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Nowhere Man

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

The greatest Czech citizen is a man who doesn’t exist. Jára Cimrman was dreamed up as a modest caricature of the Czech people for a 1966 radio program, but he’s been adopted as a sort of fictive national hero. By general agreement he’s an accomplished author, detective, poet, inventor, mathematician, playwright, sportsman, philosopher, traveler, teacher, and composer; in a 2005 television competition he would have been voted “The Greatest Czech” but was disqualified for not existing. No one quite knows what he looks like, but his accomplishments are listed on an immortal Wikipedia page:

  • He proposed the Panama Canal to the U.S. government while composing a libretto for an opera about it.
  • Fleeing arctic cannibals, he came within 7 meters of reaching the North Pole.
  • He invented yogurt.
  • He created the first puppet show in Paraguay.
  • He corresponded with George Bernard Shaw for many years, without receiving a response.
  • He constructed the first rigid airship using Swedish steel and Czech wicker.
  • He reworked the electrical contact on Edison’s first light bulb and found a sublet for Gustave Eiffel.
  • He suggested that Mendeleev rotate his first draft of the Periodic Table.
  • He devised the philosophy of externism, the opposite of solipsism. In solipsism, the observer exists and the outside world does not. In externism, the outside word exists but the philosopher does not.

When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he found three missed calls from Cimrman.

Related: Germans pretend that the city of Bielefeld doesn’t exist. The tradition began in 1993 as a satire of conspiracy theories (“Do you know anybody from Bielefeld? Have you ever been to Bielefeld? Do you know anybody who has ever been to Bielefeld?”), but it’s taken on a life of its own. Referring to a town hall meeting she’d attended in Bielefeld, Chancellor Angela Merkel added, “… if it exists at all,” and the city council once released a press statement titled Bielefeld gibt es doch! (Bielefeld does exist!) … on April Fools’ Day.

(Thanks, January and Bryan.)

| Oddities

Local Color

In May 2008, when roommates Ben Kinsley and Robin Hewlett learned that Google would be sending a camera car down their Pittsburgh street, they decided to greet it in style. After the car’s visit, anyone who typed “Sampsonia Way Pittsburgh” into Google Maps would see a high school marching band showered in confetti, two 17th-century swordsmen doing battle, a woman escaping a third-story window using knotted sheets, and a love ray uniting fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers and Cleveland Browns.

The images have since been replaced as Google has updated its records, but the “Street With a View” project became Kinsley’s master’s thesis project at Carnegie Mellon University. And they made this film:

| Oddities

Clergymen and Chickens

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Why, let me ask, should a hen lay an egg which egg can become a chicken in about three weeks and a full-grown hen in less than a twelvemonth, while a clergyman and his wife lay no eggs but give birth to a baby which will take three-and-twenty years before it can become another clergyman? Why should not chickens be born and clergymen be laid and hatched? Or why, at any rate, should not the clergyman be born full grown and in Holy Orders, not to say already beneficed? The present arrangement is not convenient, it is not cheap, it is not free from danger, it is not only not perfect but is so much the reverse that we could hardly find words to express our sense of its awkwardness if we could look upon it with new eyes, or as the cuckoo perhaps observes it.

— Samuel Butler, “On Memory as a Key to the Phenomena of Heredity,” Working Men’s College, London, Dec. 2, 1882

| Quotations

Podcast Episode 206: The Sky and the Sea

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard opened two new worlds in the 20th century. He was the first person to fly 10 miles above the earth and the first to travel 2 miles beneath the sea, using inventions that opened the doors to these new frontiers. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow Piccard on his historic journeys into the sky and the sea.

We’ll also admire some beekeeping serendipity and puzzle over a sudden need for locksmiths.

See full show notes …

| History · Podcast · Science & Math · Technology

The Double Day

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Lyndon Johnson averaged only 3 to 4 hours of sleep a night and worked most of the rest; his wife once said, “Lyndon acts as if there is never going to be a tomorrow.” He arranged his time in a curious pattern:

Johnson began every day with a bedroom conference at 6:30 a.m., then worked straight through until 2:00 p.m., when he had lunch, relaxed, sometimes with a swim, and took a quick nap. By 4:00 p.m. he was ready to go again. ‘It’s like starting a new day,’ Johnson observed, and he would then proceed to work straight through to one or two in the morning. This Johnsonian ‘double day’ amazed the press and exhausted and frustrated his over-worked aides. His assistant Jack Valenti opined that Johnson had ‘extra glands’ that gave him energy that ordinary men did not possess: ‘He goes to bed late, rises early, and the words I have never heard him say are “I’m tired.”‘

He once called a congressman at 3 a.m. to discuss a piece of pending legislation. When Johnson asked, “Were you asleep?” the congressman thought quickly and said, “No, Mr. President, I was just lying here hoping you’d call.”

