The geeks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are fond of merry japes, locally known as “hacks”. One of the more memorable happened one night in October 1958 when an MIT fraternity had the idea of initiating new members by making them measure a bridge over the Charles River connecting the Cambridge campus with Boston. Crossing the bridge was often a wet, windy and unpleasant business and it was thought that students returning at night from downtown would like to know, by visible marks and with some precision, how far they still had to go. The older fraternity brothers decided to use one of the new pledges as a rule, and selected Oliver R. Smoot, the shortest of the lot at 5ft 7in. The other pledges laid Smoot out at one end of the bridge, marked his extent with chalk and paint, then picked him up and laid him down again, spelling out the full measurement every ten lengths, and inscribing the mid-point of the bridge with the words “halfway to Hell”. In this way, it was determined that the span was 364.4 smoots long, “plus or minus one ear” (to indicate measurement uncertainty).
The hack was too good to let fade away, so every now and then the fraternity makes its pledges repaint the markings. You might think this isn’t the sort of vandalism the police would tolerate, but they do. The smoot markings soon became convenient in recording the exact location of traffic accidents, so (as the story goes) when the bridge walkways needed to be repaved in 1987, the Massachusetts Department of Public Works directed the construction company to lay out the concrete slabs on the walkway not in the customary six-foot lengths but in shorter smoot units. Fifty years after the original hack, the smoot markers have become part of civic tradition: the City of Cambridge declared 4 October 2008 “Smoot Day”. MIT students ran up a commemorative plaque on a precision milling machine and created an aluminium Smoot Stick which they deposited in the university’s museum as a durable reference standard: the unit-smoot is now detached from the person-Smoot. Through the legions of MIT graduates driving global high-tech culture, the smoot has travelled the world. If you use Google Earth, you can elect the units of length in which you’d like distances measured: miles, kilometres, yards, feet – and smoots.
Robert Crease, The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement, 2011.
January 5, 2022
QotD: Measurement hack that lives on
December 30, 2021
QotD: Richard Feynman discovers (to his shock) that females can understand analytic geometry
I listened to a conversation between two girls, and one was explaining that if you want to make a straight line, you see, you go over a certain number to the right for each row you go up – that is, if you go over each time the same amount when you go up a row, you make a straight line – a deep principle of analytic geometry! It went on. I was rather amazed. I didn’t realize the female mind was capable of understanding analytic geometry.
She went on and said, “Suppose you have another line coming in from the other side, and you want to figure out where they are going to intersect. Suppose on one line you go over two to the right for every one you go up, and the other line goes over three to the right for every one that it goes up, and they start twenty steps apart,” etc. – I was flabbergasted. She figured out where the intersection was. It turned out that one girl was explaining to the other how to knit argyle socks. I, therefore, did learn a lesson: The female mind is capable of understanding analytic geometry. Those people who have for years been insisting (in the face of all obvious evidence to the contrary) that the male and female are equally capable of rational thought may have something. The difficulty may just be that we have never yet discovered a way to communicate with the female mind. If it is done in the right way, you may be able to get something out of it.
Richard Feynman, “What is Science?”, Richard Feynman [presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, 1966 in New York City, and reprinted from The Physics Teacher Vol. 7, issue 6, 1969].
December 28, 2021
QotD: Football, Minnesota Viking style
Tom Pelissero, “Vikings rediscover winning ways”, KFAN Sports, 2005-01-10.
December 27, 2021
QotD: The purpose of an Eton education
Auberon Waugh, Diary, 1973-09-26.
December 26, 2021
You Suck at Christmas – You Suck at Cooking (episode 28)
You Suck At Cooking
Published 23 Dec 2015A 100 percent full throttle high adrenaline speed chase through the history of christmas.
Wishing you all a great close to your year!
QotD: Boxing Week Sales
James Lileks, “Backfence: Beyond new store’s hype, genuine smiles”, Minneapolis Star Tribune, 2004-08-03.
