und Geld [luck, patience, skill, and money].” — Paul Ehrlich
Black and White
Podcast Episode 287: The Public Universal Friend
After a severe fever in 1776, Rhode Island farmer’s daughter Jemima Wilkinson was reborn as a genderless celestial being who had been sent to warn of the coming Apocalypse. But the general public was too scandalized by the messenger to pay heed to the message. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the story of the Public Universal Friend and the prejudiced reaction of a newly formed nation.
We’ll also bid on an immortal piano and puzzle over some Icelandic conceptions.
Disharmony
Dutch writer Gerard Nolst Trenité’s 1920 poem “The Chaos” is a polemic on the senselessness of English pronunciation:
Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.
I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.
Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word.
Sword and sward, retain and Britain
(Mind the latter how it’s written).
Made has not the sound of bade,
Say–said, pay–paid, laid but plaid.
Reflections
Maxims of Goethe:
- When a rainbow has lasted as long as a quarter of an hour we stop looking at it.
- Researching into nature we are pantheists, writing poetry we are polytheists, morally we are monotheists.
- Considered historically, our good points appear in a moderate light, our faults excuse themselves.
- To do well you need talent, to do good you need means.
- For surely everyone only hears what he understands.
- If you miss the first buttonhole, you can’t ever get fully buttoned up.
- You really only know when you know little; doubt grows with knowledge.
- People think one ought to be busy with them when one isn’t busy with oneself.
- Acumen is least likely to desert clever men when they are in the wrong.
- One doesn’t find frogs wherever there is water, but there is water where you hear frogs.
- Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but not more interesting than contemplating.
- Everyone manages to have just about enough strength left to act according to his convictions.
- Let memory fail as long as our judgment remains intact when needed.
- Dirt glitters when the sun happens to shine.
- Beauty can never be clear about itself.
- Mysteries do not as yet amount to miracles.
“There are people who ponder about their friends’ shortcomings: there’s nothing to be gained by that. I have always been on the lookout for the merits of my opponents, and this has been rewarding.”
Stop
“The actual building of roads devoted to motor cars is not for the near future, in spite of many rumors to that effect.” — Harper’s Weekly, Aug. 2, 1902
“That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical character have been introduced.” — Scientific American, Jan. 2, 1909
The Skynet Series
In August 2016 artist Patrick Shearn installed a 15,000-square-foot kinetic sculpture overnight in Los Angeles’ Pershing Square. Inspired by schools of fish and murmurations of starlings, Shearn suspended two layers of holographic mylar streamers across the square to make large movements of air visible both to pedestrians and to occupants of the surrounding buildings. He’s followed it up with similar sculptures around the world.
Full Speed Ahead
I just liked this — during World War I, the British painted false bow waves on the sides of their transport ships to deceive German submarines as to their speed.
From The Times History of the War, 1917.