Ethic

Joining an Inuit hunting party in Greenland in 1910, Danish explorer Peter Freuchen was pleased to receive several hundred pounds of meat because he’d thrust a harpoon into a walrus. When he thanked the primary hunter, the man looked at him and said nothing. Back at camp he told Freuchen:

Up in our country we are human! And since we are human we help each other. We don’t like to hear anybody say thanks for that. If I get something today you may get it tomorrow. Some men never kill anything because they are seldom lucky or they may not be able to run or row as fast as others. Therefore they would feel unhappy to have to be thankful to their fellows all the time. And it would not be fun for the big hunter to feel that other men were constantly humbled by him. Then his pleasure would die. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves, and by whips one makes dogs.

Freuchen wrote, “I have come to understand the truth of his words. The polar Eskimos were a free people when we met them.”

(Peter Freuchen, Adventures in the Arctic, 1960.)

A Puzzle Forest

An unusual problem by Reddit user cgibbard, from a discussion in 2010:

Here’s a representation of 101010 for you to figure out.

      *             *      *
      |             |      |
   *  *  *   *  *   *  * * *
   |  |   \ /    \ /    \|/
*  *  *    *      *      *

As a bonus, here’s the corresponding representation for 42:

   * *   *
   |  \ /
*  *   *

The puzzle is to find the rule for this representation.

A commenter wrote, “This puzzle is really clever and very rewarding to figure out.”

Click for Answer

The Flying Train

Watch this footage and try to guess when it was recorded.

Amazingly, it’s from 1902. The cities of Elberfeld and Barmen in western Germany had begun to discuss an elevated railway as early as 1887; they enlisted engineer Eugen Langen, and the line opened in 1901.

The Wuppertal Schwebebahn is still in use today — the world’s oldest electric suspension railway carries 85,000 passengers a day on an eight-mile route through the city of Wuppertal, much of the journey unfolding 12 meters above the River Wupper. Local poet Else Lasker-Schüler compared it to a flight on the back of a steely dragon.

(Thanks, Nick.)

Cornered

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Koushi_10x10.svg

“Here is an old favorite of mine that completely stumped me once when I was a student,” writes Jeff Hooper in Crux Mathematicorum. Suppose that each square in this 3×7 grid is painted red or black at random. Show that the board must contain a rectangle whose four corner squares are all the same color.

Click for Answer

In a Word

chevelure
n. a head of hair

abditive
adj. hidden

protreptic
n. a writing intended to exhort or instruct

revolute
v. to imbue with revolutionary spirit

For Histiaeus, when he was anxious to give Aristagoras orders to revolt, could find but one safe way, as the roads were guarded, of making his wishes known; which was by taking the trustiest of his slaves, shaving all the hair from off his head, and then pricking letters upon the skin, and waiting till the hair grew again. Thus accordingly he did; and as soon as ever the hair was grown, he despatched the man to Miletus, giving him no other message than this — ‘When thou art come to Miletus, bid Aristagoras shave thy head, and look thereon.’ Now the marks on the head, as I have already mentioned, were a command to revolt.

— Herodotus, Terpsichore