Butler University mathematician Jerry Farrell has telekinesis. Here’s a demonstration. Toss a coin and enter the result (HEAD or TAIL) as 1 Across in the grid below. Then solve the rest of the puzzle:
Across Down
1 Your coin shows a ______ 1 Half a laugh
5 Wagner's earth goddess 2 Station terminus?
6 Word with one or green 3 Dec follower?
4 Certain male
In 1951 G.V. Carey published a 15-page booklet called “Making an Index,” intended to guide new authors in preparing indexes for their books. When it was published, a friendly reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement suggested jokingly that the booklet might have benefited from an index of its own, in which Carey could have given “a full-dress demonstration of his principles.”
So, charmingly, Carey made one: In the second edition he added a 3-page index to his 15-page book, writing, “The reviewer, though he may have had his tongue in his cheek, has put the author on his mettle and tempted him, at the opportunity afforded by a new impression, to take up the challenge.” Admittedly, this required some stretching, particularly as he wanted to include every letter of the alphabet. Some sample entries:
Anybody, mere page-numbers not of the slightest use to, 7
Bibliographer, seventeenth-century, 3
Cherry, twice bitten, once shy. See Cross-references
Common sense, use your, 9, 15, and pass.
Earl of Beaconsfield, 11
Eye in, getting your, 5
Fiction, non-, 3
Haystack, looking for needle in, 4
Jehu (son of Nimshi), 12-13
John, St, 10
Life of Abraham Lincoln, 6
Lincoln, Abraham, Life of, 6
Omniscient, indexers not always, 4
Perfection, counsel of, 3
Sense, common. See Common sense
Suez Crisis, 14
What not to do. See Anybody, Earl of Beaconsfield, von Kluck, etc., etc.
York, New, missing, 10
Yourself in the users’ place, put, 6-7, 12
Zealand, New, 10
One thicket of cross-references never finds its way back to the text:
Chase, wild goose, See Von Kluck
Goose chase, wild. See Kluck, von
Kluck, von. See Von Kluck
Von Kluck. See Kluck, von
Wild goose chase. See Kluck, von
And evidently he hates the word alphabetisation:
Order, alphabetical. See Horrid word
Horrid word. See Alphabetisation
Alphabetisation, 9-10
But “It remains only to affirm that the author has made a serious attempt to demonstrate, even in this not very serious index, some at least of the principles set forth in the preceding pages.”
In Ian Fleming’s novel You Only Live Twice, a head injury gives James Bond amnesia, and the world briefly thinks him dead. An obituary appears in the London Times:
To serve the confidential nature of his work, he was accorded the rank of lieutenant in the Special Branch of the RNVR, and it is a measure of the satisfaction his services gave to his superiors that he ended the war with the rank of commander.
In For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond, Ben MacIntyre notes that this wording contains a “knowing glimmer of self-congratulation”: Fleming himself had been commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in July 1939 as a lieutenant and was promoted to commander a few months later.
In his 1943 book The Life of Johnny Reb, Emory University historian Bell Wiley collects misspellings found in the letters of Confederate soldiers. Can you decipher these words?
Bonus: What does A brim ham lillkern mean?
In Patterns of Poetry (1986), Miller Williams writes, “Fourteen words have rarely done such duty as in the following sonnet, which differs from the traditional form only in not having ten syllables per line and in the combining of the Italian octave and the Shakespearean sestet”:
I
Through
Blue
Sky
Fly
To
You.
Why?
Sweet
Love,
Feet
Move
So
Slow.
— Witter Brynner
New Yorker Kam Brock was sedated and placed in a mental hospital last September because police thought she might be delusional — for one thing, she insisted that Barack Obama was one of her Twitter followers. The hospital set this as an objective for her release: “Patient will verbalize the importance of education for employment and will state that Obama is not following her on Twitter.”
It turns out that @BarackObama does follow Brock on Twitter — but the account doesn’t belong to the president; it was leased to a nonprofit by his campaign.
In 1980, 25-year-old Alfred Lawrence Patterson was admitted to Michigan’s Northville Regional Psychiatric Hospital. He said that the Secret Service and Sen. Edward Kennedy had conspired to place him there.
In fact Patterson had been interviewed by the Secret Service after he’d sent a threatening letter to Kennedy; they concluded that he needed psychiatric care. (Impressively, Patterson won that year’s House primary from within the hospital, drawing 50 percent of the vote.)
When Martha Mitchell, the wife of Nixon attorney general John Mitchell, began to claim that the White House was engaged in illegal activities, she was rumored to be mentally ill. But events proved her right. Nixon later told David Frost, “If it hadn’t been for Martha Mitchell, there’d have been no Watergate.”
Psychologists remember this as the “Martha Mitchell effect” — when a client insists that she’s being chased by the mob, or that the police have been spying on her, she’s not necessarily delusional. In the words of psychotherapist Joseph Berke, “even paranoids have enemies.”
(Thanks, Jason.)
“I can’t recall who first pointed out that the word ‘explain’ means literally to ‘flatten out.'” — Philip Slater
What do these words have in common?
DEVIOUS
EFFENDI
ENEMY
ENVIOUS
ESCAPEE
ODIOUS
OPIUM
TEDIOUS
ANEMONE
ARCADIAN
EXCELLENCY
OBEDIENCY
EXPEDIENCY
Hercules is battling a hydra. He manages to sever a head, but finds that a new head is generated according to the following rule: We move down one segment from the point where the head was severed and make a copy of the entire subtree above that point. Worse, the rate is increasing — the nth stroke of Hercules’ sword produces n new subtrees.
What will happen? The situation certainly looks dire, but, amazingly, Hercules cannot lose. No matter how large the hydra is, and no matter the order in which he severs the heads, he will always kill the hydra in finitely many turns.
Why? With each step, the complexity in the network is migrating toward the root — and that can’t continue forever. “We basically say that whenever something goes on K steps away from the root, it’s infinitely times worse than anything that is going on K-1 steps away from the root,” Comenius University computer scientist Michal Forišek explains in Slate.
“Now, whenever you kill a head, you very slightly simplified something that is K steps away. And even though you get a lot of new stuff in return, all that stuff is only K-1 steps away, and hence the entire result is still simpler than it was before.”
(Laurie Kirby and Jeff Paris, “Accessible Independence Results for Peano Arithmetic,” Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society 14 [1982], 285-293.)
We’ve been making things awfully hard on spirits. The standard Ouija board lays out the alphabet in two simple rows, which means it’s easy for the dead to tell us about FEEDERS but terribly hard to refer to LAYAWAY, even though these words are equally long.
In the interests of better communication, Eric Iverson made a study of this for the August 2005 issue of Word Ways. Using an image of a Ouija board, he counted the number of pixels that a planchette would have to travel in order to spell out various English words. The results are dismaying: The most exhausting four-letter word, MAMA, requires fully 17 times as much travel as the simple FEED. Longer words are more consistent: The hardest 23-letter word, DISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM, requires little more work than the easiest, ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPHIC. But do dead people have that kind of stamina?
What’s the answer? Iverson experimented with different layouts and found a hexagonal grid that minimizes the average travel distance for a typical word (see the link below). And he found a checkerboard grid that’s 3 percent more efficient than that. Even rearranging the letters on a standard board to ZXVGINAROFUPQ JKWCHTESDLMYB rather than the standard alphabet increases efficiency by about a third. Now maybe we can have some better conversations.
(Eric Iverson, “Traveling Around the Ouija Board,” Word Ways 38:3 [August 2005], 174-177.)