December 25, 2021
QotD: Blackadder and Melchet exchange Christmas greetings
Lord Melchet: Greetings of the season to you, Blackadder! May the Yule log slip from your fire and burn your house down!Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, 1988.
December 24, 2021
Repost – Hey Kids! Did you get your paperwork in on time?
If you hurry, you can just get your Santa’s Visit Application in before the deadline tonight!
QotD: Christmas nostalgia
James Lileks
December 23, 2021
If Delivery Companies Were Santa
It’s a Southern Thing
Published 21 Dec 2021Up on the housetop, click, click, click.
Down through the chimney comes UPS … and FedEx, USPS, and Amazon Prime.
QotD: Stupid Commercials
Alan McLeod, “1 + 0 = 2”, Gen X at 40, 2005-11-15.
December 22, 2021
QotD: Sibling rivalry
Mealtime was competitive too. The winner was the one who moved the greatest percentage of my father’s income through his or her digestive system. I was in my thirties before someone told me that eating is not a speed sport.
Scott Adams, Dilbert Newsletter 61.0, 2005-10-25.
December 21, 2021
Repost – ‘Tis the season to hate the senders of boastful holiday letters
Gregg Easterbrook receives the perfect, perfect holiday letter:
Don’t you hate boastful holidays letters about other people’s fascinating lives and perfect children? Below is one Nan and I received last week.
Dear Friends,
What a lucky break the CEO sent his personal jet to pick me up from Istanbul; there’s plenty of room, since I have the entire aircraft to myself, to take out the laptop and write our annual holiday letter. Just let me ask the attendant for a better vintage of champagne, and I’ll begin.
It’s been another utterly hectic year for Chad and I and our remarkable children, yet nurturing and horizon-expanding. It’s hard to know where the time goes. Well, a lot of it is spent in the car.
Rachel is in her senior year at Pinnacle-Upon-Hilltop Academy, and it seems just yesterday she was being pushed around in the stroller by our British nanny. Rachel placed first this fall in the state operatic arias competition. Chad was skeptical when I proposed hiring a live-in voice tutor on leave from the Lyric Opera, but it sure paid off! Rachel’s girls’ volleyball team lost in the semifinals owing to totally unfair officiating, but as I have told her, she must learn to overcome incredible hardship in life.
Now the Big Decision looms — whether to take the early admission offer from Harvard or spend a year at Julliard. Plus the whole back of her Mercedes is full of dance-company brochures as she tries to decide about the summer.
Nicholas is his same old self, juggling the karate lessons plus basketball, soccer, French horn, debate club, archeology field trips, poetry-writing classes and his volunteer work. He just got the Yondan belt, which usually requires nine years of training after the Shodan belt, but prodigies can do it faster, especially if (not that I really believe this!) they are reincarnated deities.
Modeling for Gap cuts into Nick’s schoolwork, but how could I deprive others of the chance to see him? His summer with Outward Bound in the Andes was a big thrill, especially when all the expert guides became disoriented and he had to lead the party out. But you probably read about that in the newspapers.
What can I say regarding our Emily? She’s just been reclassified as EVVSUG&T — “Extremely Very Very Super Ultra Gifted and Talented.” The preschool retained a full-time teacher solely for her, to keep her challenged. Educational institutions are not allowed to discriminate against the gifted anymore, not like when I was young.
Yesterday Rachel sold her first still-life. It was shown at one of the leading galleries without the age of the artist disclosed. The buyers were thrilled when they learned!
Then there was the arrival of our purebred owczarek nizinny puppy. He’s the little furry guy in the enclosed family holiday portrait by Annie Leibovitz. Because our family mission statement lists cultural diversity as a core value, we named him Mandela.
Chad continues to prosper and blossom. He works a few hours a day and spends the rest of the time supervising restoration of the house — National Trust for Historic Preservation rules are quite strict. Corporate denial consulting is a perfect career niche for Chad. Fortune 500 companies call him all the time. There’s a lot to deny, and Chad is good at it.
