Search Results for: in a word

Strange Bills

exhibition broadside - enormous head

Magician, actor, and author Ricky Jay collects the broadsides that publicized bygone exhibitions of conjuring, acrobatics, curiosities, and feats of strength. These are two of his favorites, featured in his 2005 collection Extraordinary Exhibitions. According to one account, the Frenchmen who exhibited the “enormous head” were “cautiously noncommittal” as to whether it had belonged to a gigantic bird, fish, or lizard. And the playbill below presents three words that Jay finds “endlessly appealing. I love the way they look on the page. I love the way they roll off the tongue. No matter how much one is mired in the complexities of life, no matter how seriously one is inclined to take oneself, no matter how depressing are the day’s events — these vicissitudes are all assuaged by the presence of ‘The Giant Hungarian Schoolboy.'”

exhibition broadside - hungarian schoolboy

| Entertainment

So It Goes

A whimsical traveler on one of the main trails in the State of Georgia painted, on a large rock, the words, ‘Turn Me Over.’ Other travelers heaved and struggled to turn the rock over. On the underside of it they found painted, ‘Now Turn Me Back That I May Fool Another.’

— H. Allen Smith, The Compleat Practical Joker, 1953

| Humor

Chasing Leo

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Albrecht_D%C3%BCrer_055.jpg

In 1938, the American Mathematical Monthly published an unlikely paper: “A Contribution to the Mathematical Theory of Big Game Hunting.” In it, Ralph Boas and Frank Smithies presented 16 ways to catch a lion using techniques inspired by modern math and physics. Examples:

  • “The Method of Inversive Geometry. We place a spherical cage in the desert, enter it, and lock it. We perform an inversion with respect to the cage. The lion is then in the interior of the cage, and we are outside.”
  • “A Topological Method. We observe that a lion has at least the connectivity of the torus. We transport the desert into four-space. It is then possible to carry out such a deformation that the lion can be returned to three-space in a knotted condition. He is then helpless.”
  • “The Dirac Method. We observe that wild lions are, ipso facto, not observable in the Sahara Desert. Consequently, if there are any lions in the Sahara, they are tame. The capture of a tame lion may be left as an exercise for the reader.”
  • “A Relativistic Method. We distribute about the desert lion bait containing large portions of the Companion of Sirius. When enough bait has been taken, we project a beam of light across the desert. This will bend right round the lion, who will then become so dizzy that he can be approached with impunity.”

The article has inspired a tradition of updates by other mathematicians over the years:

  • “Let Q be the operator that encloses a word in quotation marks. Its square Q2 encloses a word in double quotes. The operator clearly satisfies the law of indices, QmQn = Qm + n. Write down the word ‘lion,’ without quotation marks. Apply to it the operator Q-1. Then a lion will appear on the page. It is advisable to enclose the page in a cage before applying the operator.” (I.J. Good, 1965)
  • “Game Theoretic Method. A lion is big game. Thus, a fortiori, he is a game. Therefore there exists an optimal strategy. Follow it.” (“Otto Morphy,” 1968)
  • “Method of Analytics Mechanics. Since the lion has nonzero mass it has moments of inertia. Grab it during one of them.” (Patricia Dudley et al., 1968)
  • “Method of Natural Functions. The lion, having spent his life under the Sahara sun, will surely have a tan. Induce him to lie on his back; he can then, by virtue of his reciprocal tan, be cot.” (Dudley)
  • “Nonstandard Analysis. In a nonstandard universe (namely, the land of Oz), lions are cowardly and may be caught easily. By the transfer principle, this likewise holds in our (standard) universe.” (Houston Euler, et al., 1985)

Dudley also suggested a “method of moral philosophy”: “Construct a corral in the Sahara and wait until autumn. At that time the corral will contain a large number of lions, for it is well known that a pride cometh before the fall.”

