Futility Closet - 103-Legislating Pi

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 9,000 quirky curiosities from singing sand dunes to a xylophone made of ice. This is episode 103. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1897, an eccentric physician submitted a bill to the Indiana legislature claiming to have squared the circle, an impossible feat in mathematics. In today's show, we'll follow the bill's comical journey through the statehouse

Starting point is 00:00:38 as bewildered lawmakers considered how to rule on mathematical abstractions. We'll also marvel at the confusion wrought by turkeys and puzzle over a perplexing baseball game. It is an item of mathematical folklore that in 1897, the Indiana General Assembly passed a bill that set a new value for pi. Pi is just the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. You take any circle and measure the distance around it and divide that by the distance across it, and you get 3.14159, this number we all work with in school. That number is kind of unwieldy, so the story goes

Starting point is 00:01:15 that what the Indiana legislature did was just declare a new value for it. They just said, well, from now on, we'll just say that pi is 3.2 or 4 or something that's easier to work with. That would certainly make a good story, but it's not what happened. What actually happened is even stranger. What happened is that in 1894, an Indiana physician and amateur mathematician named Edward J. Goodwin thought he'd found a correct way of squaring the circle, which is an ancient geometric construction problem where if I give you a circle, you have to produce a square with the same area using only a compass and a straight edge. It had been suspected since ancient times that this is

Starting point is 00:01:49 impossible, as indeed it is, but Goodwin had decided that that's what he had done, and he wanted to sort of trumpet that to everyone who would listen to him, and one way of doing that was to submit it to the state legislature, which makes no sense. Even if he had accomplished this miracle, it doesn't make any sense to give it to a lawmaking body. Instead of getting it, like, published in a journal or something. Right. It doesn't make any sense. In 1897, he proposed a bill to his state representative, a man named Taylor Record, who admitted he didn't understand the math at all. But Goodwin wrote up the bill and gave it to him, and he submitted it to the House of Representatives. Here's the pream action of the legislature in 1897.

Starting point is 00:02:35 Which is confusingly written, but it seems to say that what he wanted to do, he made this mathematical breakthrough and he was offering it to the schools of Indiana for free if the legislature passed this bill in the 1897 session. That itself doesn't make any sense either. If you want to give it to the schools, then just give it to them. Just license it to the schools and say, you have my permission to use this for free. It doesn't make any sense to give it to a state legislature to pass it as a bill. Yeah, it's kind of confusing because, I mean, legislatures are supposed to pass like laws, right? I mean, there's supposed to be lawmaking. In sort of explaining why this was such a breakthrough or why it had been recognized by the mathematical establishment, Goodwin noted that it had already been accepted as a contribution to science by the American Mathematical Monthly, which is today a respected journal that's published

Starting point is 00:03:20 by the Mathematical Association of America. So that sounds impressive, but it turns out the association has actually only existed. It was founded in 1915 of America, so that sounds impressive, but it turns out the association has actually only existed, it was founded in 1915, and this was before that. Here it was just sort of a fledgling mathematical journal. This was only its seventh issue. It is true that he did get this proof published, claiming that he'd squared the circle,

Starting point is 00:03:38 but it was published only in the queries and information section, and it was under a disclaimer that said published by request of the author. So they weren't endorsing it in any way, he asked them to publish it and they section, and it was under a disclaimer that said published by request of the author. So they weren't endorsing it in any way. They just, he asked them to publish it and they did, but he was claiming that as a feather in his mathematical cap. Anyway, it went into, Record introduced it into the legislature. On January 18th, it was introduced to the State House of Representatives, where immediately its mathematical content started confusing people. There are two ways of looking at this whole story. If you just look at the records of the legislature, it all looks very officious and formal. It just says it was referred to such and such a committee and they gave back this response.

