What is this? It’s the history of 800 successive unsteered bicycles, each traveling from left to right until it falls over. Caltech computer scientist Matthew Cook modeled the behavior in 2004, hoping to learn how we balance, steer, and correct our paths on two wheels. He found that just two artificial neurons were enough to control a bicycle competently — the system even learned to thread a series of waypoints:
“A farmer, being asked what number of animals he kept, answered: ‘They’re all horses but two, all sheep but two, and all pigs but two.’ How many had he?”
11/09/2023 UPDATE: There’s another solution: Possibly he has no horses, sheep, or pigs but two llamas (or any other sort of animal). That works too. (Thanks, Gareth and Bob.)
Filmmaker Melton Barker started a novel business in the 1930s: He traveled across the United States, shooting a film in each town using local talent. The residents would gladly pay a fee to see themselves immortalized in a two-reel short, and their support financed the production and Barker’s livelihood until he could reach the next town.
He shot the same film, The Kidnappers Foil, 300 times over 40 years, using the same script and largely the same shots. A young girl named Betty Davis is kidnapped on her birthday, and the town’s children organize a search for her. The finished film, 15 to 20 minutes long, would be screened at local theaters. (The example above was shot in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in February 1937.)
Most of these films have been lost, but the project as a whole was added to the National Film Registry in 2012. The Texas Archive of the Moving Image has a collection of surviving films.
Can you complete the ‘self-descriptive crossword puzzle’ at left below? As in the solution to a similar puzzle seen at right, each of its 13 entries, 6 horizontal, 7 vertical, consists of an English number name folowed by a space followed by a distinct letter. The number preceding each letter describes the total number of occurrences of the letter in the completed puzzle. Hence, in the example, E occurs thirteen times, G only once, and so on, as readers can check. Note that the self-description is complete; every distinct letter is counted.
Though far from easy, the self-descriptive property of the crossword enables its solution to be inferred from its empty grid using reasoning based on orthography only.
Edgar Allan Poe’s tale “The Cask of Amontillado” is regarded today as a testament to his imagination, but in fact it was inspired by a feud with a literary rival. Poe and Thomas Dunn English had been friends, but they had a falling-out that descended into a fistfight in which Poe claimed to administer “a flogging which he will remember to the day of his death.” Thereafter the two caricatured one another in their writings — Poe even successfully sued English’s editors at the New York Mirror for libel in 1846.
In English’s novel 1844, the character Marmaduke Hammerhead is a veiled dig at Poe — he’s a liar and drunkard who is said to be the author of “The Black Crow” and uses phrases such as “Nevermore” and “lost Lenore.” It was in response to this novel that Poe wrote “The Cask of Amontillado” — the story mentions a secret society, a signal of distress, and a particular coat of arms because they all figured in English’s book. The very setting of Poe’s story derives from a scene in English’s novel that takes place in a subterranean vault.
But these associations have now been forgotten, and Poe’s story is remembered as a tale of the fantastic.
One other interesting item from Paul Halmos’ Problems for Mathematicians, Young and Old (1991): Pick a point in the first quadrant and draw a downward-sloping line through it. This line makes a triangle with the coordinate axes. At what angle should we set the line to minimize the area of the triangle?
This problem yields to calculus, but there’s a simple geometric solution. Reflect the axes through the point to make a box:
Now as we swivel our line through the point, it defines two triangles, one against each set of axes. The area of the combined triangles is equal to or greater than the area of the box. So, intuitively, it reaches a minimum just as the swiveling line becomes a diagonal of the box. That’s the answer.
Harry Mathews assembled lines from 14 existing sonnets to make a new one:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field?
Why lov’st thou that which thou receiv’st not gladly,
Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang?
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
And do whate’er thou wilt, swift-footed Time:
Nor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire, shall burn
Even such a beauty as you master now.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
(When other petty griefs have done their spite,
And heavily) from woe to woe tell o’er
That Time will come and take my love away;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
As any she belied beyond compare.
“This new poem sheds light on the structure and movement of the Shakespearean sonnet,” he wrote. “Nothing any longer can be taken for granted; every word has become a banana peel.”
(Harry Mathews, “Mathews’s Algorithm,” in Warren F. Motte, ed., Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, 1998.)
In 1923, Ollie Kraehe, owner of the NFL’s St. Louis All-Stars, approached Green Bay Packers coach Curly Lambeau with a tempting offer: He would give him end Jack “Dolly” Gray in exchange for some cash that he needed to fund his team. Lambeau leapt at the deal: Gray was reputed to have been an All-American honoree at Princeton in 1922 and sounded like the best player on Kraehe’s team.
Two weeks later, Lambeau cornered Kraehe and demanded an explanation — in his first game with the Packers, Gray had played terribly.
Kraehe told him the truth: The man had approached him earlier that year, representing himself as a Princeton star, but he played so badly that after three games Kraehe had investigated and found no such background — he was simply an impostor. Kraehe had traded him on to Lambeau as a joke, letting him coast on his phony reputation and expecting to take him back when the joke was over. But by that time the impostor had disappeared. His identity remains unknown.
Hidden on the back of the National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., is an engraving of Kilroy, the ubiquitous graffito that accompanied American GIs through Europe and, later, around the world. Some earlier inscriptions:
Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia has stood since 537, built by Justinian I as the patriarchal cathedral of Constantinople. It wasn’t until 1964 that runic inscriptions were discovered in the southern gallery, apparently engraved by members of the Varangian Guard during the Viking Age. Their meaning isn’t certain, but one may have read “Halfdan carved these runes” and the other “Ári made the runes.” More may yet be found.
The Piraeus Lion, one of four marble lion statues now at the Venetian Arsenal, bears runic inscriptions apparently made by Scandinavians in the 11th century, when it had stood in Athens. One reads, “Asmund cut these runes with Asgeir and Thorleif, Thord and Ivar, at the request of Harold the Tall, though the Greeks considered about and forbade it.” The other reads, “Hakon with Ulf and Asmund and Örn conquered this port. These men and Harold Hafi imposed a heavy fine on account of the revolt of the Greek people. Dalk is detained captive in far lands. Egil is gone on an expedition with Ragnar into Romania and Armenia.”
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