Quick Thinking

During lunch one day at Los Alamos, Richard Feynman told his colleagues, “I can work out in sixty seconds the answer to any problem that anybody can state in ten seconds, to 10 percent!”

He had completed several challenges when mathematician Paul Olum walked past.

‘Hey, Paul!’ they call out. ‘Feynman’s terrific! We give him a problem that can be stated in ten seconds, and in a minute he gets the answer to 10 percent. Why don’t you give him one?’

Without hardly stopping, he says, ‘The tangent of 10 to the 100th.’

“I was sunk: you have to divide by pi to 100 decimal places! It was hopeless. … He was a very smart fellow.”

(From Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, 1985.)

| Science & Math

A Medieval Mystery

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Adoration_of_the_Christ_Child_Follower_of_Jan_Joest_of_Kalkar.jpg

In this 1515 painting, The Adoration of the Christ Child, the angel immediately to Mary’s left appears to bear the characteristic facial features of Down syndrome (click to enlarge). This would make the painting one of the earliest representations of the syndrome in Western art.

Unfortunately, little is known about it. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns it, has identified the painter only as a “follower of Jan Joest of Kalkar.” Researchers Andrew Levitas and Cheryl Reid have suggested that the painting may indicate that individuals with Down syndrome were not regarded as disabled in medieval society. But so little is known about the work or its creator that it’s hard to establish a reliable conclusion.

“After all the speculations, we are left with a haunting late-medieval image of a person with apparent Down syndrome with all the accouterments of divinity. It is impossible to know whether any disability had been recognized or whether it simply was not relevant in that time and place.”

(Andrew S. Levitas and Cheryl S. Reid, “An Angel With Down Syndrome in a Sixteenth Century Flemish Nativity Painting,” American Journal of Medical Genetics Part A 116:4 [2003], 399-405.) (Thanks, Serge.)

| Art · History · Society

The Studious Bather

A puzzle from Chris Maslanka’s The Pyrgic Puzzler, 1987:

A bathtub will fill in 3 minutes if the plug is in and the cold tap only is turned on full. It will fill in 4 minutes if the plug is in and the hot tap only is turned on full. With the plug out and both taps off, a full tub will drain in 2 minutes. How long will it take to fill the empty tub if the plug is out and both taps are turned on full?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

“Dry Pants Eat No Fish”

Bulgarian proverbs:

  • Hunger sees nothing but bread.
  • In every village is the grave of Christ.
  • The clean gets dirty more easily.
  • The devil knows everything except where women sharpen their knives.
  • Forests have eyes, meadows ears.
  • God’s feet are of wool; his hands are of iron.
  • One guest hates the other, and the host both.
  • Do not lie for lack of news.
  • The oversaintly saint is not pleasing even unto God.
  • Man is ever self-forgiving.
  • God does not shave — why should I?
  • A long dark night — the year.
  • Do not salt other people’s food.
  • Become a sheep and you will see the wolf.
  • The smaller saints will be the ruin of God.
  • Where there is union a bullet can swim.
  • The wife carries her husband on her face; the husband carries his wife on his linen.
  • When a wool merchant speaks of sheep he means cloth.

And “God is not sinless. He created the world.”

| Quotations

Row and Columns

A problem from the 2011 Moscow Mathematical Olympiad: In a certain square matrix, the sum of the two largest numbers in each row is r and the sum of the two largest in each column is c. Show that r = c.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Unquote

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Andrea_Schiavone,_expelled_from_the_earthly_paradise,_c._1540-60_(no_frame).jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

“It is a well-known fact, too, that in the ancient world in which the entire population were non-smokers, crime of the most horrid type was rampant. It was a non-smoker who committed the first sin and brought death into the world and all our woe. Nero was a non-smoker. Lady Macbeth was a non-smoker. Decidedly, the record of the non-smokers leaves them little to be proud of.” — Robert Lynd

| Quotations

The Bell Tolls

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cathedral_Church_of_St_Paul,_monument_to_John_Donne_City_of_London_1079157_20230822_0206.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

John Donne may have posed for his own funerary monument. In his Lives of 1658, Izaak Walton writes:

… Dr. Donne sent for a Carver to make for him in wood the figure of an Urn, giving him directions for the compass and height of it; and, to bring with it a board of the height of his body. These being got, then without delay a choice Painter was to be in a readiness to draw his picture, which was taken as followeth. — Several Charcole-fires being first made in his large Study, he brought with him into that place his winding-sheet in his hand; and, having put off all his cloaths, had this sheet put on him, and so tyed with knots at his head and feet, and his hands so placed, as dead bodies are usually fitted to be shrowded and put into the grave. Upon this Urn he thus stood with his eyes shut, and with so much of the sheet turned aside as might shew his lean, pale, and death-like face; which was purposely turned toward the East, from whence he expected the second coming of his and our Saviour. Thus he was drawn at his just height; and when the picture was fully finished, he caused it to be set by his bed-side, where it continued, and became his hourly object till his death …”

It’s not clear whether this really happened — the sketch, if there was one, has been lost. The statue stands in St. Paul’s Churchyard in London.

| Death · Literature

Transparency

https://pixabay.com/photos/church-window-window-church-1843900/

There is writing which resembles the mosaics of glass you see in stained-glass windows. Such windows are beautiful in themselves and let in the light in colored fragments, but you can’t expect to see through them. In the same way, there is poetic writing that is beautiful in itself and can easily affect the emotions, but such writing can be dense and can make for hard reading if you are trying to figure out what’s happening.

Plate glass, on the other hand, has no beauty of its own. Ideally, you ought not to be able to see it at all, but through it you can see all that is happening outside. That is the equivalent of writing that is plain and unadorned. Ideally, in reading such writing, you are not even aware that you are reading. Ideas and events seem merely to flow from the mind of the writer into that of the reader without any barrier between.

— Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov: A Memoir, 1994

Elsewhere he wrote, “There is a great deal of art to creating something that seems artless.”

| Language · Literature

Otherwise Stated

Another exercise in linguistic purism: In his 1989 essay “Uncleftish Beholding,” Poul Anderson tries to explain atomic theory using Germanic words almost exclusively, coining terms of his own as needed:

The firststuffs have their being as motes called unclefts. These are mightly small; one seedweight of waterstuff holds a tale of them like unto two followed by twenty-two naughts. Most unclefts link together to make what are called bulkbits. Thus, the waterstuff bulkbit bestands of two waterstuff unclefts, the sourstuff bulkbit of two sourstuff unclefts, and so on. (Some kinds, such as sunstuff, keep alone; others, such as iron, cling together in ices when in the fast standing; and there are yet more yokeways.) When unlike clefts link in a bulkbit, they make bindings. Thus, water is a binding of two waterstuff unclefts with one sourstuff uncleft, while a bulkbit of one of the forestuffs making up flesh may have a thousand thousand or more unclefts of these two firststuffs together with coalstuff and chokestuff.

Reader Justin Hilyard, who let me know about this, adds, “This sort of not-quite-conlang is still indulged in now and then today; it’s often known as ‘Anglish’, after a coining by British humorist Paul Jennings in 1966, in a three-part series in Punch magazine celebrating the 900th anniversary of the Norman conquest. He also wrote some passages directly inspired by William Barnes in that same Germanic-only style.”

Somewhat related: In 1936 Buckminster Fuller explained Einstein’s theory of relativity in a 264-word telegram.

(Thanks, Justin.)

| Language · Science & Math