Chemical Pi

Princeton mathematician John Horton Conway memorized π to more than a thousand decimal places by marrying it to the periodic table of the elements:

3 Neutronium 1415926535 Hydrogen 8979323846 Helium 2643383279 Lithium 5028841971 Beryllium …

Between each pair of elements are sandwiched ten digits of π. (Neutronium is Andreas von Antropoff’s notional “element of atomic number zero,” an element with zero protons in its nucleus.) This approach to memorizing digits has a number of virtues:

  • It’s modular. If you forget one segment you can just look it up and plug it back in to the whole. And you can name the segment you’ve forgotten.
  • The element names lend some memorable color to each segment.
  • The 10-digit “mouthfuls” are relatively easy to remember, and since they’re tied to numbered elements you can jump fairly readily to, say, the 216th digit.
  • They give you an excuse for stopping — you’ve run out of elements!

To remember the elements themselves Conway devised a long mnemonic. It begins

Newt? Hy! He Likes Beryl’s Boring Car for Nites Out in Florid Neon

for

Nn H He Li Be B C N O F Ne.

See the paper below for the whole package — by including unconfirmed hypothetical elements, it encodes 120 mouthfuls, or 1,200 digits.

(John Conway, “Chemical π,” Mathematical Intelligencer 38:4 [December 2016], 7-10.)

| Science & Math

Bad News

https://pixabay.com/illustrations/dragon-myth-mythology-legend-pagan-8803854/

In 2015 Nature published an alarming article suggesting that dragons are real and had only gone to sleep during the Little Ice Age. A medieval document discovered “under a pile of rusty candlesticks” in the Bodleian Library showed that the creatures were once common but had entered a state of brumation when temperatures dropped and their traditional diet of knights began to thin. Rising temperatures in the modern age have correlated with increasing mentions in fictional literature, which “suggests that these fire-breathing lizards are being sighted more frequently.”

It gets worse: “Sluggish action on global warming is set to compound the problem, and policies such as the restoration of knighthoods in Australia are likely to exacerbate the predicament yet further by providing a sustained and delicious food supply.” The date of the article was April 2.

(Andrew J. Hamilton, Robert M. May, and Edward K. Waters, “Here Be Dragons,” Nature 520:7545 [April 2, 2015], 42-43.)

| Hoaxes · Science & Math

Vernacular

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reclining_Figure,_Guelph_Park.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 1991, artist Michael Dennis installed his sculpture Reclining Figure in Vancouver’s Guelph Park.

In 2012, prankster Viktor Briestensky erected the sign below at the park’s southwest corner.

Park staff initially removed the sign, but when a petition gathered 1,800 signatures they replaced it in 2014. The city now recognizes it as an official public art installation.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DudeChillingPark.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons
| Art

Unquote

“If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay — in solid cash — the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.” — Aldous Huxley

| Quotations

Why Not?

From a letter from English scholar Walter Raleigh to Mrs. F. Gotch, July 2, 1898:

Doe you lyke my newe phansy in the matere of Spelynge? I have growen wery of Spelynge wordes allwaies in one waye and now affecte diversite. The cheif vertew of my reform is that it makes the spelynge express the moode of the wryter. Frinsns, if yew fealin frenly, ye kin spel frenly-like. Butte if yew wyshe to indicate that thogh nott of hyghe bloode, yew are compleately atte one wyth the aristokrasy you canne double alle youre consonnantts, prollonge mosstte of yourre vowelles, and addde a fynalle ‘e’ wherevverre itte iss reququirred.

A later poem:

Wishes of an Elderly Man, Wished at a Garden Party, June 1914

I wish I loved the Human Race;
I wish I loved its silly face;
I wish I liked the way it walks;
I wish I liked the way it talks;
And when I’m introduced to one
I wish I thought What Jolly Fun!

| Language · Poems

Sir Hilary’s Prayer

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

English poet Winthrop Mackworth Praed was renowned for his charades — this one, published in the 1830s, has never been solved:

Sir Hilary charged at Agincourt,–
Sooth, ’twas an awful day!
And though in that old age of sport
The rufflers of the camp and court
Had little time to pray,
’Tis said Sir Hilary mutter’d there
Two syllables by way of prayer.

My first to all the brave and proud
Who see to-morrow’s sun:
My next, with her cold and quiet cloud,
To those who find their dewy shroud
Before to-day’s be done:
And both together to all blue eyes,
That weep when a warrior nobly dies.

“The best answer I have been able to find is GOOD NIGHT,” wrote Henry Dudeney in 1919. “The two syllables are by way of wish or prayer. We wish nothing but good to the victorious, we leave those have fallen to their ‘dewy shroud’ at night, while to the sorrowful bereaved we cannot do less than wish them a good night.”

But Praed himself left no solution.

| Puzzles

Hard of Hearing

In 1979 Auberon Waugh was working as a columnist at Private Eye when his editor offered him a trip to Senegal to help celebrate the anniversary of the magazine’s sister publication. “All I would have to give in exchange was a short discourse in the French language on the subject of breast feeding.”

The assignment struck Waugh as strange but not unaccountable — he’d been writing a regular column in a medical magazine that had touched on that topic.

“So I composed a speech on this subject in French, with considerable labour, only to find when I landed in Dakar that the subject chosen was not breast-feeding but press freedom.” He’d misheard the editor.

“There was no way even to describe the misunderstanding, since la liberté de la Presse bears no resemblance to le nourrisson naturel des bébés.”

(From Waugh’s 1991 autobiography Will This Do?)

| Humor · Language