To divide 8101265822784 by 8, move the 8 from the number’s head to its tail.
To multiply 1034482758620689655172413793 by 3, move the 3 from the tail to the head.
King Without a Country
Pity James Harden-Hickey — he founded a nation and no one believed him.
In 1893, newly rich after marrying into steel money, the American adventurer stopped at the empty island of Trinidad in the South Atlantic (not its larger namesake in the Caribbean) and, fancying a military dictatorship, proclaimed himself James I.
To his credit, Harden-Hickey did everything he could to legitimize his claim, but it’s hard to get these things off the ground. He named a secretary of state; opened a consular office in New York; established a flag, postage stamps, and a coat of arms; and began to sell bonds. After only two years, though, Britain seized the island for a telegraph station, occasioning a dispute with Brazil, and Harden-Hickey’s protests brought him only ridicule in the popular press.
Bold to the last, Harden-Hickey even tried to arrange an invasion of England from Ireland, but he couldn’t arrange financing. In 1898 he took an overdose of morphine, leaving behind a note to his wife–and the crown of his quondam nation.
Ancestor Guilt
Jones had been greatly depressed; he declared himself a murderer, and would not be comforted. Suddenly he asked me a question. ‘Are not the parents the cause of the birth of their children?’ said he. ‘I suppose so,’ said I. ‘Are not all men mortal?’ ‘That also may be admitted.’ ‘Then are not the parents the cause of the death of their children, since they know that they are mortal? And am I not a murderer?’ I was, I own, puzzled. At last I thought of something soothing. I pointed out to Jones that to cause the death of another was not necessarily murder. It might be manslaughter or justifiable homicide. ‘Of which of these then am I guilty?’ he queried. I could not say because I had never seen the Jones family, but I hear Jones has become a great bore in the asylum by his unceasing appeals to every one to tell him whether he has committed murder, manslaughter, or justifiable homicide!
— F.C.S. Schiller, quoted in Ralph L. Woods, How to Torture Your Mind, 1969
Unquote
“From the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.” — Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale, 1930
Fringe Sect
In 1918, Bertrand Russell was sentenced to six months in prison for writing an antiwar essay.
I was much cheered in my arrival by the warder at the gate who had to take particulars about me. He asked my religion and I replied ‘agnostic.’ He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: ‘Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God.’
“This remark kept me cheerful for about a week.”
Truel
You must participate in a three-way duel with two rivals. Each of you is given a pistol and unlimited ammunition. Unfortunately, you, Red, are the weakest shot — you hit your target only 1/3 of the time. Black is successful 2/3 of the time, and Gray hits everything he aims at.
It’s agreed that you will take turns: You’ll shoot first, then Black, then Gray, and you’ll continue in this order until one survivor remains. At whom should you shoot?
In a Word
syrtic
adj. pertaining to quicksand
Pressure
During the Russian revolution, the mathematical physicist Igor Tamm was seized by anti-communist vigilantes at a village near Odessa where he had gone to barter for food. They suspected he was an anti-Ukrainian communist agitator and dragged him off to their leader.
Asked what he did for a living, he said he was a mathematician. The sceptical gang leader began to finger the bullets and grenades slung round his neck. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘calculate the error when the Taylor series approximation to a function is truncated after n terms. Do this and you will go free. Fail and you will be shot.’ Tamm slowly calculated the answer in the dust with his quivering finger. When he had finished, the bandit cast his eye over the answer and waved him on his way.
Tamm won the 1958 Nobel prize for physics but he never did discover the identity of the unusual bandit leader.
— John Barrow, “It’s All Platonic Pi in the Sky,” The Times Educational Supplement, May 11, 1993
The Silver Swan
In The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain describes a remarkable automaton that he encountered at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867:
I watched a silver swan, which had a living grace about his movements, and a living intelligence in his eyes–watched him swimming about as comfortably and as unconcernedly as if he had been born in a morass instead of a jeweler’s shop–watched him seize a silver fish from under the water and hold up his head and go through all the customary and elaborate motions of swallowing it.
The swan still exists, now on display at England’s Barnard Castle. As a music box plays, the life-size creature preens, searches a flowing “stream” of rotating glass rods, spies a fish, and catches and swallows it. No one knows who designed it, but it’s certainly more than two centuries old — it’s described in a 1773 Act of Parliament.
See Watch Your Step and Daddy!
An Eager Student
While a law student at Duke University, Richard Nixon broke in to the dean’s office with two friends to see their forthcoming grades.
“They replaced everything, took nothing, damaged nothing, and committed no indiscretions,” writes Conrad Black in his 2008 biography of the president. “Yet some Nixonophobes have suggested that this was a foretaste of felonious behavior, and of a propensity for office break-ins.”