menticulture
n. cultivation and improvement of the mind
Inner Views
Mapmaker James Wyld gave London an enormous gift in 1851 — a 60-foot globe fitted with an internal staircase from which visitors could view the surface of the world, complete with rivers and mountains sculpted in plaster. More than a million guests filed through the exhibit in 1851, which promised “the whole extent, figure, magnitude, and multifarious features of the world we live in, as if it were one vast plain.”
“It has been suggested to us that the interior should be fitted up as lodgings for foreigners,” Punch enthused. “By this arrangement a foreigner would feel himself perfectly at home, though really abroad.”
In the same spirit, in 1831 the skeleton of a 95-foot bowhead whale was displayed in a pavilion at Charing Cross, as part of a tour that had also touched Ostend and Paris. Visitors could ascend a flight of steps to a stage set within the ribcage, where they could sit at a table and write puns in the guest book. (“Why should we be mourned for if killed by the falling of the bones of the whale? We should be be-wailed.”) Jokers called the pavilion “the palace of the Prince of Whales.”
Legal Notes
Phelim O’More was indicted at a county assize, in Ireland, for a rape.
His defence was ingenious. He gave in proof that he had a garden of beans, in which the prosecutrix committed, nightly, trespasses and depredations.
That having caught her stealing his beans, he declared, if she came again she might expect such consequences as she swore to on trial.
She came, and he kept his word.
The Court were of opinion, that the notice and the trespasses in the bean garden purged the act of felony, by showing consent a priori in the prosecutrix — and the culprit was acquitted.
— Public Advertiser, Aug. 26, 1789
Senior Citizen
Paul Erdös claimed to be two and a half billion years old.
“When I was a child, the Earth was said to be two billion years old,” he said. “Now scientists say it’s four and a half billion. So that makes me two and a half billion.”
A Better Invention
This magic word cube was devised by Jeremiah Farrell. Each cell contains a unique three-letter English word, and when the three layers are stacked, the words in each row and column can be anagrammed to spell MOUSETRAP.
Setting O=0, A=1, U=2, M=0, R=3, S=6, P=0, E=9, and T=18 produces a numerical magic cube (for example, MAE = 0 + 1 + 9 = 10).
Cretan Trouble
Epimenides, a Cretan, says that all Cretans are liars. Is this a paradox? Not really: If we suppose that the statement is true then we’re led to a contradiction, but we can consistently suppose it to be false.
But, A.N. Prior writes, “We thus reach the peculiar conclusion that if any Cretan does assert that nothing asserted by a Cretan is true, then this cannot possibly be the only assertion made by a Cretan — there must also be, beside this false Cretan assertion, some true one. Yet how can there be a logical impossibility in supposing that some Cretan asserts that no Cretan ever says anything true, and that this is the only assertion ever made by a Cretan?”
Alonzo Church first raised this point in 1946: “Without factual information about other statements by Cretans, it has been proved by pure logic (so it seems) that some other statement by a Cretan, not the famous statement of Epimenides, must once have been true.”
The paradox, Prior writes, is that “such examination makes it seem possible to settle an empirical question on logical grounds.”
Fall Apparel
Paul Kinnier’s leaf-gathering trousers, patented in 2003, replace tiresome rakes and noisy blowers:
“The instant invention consists of modified pants or trousers that are fitted with a net between the leg stalls thereof so that leaf collecting and gathering can be accomplished by walking.”
Presumably they’d also be useful in catching cats.
A Big Stick
Two weeks after Fleer released its 1989 baseball cards, the company received a call from a Baltimore sports reporter seeking a comment on card number 616. When managers looked up the card they saw a photo of Orioles second baseman Billy Ripken holding a bat on his right shoulder. On the knob of the bat were the words FUCK FACE.
The company halted distribution immediately, but this elevated the card from a novelty to a rarity, and the frenzy increased. By January its price has risen to $100; an unopened case could fetch $1,700. Ripken himself signed a few at a Jersey City card show, and the autographed cards became more valuable still. (“If people are crazy enough to spend that kind of money on a card,” he said, “it doesn’t concern me.”)
How the obscenity had made its way unnoticed through Fleer’s production process remains a mystery. The photo had been taken in Boston before an Orioles-Red Sox game in 1988; Ripken eventually admitted that he’d written the expletive himself to identify a practice bat, but he insisted that its appearance in the photo had been an accident.
See Inverted Jenny.
A Penny Saved
Recipe to keep a person warm the whole winter with a single Billet of Wood. — Take a billet of wood the ordinary size, run up into the garret with it as quick as you can, throw it out of the garret window; run down after it (not out of the garret window mind) as fast as possible; repeat this till you are warm, and as often as occasion may require. It will never fail to have the desired effect whilst you are able to use it. — Probatum est.
— Oracle and Public Advertiser, Nov. 24, 1796
The Linda Problem
Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.
Which of the following two alternatives is more probable?
1. Linda is a bank teller.
2. Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement.
Rationally, statement 2 cannot be more likely than statement 1, but in a 1983 study by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, fully 85 percent of respondents said that it was.
Why this happens is a matter of some debate. Tversky and Kahneman argued that in making this kind of judgment we seek the closest resemblance between causes and effects (here, between Linda’s personality and her behavior), rather than calculating probability, and that this makes statement 2 seem preferable.