(From Larry F. Vrzalik and Michael Minor, From the President’s Pen, 1991.)

| History

Needs Analysis

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I do not believe in freedom of will. Schopenhauer’s words, ‘Man can indeed do what he wants, but he cannot want what he wants,’ accompany me in all life situations and console me in my dealings with people, even those that are really painful to me. This recognition of the unfreedom of the will protects me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and judging individuals and losing good humor.

— Albert Einstein, Mein Glaubensbekenntnis, August 1932

| Society

A Fractured Mystery

In 1934, Victor Gollancz published The Torquemada Puzzle Book, a miscellany of verbal puzzles by Edward Powys Mathers, who under the name Torquemada devised cryptic crossword puzzles for the Observer between 1926 and his death in 1939. At the back of the book was a short novel titled Cain’s Jawbone, which came with a unique twist:

Cain’s Jawbone, the bald narrative of a series of tragic happenings during a period of less than six months in a recent year, has met with an accident which seems to be unique in the history of the novelette. The pages have been printed in an entirely haphazard and incorrect order, a fact which reflects little credit on somebody. The author assures his readers, however, that while it is now too late for him to remedy the ordering of the pages, it is quite possible for them, should they care to take the trouble, to reorder them correctly for themselves. Before they attempt to do this, they may care to be assured that there is an inevitable order, the one in which the pages were written, and that, while the narrator’s mind may flit occasionally backwards and forwards in the modern manner, the narrative marches on, relentlessly and unequivocally, from the first page to the last.

The novel’s 100 pages had been printed and bound out of order. To solve the puzzle, the reader had to sort them into the correct order, read the story, solve the mysteries, and reveal the murderers. The task was so difficult that only two puzzlers solved it. Their names were printed in the Observer, but the solution to the problem was never revealed.

Last year the Laurence Sterne Trust got a copy of the book and has crowdfunded a new edition. For £30 you’ll get a box containing 100 jumbled pages, which you have to sort into a coherent mystery story, then identify six murderers and their six victims. The competition will run for 12 months from the date of publication, and the winner gets £1,000. As I write this 659 backers have signed up, putting the project well over its funding goal, but a publication date hasn’t yet been announced. You can find more info here and here.

Note: The announcement ends with a warning: “This is not a competition for the faint-hearted. The puzzle is phenomenally difficult.”

(Thanks, Sam.)

| Puzzles

Puffery

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From a letter of Charles Darwin to Charles Lyell, April 1860:

I must say one more word about our quasi-theological controversy about natural selection, and let me have your opinion when we meet in London. Do you consider that the successive variations in the size of the crop of the Pouter Pigeon, which man has accumulated to please his caprice, have been due to ‘the creative and sustaining powers of Brahma?’ In the sense that an omnipotent and omniscient Deity must order and know everything, this must be admitted; yet, in honest truth, I can hardly admit it. It seems preposterous that a maker of a universe should care about the crop of a pigeon solely to please man’s silly fancies. But if you agree with me in thinking such an interposition of the Deity uncalled for, I can see no reason whatever for believing in such interpositions in the case of natural beings, in which strange and admirable peculiarities have been naturally selected for the creature’s own benefit. Imagine a Pouter in a state of nature wading into the water and then, being buoyed up by its inflated crop, sailing about in search of food. What admiration this would have excited — adaptation to the laws of hydrostatic pressure, &c &c For the life of me I cannot see any difficulty in natural selection producing the most exquisite structure, if such structure can be arrived at by gradation, and I know from experience how hard it is to name any structure towards which at least some gradations are not known.

Ever yours,

C. Darwin.

| Science & Math

Podcast Episode 203: Notes and Queries

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll explore some more curiosities and unanswered questions from Greg’s research, including a misplaced elephant, a momentous biscuit failure, a peripatetic ax murderer, and the importance of the 9 of diamonds.

We’ll also revisit Michael Malloy’s resilience and puzzle over an uncommonly casual prison break.

See full show notes …

| History · Podcast