Search Results for: roll call

Going Home

Until 2006, a British ambassador leaving his post would write a valedictory despatch to be circulated among select readers in the British government. These “parting shots” tended to be appallingly frank, combining the diplomat’s real feelings about the nation he was leaving with his often wounded resentment at the indifference of his own government:

  • Argentina: “All I knew of Argentines before coming here was that they were generally disliked by all other Latin Americans as unduly pretentious, snobbish upstarts. …. The per capita outlay on deodorants in the Argentine is the highest in the world.”
  • Finland: “It could plausibly be argued that it is a misfortune for anybody but a Finn to spend three years in Finland, as I have just done. … Finland is flat, freezing, and far from the pulsating centres of European life.”
  • Uruguay: “After living now for over two years among people who call themselves Orientals and who seem to have inherited nearly all the faults and none of the virtues of Spain (though they have many minor virtues of their own), I look forward to returning to what I conceive to be, at least by contrast, the speed and efficiency of my own country.”
  • Saudi Arabia: “It is a great tragedy that, with all the world’s needs, Providence should have concentrated so much of a vital resource and so much wealth in the hands of people who need it so little and are so socially irresponsible about the use of it.”
  • Thailand: “Decayed garbage left for months on the side of the roads; stagnant canals that serve both as cesspools and as the dumping ground for dead dogs; buses and lorries that belch uncontrolled clouds of diesel fumes; scarcely a pavement without potholes and open manholes to break the legs of the unwary; bag-snatchers in every block; assault and violence a way of life; prostitution and every form of natural and unnatural vice on a scale astonishing even in Asia; a city of 4 million with only one park, and that littered with refuse and infested by thieves; unplanned hideous ribbon development; no proper drainage, so that in the rainy season large areas of the city remain flooded for weeks on end; and the whole set in a flat mournful plain without even a hillock in sight for 100 miles in any direction: this is Bangkok, the vaunted Venice of the East.”

Matthew Parris, who published a whole collection of these in 2010, explains: “Beyond retirement there can be no reprisals.”

| Society

The Wobbler

Here’s an odd little animal: Get two rigid disks, cut a notch in each one, fit them together as shown, and try to send them rolling across a table. If the notches are too deep, marrying the discs too closely together, then the object will pretty quickly slow to a stop with each disc standing at a 45° angle to the table. If the notches are too shallow, it will stop with one disc standing up at right angles to the table. But if the notches are about the right length, ideally 29.2893 percent of the radius, then the contraption will roll along quite happily for a surprisingly long distance.

The reason is that in that configuration the object’s center of mass remains level as it rolls along. (It does move from side to side, which is why it’s called the wobbler.)

Apparently this was originally discovered by A.T. Stewart, who dubbed his creation the “two-circle roller” in a 1966 note in the American Journal of Physics. I found it described in Matt Parker’s 2014 book Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension, which includes a simple proof of the principle involved. There’s a more rigorous discussion here.

| Science & Math

noitaripsnI

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frank_Bunker_Gilbreth_Sr_1868-1924.jpg

When Frank Bunker Gilbreth needed a name for an elementary motion in the workplace, he called it a therblig — his own name (nearly) backward.

The jazz standard “Airegin,” composed by Sonny Rollins in 1954, is Nigeria spelled backward.

The utopia Erewhon in Samuel Butler’s novel of that name is (nearly) nowhere backward.

In 1963 the Beatles set up a merchandising company called Seltaeb.

A variation in gravitational lensing caused by Earth’s motion is called parallax. A change caused by motion of the source (for example, a binary star) is called xallarap.

The reciprocal of an ohm is a mho.

The reciprocal of a farad is a daraf.

The reciprocal of a henry is a yrneh.

The distant minor planet 20461 Dioretsa orbits the sun with a retrograde motion. Its name is asteroid spelled backward.

| Language

Foreign Food

https://www.flickr.com/photos/scriptingnews/3418293087
Image: Flickr

In The Ouija Book (1979), Gina Covina writes, “Whatever your work or field of interest, it brings an added richness to your Ouija sessions, and Ouija will return this richness by sparking new ideas and reflecting imaginative perspectives back on your field of interest.” One day, “in a particularly domestic mood,” she sat at her Ouija table and found herself copying down this recipe:

Mix together equal parts peanut butter, honey, and nutritional yeast. Add raisins or nuts if desired. Make into balls and roll balls in coconut.

She calls it “Goo Ball,” “an excessively healthful candy that provides all the B vitamins in doses larger than you’ll find anywhere.” Where it came from, exactly, is unknown — proceed at your own risk.

| Oddities

Unwinese

English comedian Stanley Unwin invented his own language, “Basic Engly Twenty Fido,” a playfully twisted version of English that he said had been inspired by his mother, who once told him that she had “falolloped over” and “grazed her kneeclabbers.”

After that, he said, he became “a masterlode of the verbally thrips oratory.” Asked his opinion of Elvis Presley, he said, “Well, from across the herring-pole where harth the people has produced some waspwaist and swivel-hippy, I must say the rhythm contrapole sideways with the head and tippy tricky half fine on the strings.”

