Eternity in an Hour

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paradiso_Canto_31.jpg

At the end of his 1986 book Paradoxes in Probability Theory and Mathematical Statistics, statistician Gábor J. Székely offers a final paradox from his late professor Alfréd Rényi:

Since I started to deal with information theory I have often meditated upon the conciseness of poems; how can a single line of verse contain far more ‘information’ than a highly concise telegram of the same length. The surprising richness of meaning of literary works seems to be in contradiction with the laws of information theory. The key to this paradox is, I think, the notion of ‘resonance.’ The writer does not merely give us information, but also plays on the strings of the language with such virtuosity, that our mind, and even the subconscious self resonate. A poet can recall chains of ideas, emotions and memories with a well-turned word. In this sense, writing is magic.

| Literature

Graft

graft puzzle

You’re a venal king who’s considering bribes from two different courtiers.

Courtier A gives you an infinite number of envelopes. The first envelope contains 1 dollar, the second contains 2 dollars, the third contains 3, and so on: The nth envelope contains n dollars.

Courtier B also gives you an infinite number of envelopes. The first envelope contains 2 dollars, the second contains 4 dollars, the third contains 6, and so on: The nth envelope contains 2n dollars.

Now, who’s been more generous? Courtier B argues that he’s given you twice as much as A — after all, for any n, B’s nth envelope contains twice as much money as A’s.

But Courtier A argues that he’s given you twice as much as B — A’s offerings include a gift of every integer size, but the odd dollar amounts are missing from B’s.

So who has given you more money?

| Puzzles

Things and Stuff

Anchormen, chairs, dogs, flowers, and comets are things: If I have one anchorman and add another, I have two anchormen. My chair did not exist until it was assembled into that form. And if a comet hits Paraguay, it is no longer a comet.

Helium, gravy, wood, music, and joy are stuff: If some helium escapes my balloon, it seems wrong to say that I’ve lost a thing. If I divide my gravy into two portions, it’s still gravy. And if I chop my cabin into firewood, the amount of wood in the world does not seem to have changed.

We seem to distinguish between these two classes of existence. We can count things, but stuff forms a sort of cumulative mass. Things are made of stuff (crowns are made of gold), but stuff is made of things (gold is made of molecules). What’s at the bottom? And what leads us to make these distinctions?

(Kristie Miller, “Stuff,” American Philosophical Quarterly 46:1 [January 2009], 1-18.)

| Oddities

Finale

schnittke gravestone

Composer Alfred Schnittke’s gravestone bears a musical staff with a semibreve rest under a fermata, indicating that the rest should be held as long as desired. It’s marked fff, or fortississimo, meaning that it should be performed very strongly.

Overall it might be interpreted to mean “a decided rest of indefinite length.”

| Art · Death

Misc

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_story_of_the_greatest_nations,_from_the_dawn_of_history_to_the_twentieth_century_-_a_comprehensive_history,_founded_upon_the_leading_authorities,_including_a_complete_chronology_of_the_world,_and_(14586608739).jpg

  • FRENCH REVOLUTION is an anagram of VIOLENCE RUN FORTH.
  • Aldous Huxley was George Orwell’s French teacher.
  • West Side Story was originally called East Side Story.
  • The Labrador dog is from Newfoundland, and the Newfoundland dog is from Labrador.
  • “I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.” — Wilson Mizner
| Art · Language · Literature · Quotations · Trivia

Self-Seeking

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hermann_Kern_Gute_Freunde_1904.jpg

Why do we cultivate friendships? What reason do I have to be a friend to another person, that is, to care about him for his own sake? In order to make the friendship worthwhile, such a reason would have to explain how doing it makes my own life better. But that’s a problem: If I pursue the friendship in order to improve my own life, then I’m not really being a true friend, caring about my friend for his own sake.

University of Newcastle philosopher Joe Mintoff writes, “The problem is that, even though many of us think that being a true friend makes our lives better, paradoxically this thought had better not guide our pursuit of friendship, lest this mean that we are not true friends and that our lives are not made better.” Why, then, do we seek to befriend others?

(Joe Mintoff, “Could an Egoist Be a Friend?,” American Philosophical Quarterly 43:2 [April 2006], 101-118.)

| Society

The Two Errand Boys

dudeney errand boys

Another conundrum from Henry Dudeney’s Canterbury Puzzles:

A country baker sent off his boy with a message to the butcher in the next village, and at the same time the butcher sent his boy to the baker. One ran faster than the other, and they were seen to pass at a spot 720 yards from the baker’s shop. Each stopped ten minutes at his destination and then started on the return journey, when it was found that they passed each other at a spot 400 yards from the butcher’s. How far apart are the two tradesmen’s shops? Of course each boy went at a uniform pace throughout.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Podcast Episode 134: The Christmas Truce

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Illustrated_London_News_-_Christmas_Truce_1914.jpg

In December 1914 a remarkable thing happened on the Western Front: British and German soldiers stopped fighting and left their trenches to greet one another, exchange souvenirs, bury their dead, and sing carols in the spirit of the holiday season. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the story of the Christmas truce, which one participant called “one of the highlights of my life.”

We’ll also remember James Thurber’s Aunt Sarah and puzzle over an anachronistic twin.

See full show notes …

| History · Podcast

New Music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMzIXxlwuCs

The score for British composer Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise is 193 pages of abstract and geometric shapes. There’s no indication as to how to interpret these, but Cardew suggested that the players work out a plan in advance.

bussotti

Sylvano Bussotti’s Five Pieces for David Tudor drives conventional notation in the direction of graphics and visual art. “For Bussotti, musical results, whatever they may be, flow directly from the visual,” writes Simon Shaw-Miller in Visible Deeds of Music (2002). “The ear plays no part until the work is performed.”

berberian

Stripsody, by Bussotti’s friend Cathy Berberian, is composed as a cartoon strip, complete with characters (including Tarzan and Superman) and sound effects at approximate pitch (including oink, zzzzzz, pwuitt, bang, uhu, and kerplunk). The instructions explain, “The score should be performed as if [by] a radio sound man, without any props, who must provide all the sound effects with his voice.” Here’s an example:

See Difficult Music.

| Art

Solitons

In 1834, engineer John Scott Russell was experimenting with boats in Scotland’s Union Canal when he made a strange discovery:

I was observing the motion of a boat which was rapidly drawn along a narrow channel by a pair of horses, when the boat suddenly stopped — not so the mass of water in the channel which it had put in motion; it accumulated round the prow of the vessel in a state of violent agitation, then suddenly leaving it behind, rolled forward with great velocity, assuming the form of a large solitary elevation, a rounded, smooth and well-defined heap of water, which continued its course along the channel apparently without change of form or diminution of speed. I followed it on horseback, and overtook it still rolling on at a rate of some eight or nine miles an hour, preserving its original figure some thirty feet long and a foot to a foot and a half in height. Its height gradually diminished, and after a chase of one or two miles I lost it in the windings of the channel. Such, in the month of August 1834, was my first chance interview with that singular and beautiful phenomenon which I have called the Wave of Translation.

They’re known today as solitons. He found that such waves can travel over very large distances, at a speed that depends on their size and width and the depth of the water. Remarkably, as shown above, they emerge from a collision unchanged, simply “passing through” one another.

(Thanks, Steve.)

| Science & Math