Me? Oh, I do this and that. I feel myself growing and flowering as a change agent. I yearn to empower the stakeholders. This year I was promoted to COO and invited to the White House twice, but honestly, beading in the evening means just as much to me. I was sorry I had to let Carmen go on the same day I brought home my $14.6 million bonus, but she had broken a Flora Danica platter and I caught her making a personal call.
Chad and I got away for a week for a celebration of my promotion. We rented this quaint five-star villa on the Corsican coast. Just to ourselves — we bought out all 40 rooms so it would be quiet and contemplative and we could ponder rising above materialism.
Our family looks to the New Year for rejuvenation and enrichment. Chad and I will be taking the children to Steamboat Springs over spring break, then in June I take the girls to Paris, Rome and Seville while Chad and Nicholas accompany Richard Gere to Tibet.
Then the kids are off to camps in Maine, and before we know it, we will be packing two cars to drive Rachel’s things to college. And of course I don’t count Davos or Sundance or all the routine excursions.
I hope your year has been as interesting as ours.
Love,
Jennifer, Chad, Rachel, Nicholas & Emily(The above is inspired by a satirical Christmas letter I did for The New Republic a decade ago. I figure it’s OK to recycle a joke once every 10 years.)
QotD: The Royal Victimhood Olympics
It’s certainly been a bumpy old ride of a year, making Her Majesty’s annus horribilis look like a teddy bears’ picnic. But though I’m not a royalist, I’m counting on this most stiff-upper-lipped of ladies not to mention those two little words which were inescapable this year: “mental health”, or the Mental Elf, as I’ve come to think of him.
Remember our old friends Elf and Safety? They’ve been replaced by Mental Elf, and he’s even more annoying, a nasty little imp intent on making every single member of this once-stoic island race confess to hidden sorrows.
The Royal Victimhood Olympics are now an open-season event, like tennis. The Prince of Wails had a head start, moaning about being sent to boarding school by his “distant” mother who – shame on her! – was a young woman doing her very best in a role she had neither wanted nor expected. Meghan Markle famously fled Frogmore Cottage with the Mental Elf in hot pursuit. Prince William, who appeared to be the sensible one, revealed this week he felt as if “the whole world was dying” after he helped save the life of a child while working as a helicopter pilot for the air-ambulance service.
And of course Sarah Ferguson has referred to herself as “the most persecuted woman in the history of the royal family”. All we need now is for Duchess Kate to weigh in with a detailed account of, say, her PMS problems and we’ve collected the full set of Unhappy Royal Families!
Yes, I know Princess Diana started it. But neurosis was just a part of her emotional repertoire. She realised that one of the best guarantees of good mental health is helping others rather than contemplating one’s navel. Or in the case of the wretched Fergie, one’s novel. The writing of Her Heart for a Compass was reportedly “therapeutic” and boosted her “self-esteem”. Is the world big enough for a more self-loving Fergie?
Julie Burchill, “The Queen is the last sane royal standing”, Spiked, 2021-12-09.
December 20, 2021
QotD: Turkeys
It did not go well.
As it turns out, turkeys are dumb. And not just a little dumb, no. Turkeys are catastrophically dumb. As in keeping them alive is a monumental challenge, kind of dumb. Turkeys are an abomination of creation: they will make you doubt the plausibility of natural selection. Nothing so dumb should be permitted to survive, except to sustain something more useful.
My husband recalls his peak moment as an amateur turkey farmer; he watched as one of his birds drowned itself in its own water dish. He swears that this is true. He watched the bird stretch down to take a drink, get stuck under the water, and die.
All in all, my husband lost nine of his 20 turkeys.
You should never feel guilty about an animal that is too dumb to pull its own head out of a shallow water dish. Poultry is God’s tofu.
Jen Gerson, “Done with the political turkeys after the holidays”, CBC News, 2021-01-04.