| Science & Math

The Champion

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Charlie_Chaplin.jpg

A group of us had gone to the pier to have dinner at a little fish restaurant, and while waiting to be served, Charlie Chaplin noticed a sign across the way that read, ‘Scientific Handwriting Analysis. Ten Cents.’ Charlie decided, as a joke, to try the expert out. Aldous [Huxley] stopped him. It would be too simple for a swami to ‘read’ for Charlie because his appearance was familiar to practically everyone in the world. On the other hand no one would recognize Aldous. So Charlie wrote a few words on a scrap of paper which Aldous took to the lady. He returned from his interview in a mood of deep concentration and reported what had happened. The lady had studied the writing a moment and then looked up at Aldous suspiciously. ‘Are you trying to make fun of me, sir?’ she asked. Aldous assured her he was not and wanted to know why she asked. She paused and studied Charlie’s writing more closely. Then, still suspicious, she asked, ‘Did you write this while you were in an unnatural or cramped position?’ Aldous then admitted that the writing was not his own but he assured the lady that it had been done quite normally. ‘Then,’ said the expert, ‘I don’t know what to say, because if what you tell me is true, the man who wrote this is a God-given genius.’

— Anita Loos in Aldous Huxley: A Memorial Volume, ed. Julian Huxley, 1965

| Entertainment

Book Perils

“I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book, and ransack every page.” — Emerson

“When we read, we are, we must be, repeating the words to ourselves unconsciously; for how else should we discover, as we have all discovered in our time, that we have been mispronouncing a word which, in fact, we have never spoken? I refer to such words as ‘misled,’ which I, and millions of others when young, supposed to be ‘mizzled.'” — A.A. Milne

“It is one of the oddest things in the world that you can read a page or more and think of something utterly different.” — Christian Morgenstern

| Literature

A Pretty Problem

In Longfellow’s novel Kavanagh, Mr. Churchill reads a word problem to his wife:

“In a lake the bud of a water-lily was observed, one span above the water, and when moved by the gentle breeze, it sunk in the water at two cubits’ distance. Required the depth of the water.”

“That is charming, but must be very difficult,” she says. “I could not answer it.”

Is it? If a span is 9 inches and a cubit is 18 inches, how deep is the water?

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| Literature · Puzzles · Science & Math

The Great West

But Miss Cooper, the daughter of the novelist, tells a story which is well-nigh incredible. When in Paris, she saw a French translation of ‘The Spy,’ in which a man is represented as tying his horse to a locust. Not understanding that the locust-tree was meant, the intelligent Frenchman translated the word as ‘sauterelle,’ and, feeling that some explanation was due, he gravely explained in a note that grasshoppers grew to an enormous size in America, and that one of them, dead and stuffed, was placed at the door of the mansion for the convenience of visitors on horseback.

— William Shepard Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1892

| Literature

Misc

  • EVIAN, SEIKO, and STROH’S are all English words spelled backward.
  • Can “I apologize” be false?
  • 165033 = 163 + 503 + 333
  • Little Wymondley, in Hertfordshire, is bigger than Great Wymondley.
  • “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?” — Satchel Paige
| Language · Science & Math · Trivia

Private Line

In 1980, Morris Davie was accused of setting forest fires and brought to the headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to take a lie detector test. He was left alone in a room, where a hidden camera recorded him dropping to his knees and saying, “Oh God, let me get away with it just this once.”

At trial, his lawyer objected to this evidence, arguing that it violated a Canadian law that prohibited the interception of private communications “made under circumstances in which it is reasonable for the originator thereof to expect that it will not be intercepted by any person other than the person intended by the originator thereof to receive it.”

Is God a person? The trial judge thought so — he held the videotape inadmissible and Davie was acquitted. The British Columbia Court of Appeal disagreed, however, deciding that a private communication requires an “intended human recipient.”

“In my opinion,” wrote Justice J.A. Hutcheon, “the word ‘person’ is used in the statutes of Canada to describe someone to whom rights are granted and upon whom obligations are placed. There is no earthly authority which can grant rights or impose duties upon God. I can find no reason to think that the Parliament of Canada has attempted to do so in the enactment of sections of the Criminal Code dealing with the protection of privacy.” He ordered a new trial.

| Religion · Society

Meant to Be

In 2007 Gordon Bonnet was going through some genealogical records when he ran across a marriage record for Edward DeVere Stewart and Etta Grace Staggers.

“It was only when I was putting the names in my database that I noticed something odd about them. What is it?”

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| Puzzles