The Small Faces asked him to narrate the story of Happiness Stan on their 1968 album Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake. He starts, “Are you all sitty comforty bolt two square on your botty? Then I’ll begin. Like all real-life experience story this also begins once upon a polly-ti-to. Now after little lapse of time Stan became deep hungry in his tumload. After all he struggly trickly half several mileode, and anyone would suffer under this.”

This might recall Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” or such fictional languages as Nadsat in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. The difference is that, for the most part, Unwin wasn’t preparing his utterances in advance but improvising them on the spot.

In 2002 he was laid to rest beside his wife, Frances, under an epitaph that read “Reunitey in the heavenly-bode – Deep Joy!” And his family arranged a thanksgiving service with a valediction in his own style: “Goodly byelode loyal peeploders! Now all gatherymost to amuse it and have a tilty elbow or a nice cuffle-oteedee — oh yes!”

| Language

Nocturne

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11483/11483-h/11483-h.htm

Here’s an oddity: In 1882 Lewis Carroll collaborated on a song with the dreaming imagination of his friend the Rev. C.E. Hutchinson of Chichester. Hutchinson had told Carroll of a strange dream he’d had:

I found myself seated, with many others, in darkness, in a large amphitheatre. Deep stillness prevailed. A kind of hushed expectancy was upon us. We sat awaiting I know not what. Before us hung a vast and dark curtain, and between it and us was a kind of stage. Suddenly an intense wish seized me to look upon the forms of some of the heroes of past days. I cannot say whom in particular I longed to behold, but, even as I wished, a faint light flickered over the stage, and I was aware of a silent procession of figures moving from right to left across the platform in front of me. As each figure approached the left-hand corner it turned and gazed at me, and I knew (by what means I cannot say) its name. One only I recall — Saint George; the light shone with a peculiar blueish lustre on his shield and helmet as he turned and slowly faced me. The figures were shadowy, and floated like mist before me; as each one disappeared an invisible choir behind the curtain sang the ‘Dream music.’ I awoke with the melody ringing in my ears, and the words of the last line complete — ‘I see the shadows falling, and slowly pass away.’ The rest I could not recall.

He played the melody for Carroll, who wrote a suitable lyric of five verses. Hutchinson disclaimed writing the music, but if he didn’t … who did?

(From Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll, 1898.)

11/24/2021 UPDATE: Reader Paul Sophocleous provided this MIDI file of the published music. (Thanks, Paul.)

| Art · Literature · Oddities

Podcast Episode 361: A Fight Over Nutmeg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AMH-4740-NA_Map_of_Poeloe_Run.jpg

In 1616, British officer Nathaniel Courthope was sent to a tiny island in the East Indies to contest a Dutch monopoly on nutmeg. He and his men would spend four years battling sickness, starvation, and enemy attacks to defend the island’s bounty. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe Courthope’s stand and its surprising impact in world history.

We’ll also meet a Serbian hermit and puzzle over an unusual business strategy.

See full show notes …

| History · Podcast

Podcast Episode 359: Stranded in Shangri-La

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20170903_Papouasie_Baliem_valley_14.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 1945, a U.S. Army transport plane crashed in New Guinea, leaving three survivors marooned in the island’s mountainous interior. Injured, starving, and exhausted, the group seemed beyond the hope of rescue. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe the plight of the stranded survivors and the remarkable plan to save them.

We’ll also reflect on synthetic fingerprints and puzzle over a suspicious notebook.

See full show notes …

| History · Podcast

Even Up

rolling die puzzle

Suppose we cover a chessboard with 32 dominoes so that each domino covers two squares. What is the likelihood that there will be an even number of dominoes in each of the two orientations (horizontal and vertical)?

In fact this will always be the case. Consider the 32 squares in the odd-numbered horizontal rows. Each horizontal domino on the board covers either two of these squares or none of them. And each vertical domino covers exactly one of these squares. So the horizontal dominoes cover an even number of these squares (call it n), and the number of squares remaining in this group (32 – n) must also be even. This latter number is also equal to the number of vertical dominoes, so both quantities are even.

(By Vyacheslav Proizvolov.)

| Science & Math

Saying Goodbye

Leyland Kirby’s composition Everywhere at the End of Time depicts the progression of Alzheimer’s disease through six hours of successively degraded ballroom music:

STAGE 1: Here we experience the first signs of memory loss. This stage is most like a beautiful daydream. The glory of old age and recollection. The last of the great days.

STAGE 2: The second stage is the self realisation and awareness that something is wrong with a refusal to accept that. More effort is made to remember so memories can be more long form with a little more deterioration in quality. The overall personal mood is generally lower than the first stage and at a point before confusion starts setting in.

STAGE 3: Here we are presented with some of the last coherent memories before confusion fully rolls in and the grey mists form and fade away. Finest moments have been remembered, the musical flow in places is more confused and tangled. As we progress some singular memories become more disturbed, isolated, broken and distant. These are the last embers of awareness before we enter the post awareness stages.

STAGE 4: Stage 4 is where serenity and the ability to recall singular memories gives way to confusions and horror. It’s the beginning of an eventual process where all memories begin to become more fluid through entanglements, repetition and rupture.

STAGE 5: More extreme entanglements, repetition and rupture can give way to calmer moments. The unfamiliar may sound and feel familiar. Time is often spent only in the moment leading to isolation.

“Stage 6 is without description.”

| Art