By the People

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Think of democracy as a machine. At fixed intervals, the preferences of individual citizens are fed into the machine, and it aggregates them and produces a “choice” of its own. Democratic rule is achieved if, when the machine isn’t working, its most recent choice is acted upon.

“The question now arises: What is the authority of the choice expressed by the machine?” writes philosopher Richard Wollheim. “More specifically, why should someone who has fed his choice into the machine and then is confronted by the machine with a choice non-identical with his own, feel any obligation to accept it?”

(Richard Wollheim, “A Paradox in the Theory of Democracy,” in Peter Laslett and W.G. Runciman, eds., Philosophy, Politics and Society, Second Series: A Collection, 1962.)

| Society

“How to Get a Head-Ache”

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Naturalists state that snakes, when in danger, have been known to swallow each other; the above three snakes have just commenced to perform this operation. The snakes are from the same ‘hatch,’ and are therefore equal in age, length, weight, &c. They all start at scratch — that is, commence swallowing simultaneously. They are twirling round at the express rate of 300 revolutions per minute, during which time the circumference is decreased by 1 inch.

We would like our readers to tell us what will be the final result? Heads or tails, and how many of each?

— John Scott, The Puzzle King, 1899

| Oddities

Kennedy’s Waffles

For no reason, here’s a recipe for waffles that John Kennedy ate in the White House, “his breakfast treat for special occasions”:

1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 cup butter
2 egg yolks
1 cup and 1 tablespoon sifted cake flour
7/8 cup milk or 1 cup buttermilk
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 egg whites, stiffly beaten
4 teaspoons baking powder

Cream the sugar and butter. Add the egg yolks and beat. Then add the flour and milk alternately. This mixture may be kept in the refrigerator until you are ready to use it. When you are ready to bake it, fold in the egg whites, and add the baking powder and salt. Bake on a waffle iron. Serves 3.

“President Kennedy liked melted butter and maple syrup on his waffles.”

From White House chef François Rysavy’s 1972 collection A Treasury of White House Cooking.

| History · Trivia

What’s That?

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Suppose now that two philosophers, McX and I, differ over ontology. Suppose McX maintains there is something which I maintain there is not. McX can, quite consistently with his own point of view, describe our difference of opinion by saying that I refuse to recognize certain entities. …

When I try to formulate our difference of opinion, on the other hand, I seem to be in a predicament. I cannot admit that there are some things which McX countenances and I do not, for in admitting that there are such things I should be contradicting my own rejection of them.

It would appear, if this reasoning were sound, that in any ontological dispute the proponent of the negative side suffers the disadvantage of not being able to admit that his opponent disagrees with him.

This is the old Platonic riddle of nonbeing. Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not?

— Willard Van Orman Quine, “On What There Is,” 1948

| Oddities

Black and White

macleod chess problem

By N.A. Macleod. White to mate in two moves.

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| Puzzles

“Moonshine”

A double limerick by Walter de la Mare:

There was a young lady of Rheims,
There was an old poet of Gizeh;
He rhymed on the deepest and sweetest of themes,
She scorned all his efforts to please her:
And he sighed, “Ah, I see,
She and sense won’t agree.”
So he scribbled her moonshine, mere moonshine, and she,
With jubilant screams, packed her trunk up in Rheims,
Cried aloud, “I am coming, O Bard of my dreams!”
And was clasped to his bosom in Gizeh.

| Poems

“The Adventure of the Tall Man”

After Arthur Conan Doyle’s death, his biographer Hesketh Pearson claimed to have discovered among his papers the scenario of an uncompleted tale.

A girl appeals to Sherlock Holmes for help — her uncle has been found shot in his bedroom, and her lover has been arrested as a suspect. The lover has recently had a quarrel with the old man; a revolver is found in his house that could have fired the fatal shot; and he owns a ladder whose feet match marks below the dead man’s window and which bears incriminating soil on its feet. The girl suspects another man who has been paying court to her.

Holmes and Watson go to the village, where they discover a pair of stilts in a disused well. When the accused man is found guilty of murder, Holmes is driven to a desperate stratagem: He dresses an actor as the murdered man, mounts him on the stilts, and has him approach the villain’s bedroom window, crying, “As you came for me, I have come for you!” Terrified, the man makes a full confession: He had planted the revolver and smeared the ladder’s feet with soil, hoping to win the girl and her money.

Pearson adds, apparently without intending the pun, “Presumably Doyle scrapped this because he felt on reflection that the episode of the stilts was rather tall.”

Of the story, Richard Lancelyn Green wrote, “there is no evidence to show that it is by [Doyle] and strong internal evidence to suggest that it’s not.” For what it’s worth, Robert A. Cutter completed the adventure in 1947.

| Hoaxes · Literature

After You

A train engine pulling four cars meets a train engine pulling three cars. There’s a short spur next to the main track, but it can hold only one engine or one car at a time. A car cannot be joined to the front of an engine. What’s the most expeditious way for the two trains to pass one another?

This sounds fairly simple, but the solution is surprisingly involved. In presenting the problem in his Cyclopedia of 5000 Puzzles, Tricks, and Conundrums (1914), Sam Loyd wrote that it “shows the primitive way of passing trains before the advent of modern methods, and the puzzle is to tell just how many times it is necessary to back or reverse the directions of the engines to accomplish the feat, each reversal of an engine being counted as a move in the solution.”

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| Puzzles

DIY

In 1888, on reading that the villanelle requires “an elaborate amount of care in production, which those who read only would hardly suspect existed,” British philologist W.W. Skeat tossed off this one:

It’s all a trick, quite easy when you know it,
As easy as reciting A B C,
You need not be an atom of a poet.

If you’ve a grain of wit, and want to show it,
Writing a villanelle — take this from me —
It’s all a trick, quite easy when you know it.

You start a pair of rimes, and then you “go it”
With rapid-running pen and fancy free;
You need not be an atom of a poet.

Take any thought, write round it and below it,
Above or near it, as it liketh thee;
It’s all a trick, quite easy when you know it.

Pursue your task, till, like a shrub, you grow it,
Up to the standard size it ought to be;
You need not be an atom of a poet.

Clear it of weeds, and water it, and hoe it,
Then watch it blossom with triumphant glee.
It’s all a trick, quite easy when you know it;
You need not be an atom of a poet.

| Poems

Navel Warfare

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Another mistake there may be in the Picture of our first Parents, who after the manner of their posterity are both delineated with a Navel. … Which notwithstanding cannot be allowed, … that in the first and most accomplished piece, the Creator affected superfluities, or ordained parts without use or office.

… Now the Navel being a part, not precedent, but subsequent unto generation, nativity or parturition, it cannot be well imagined at the creation or extraordinary formation of Adam, who immediately issued from the Artifice of God; nor also that of Eve, who was not solemnly begotten, but suddenly framed, and anomalously proceeded from Adam.

— Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 1646

| Art · Religion