In a Word

bafflegab
n. official or professional jargon which confuses more than it clarifies; gobbledegook

This is such a useful word that its coiner actually received an award. Milton A. Smith, assistant general counsel for the American Chamber of Commerce, invented it to describe one of the incomprehensible price orders published by the Chamber’s Office of Price Stabilization. His comment, published in the Chamber’s weekly publication Washington Report in January 1952, was lauded in an editorial in the Bellingham [Wash.] Herald, which sponsored a plaque.

Smith said he’d considered several words to describe the OPS order’s combination of “incomprehensibility, ambiguity, verbosity, and complexity.” He’d rejected legalfusion, legalprate, gabalia, and burobabble.

At the award presentation, he was asked to define his word briefly. He answered, “Multiloquence characterized by consummate interfusion of circumlocution or periphrasis, inscrutability, and other familiar manifestations of abstruse expatiation commonly utilized for promulgations implementing Procrustean determinations by governmental bodies.”

| Language

Extra Credit

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The boys in Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky’s 1895 painting Mental Arithmetic are having a difficult time solving the problem on the board:

\displaystyle \frac{10^{2} + 11^{2} + 12^{2} + 13^{2} + 14^{2}}{365}

As it happens, there’s a simple solution: Both (102 + 112 + 122) and (132 + 142) are equal to 365, so the answer is simply (365 + 365) / 365, or 2. They’ll figure it out.

| Art · Science & Math

A Box Code

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/13180/13180-h/13180-h.htm

In Robert Chambers’ 1906 novel The Tracer of Lost Persons, Mr. Keen copies the figure above from a mysterious photograph. He is trying to help Captain Harren find a young woman with whom he has become obsessed.

“It’s the strangest cipher I ever encountered,” he says at length. “The strangest I ever heard of. I have seen hundreds of ciphers — hundreds — secret codes of the State Department, secret military codes, elaborate Oriental ciphers, symbols used in commercial transactions, symbols used by criminals and every species of malefactor. And every one of them can be solved with time and patience and a little knowledge of the subject. But this … this is too simple.”

The message reveals the name of the young woman whom Captain Harren has been seeking. What is it?

Click for Answer
| Literature · Science & Math

Hall’s Marriage Theorem

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Suppose we have a group of n men and n women. Each of the women can find some subset of the men whom she would be happy to marry. And each of the men would be happy with any woman who will have him. Is it always possible to pair everyone off into happy marriages?

Clearly this won’t work if, for example, two of the women have their hearts set on the same man and won’t be happy with anyone else. In general, for any subset of the women, we need to be sure that they can reconcile their preferences so that each of them finds a mate.

Surprisingly, though, that’s all that’s required. So long as every subset of women can collectively express interest in a group of men at least as numerous as their own, it will always be possible to marry off the whole group into happy couples.

The theorem was proved by English mathematician Philip Hall in 1935. Another application of the same principle: Shuffle an ordinary deck of 52 playing cards and deal it into 13 piles of 4 cards each. Now it’s always possible to assemble a run of 13 cards, ace through king, by drawing one card from each pile.

| Science & Math

Key Testimony

Here’s a piano reciting the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court.

It was programmed by Austrian composer Peter Ablinger for World Venice Forum 2009, sponsored by Italy’s Academy of Environmental Sciences. Ablinger wanted to convey an environmental message by musical means, so he asked Berlin elementary school student Miro Markus to read the text and then translated the frequency spectrum of Markus’ voice to the piano.

“I break down this phonography — meaning a recording of something, the voice, in this case — in individual pixels, one can say,” Ablinger explained. “And if I have the possibility of a rendering in a fairly high resolution (and that I only get with a mechanical piano), then I in fact restore some kind of continuity.”

“Therefore, with a little practice, or help or subtitling, we actually can hear a human voice in a piano sound.”

| Technology

The Silent Trade

The 15th-century Venetian navigator Alvise Cadamosto describes a curious convention by which the Mauritanian Azanaghi traded salt with the merchants of Mali:

All those who have the salt pile it in rows, each marking his own. Having made these piles, the whole caravan retires half a day’s journey. Then there comes another race of blacks who do not wish to be seen or to speak. They arrive in large boats, from which it appears that they come from islands, and disembark. Seeing the salt, they place a large quantity of gold opposite each pile, and then turn back, leaving salt and gold. When they have gone, the Negroes who own the salt return: if they are satisfied with the quantity of gold, they leave the salt and retire with the gold. Then the blacks of the gold return, and remove those piles which are without gold. By the other piles of salt they place more gold, if it pleases them, or else they leave the salt. In this way, by long and ancient custom, they carry on their trade without seeing or speaking to each other.

In this way different cultures can trade safely without speaking the same language. It’s called the “silent trade”; Herodotus describes a similar practice between Carthage and West Africa, and it’s been reported also in Siberia, Lapland, Timor, Sumatra, India, Sri Lanka, and New Guinea.

Why didn’t the Malians simply take the salt? Presumably because trade was more valuable to them in the long run. I wonder how such a custom gets started in the first place, though.

| Society

Landscape Portrait

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In Johannes Kepler’s 1608 novel Somnium, a demon describes how the shapes of the terrestrial continents appear to an observer on the moon:

On the eastern side [toward the Atlantic Ocean] it looks like the front of the human head cut off at the shoulders [Africa] and leaning forward to kiss a young girl [Europe] in a long dress [Thrace and the Black Sea regions], who stretches her hand back [Britain] to attract a leaping cat [Scandinavia]. The bigger and broader part of the spot [Asia], however, extends westward without any apparent configuration. In the other half of Volva [Earth] the brightness is more widely diffused [the two oceans] than the spot [the American continent]. You might call it the outline of a bell [South America] hanging from a rope [Nicaragua, Yucatán, Popayán] and swinging westward. What lies above [Brazil] and below [North America] cannot be likened to anything.

The two “halves” are the Old World and the New. East and west, upper and lower are reversed in the lunar perspective. Kepler mistakenly believed that continents would appear as dark “spots” against lighter oceans; he later credited Galileo with correcting this error.

| Literature

Free Enterprise

https://www.flickr.com/photos/132084522@N05/17086570218
Image: Flickr

Charging Bull, the bronze sculpture that’s become a ubiquitous symbol of Wall Street, was not commissioned by New York City or anyone in the financial district. Artist Arturo Di Modica spent $360,000 to create the three-ton statue, trucked it to Lower Manhattan, and on Dec. 15, 1989, left it in front of the New York Stock Exchange as a Christmas gift to the people of New York. Police impounded it, but after a public outcry the city decided to install it two blocks south of the exchange.

Since New York doesn’t own it, technically it has only a temporary permit to remain on city property. But after 32 years, it appears to have become a permanent fixture.

| Art