Starting point is 00:04:13 So there's no hint that anyone thinks there's anything amiss with the state representatives considering an item of mathematical proof. But a better way to look at it is to look at the newspaper accounts at the time, which were written by reporters who were in the chamber and could sort of get a subjective sense of how the lawmakers were taking all this. Handling it, yeah. One paper that did a very good job of this was actually a German language paper in Indianapolis. Here's one thing they wrote. Gast of Bloomington, a Democrat, moved amid great laughter that the bill be referred to the Finance Committee as it had made itself responsible for the solving of great problems and since it has the time to do the job. So you can see right away there, they understand that this is ridiculous, that they're even being asked to consider this, and that they have no place in considering a

Starting point is 00:04:53 mathematical theorem. It's just a better way of understanding what was actually happening there. They weren't as kind of oblivious as it's sometimes made out to be. Here's another excerpt from the Indianapolis Sun. The complexity of the terminology set the lawmakers to laughing, and Speaker Pettit carried the joke a little farther by referring the bill to the Committee on Swamplands, which he did. Officially, it's called the Committee on Canals, but it's sort of the same thing. The Committee on Swamplands recommended that it be referred to the Committee on Education, which recommended that the bill pass. There are two riddles in this whole odyssey that I just don't think anyone has the answer to. One is why the Committee on Education recommended this bill pass. No one seems to know why. The

Starting point is 00:05:33 House's own records are confused on this point. On January 20th, the Indianapolis Sentinel reported that the state superintendent of public instruction believed that Goodwin actually had squared the circle and that he wanted the bill passed. I cannot believe that that's true, but there's a limited amount of information that's come down to us. In any case, the chairman of that committee recommended to the House that the bill pass, and in fact it did pass unanimously on a vote of 67 to 0 on February 6th, whereupon it passed to the Senate. Fortunately for everyone here, and entirely by coincidence, just as the House was ending its discussion on the bill, mathematician from purdue university named c.a waldo arrived in indianapolis for a completely unrelated reason he was there to get the annual appropriation for the indiana

Starting point is 00:06:13 academy of science but he knew math and he was in the building and he overheard that they were voting on this mathematical bill and tried to put the brakes on it was too late for him to stop it in the house but he started talking to senators to try to stop it in the Senate. He wrote afterward, a member showed the writer a copy of the bill just passed and asked him if he would like an introduction to the learned doctor, its author. He declined the courtesy with thanks, remarking that he was acquainted with as many crazy people as he cared to know. And about here, so now it's out of the House and headed for the Senate. and because it's being reported by all the reporters who normally cover the legislature, it's getting about in the world, and other people, particularly newspapers in Indianapolis, Chicago, and later New York, started to make fun of the Indiana legislature for even having anything to do with this at all. After it passed the House, the Indianapolis Journal said, this is the strangest bill that has ever passed an Indiana assembly.

Starting point is 00:07:02 Anyway, it had gotten into the Senate at this point, and they referred it to the Committee on Temperance, which is another puzzle. DePauw University mathematician Will Eddington writes, one wonders whether this was done intentionally, for certainly the bill could have been referred to no committee more appropriately named. And this is the second of the two riddles I mentioned. That committee, the Committee on Temperance in the Senate, recommended that the bill pass. There's no hint as to their thinking. I can't imagine why they thought it ought to or why they thought they were qualified to be the ones to make that decision. But the chairman recommended to the Senate that the said bill do pass. So it was on the point of passing the Senate when that afternoon, which is now February 12th,

Starting point is 00:07:38 aware of the growing ridicule in newspaper editorials around the country and perhaps coached by this Purdue University mathematician, C.A. Waldo, the Senate began to balk, finally, at passing the bill. Two newspaper accounts here. The Indianapolis Journal on February 13th wrote, Senator Drummond did not want the rule suspended until he had some information as to the purpose of the bill. It may be I am densely ignorant on this question of mathematics, he said. Consent, consent, said Senator Ellison. There was loud laughter at this sally. Although the bill was not acted on favorably, no one who spoke against it intimated that there was anything wrong with the theories it advances. All of the senators who spoke on the bill admitted that they were ignorant of the merits of the proposition. It was simply regarded as not being

Starting point is 00:08:15 a subject for legislation, which is perfectly sensible. So the senators did understand that this was not something that should have been under their consideration. This is from the Indianapolis News of the same day. The bill was brought up and made fun of. The senators made bad puns about it, ridiculed it, and laughed over it. The fun lasted half an hour. Senator Hubble said that it was not meet for the Senate, which was costing the state $250 a day, to waste its time in such frivolity. He said that in reading the leading newspapers of Chicago in the East, he found that the Indiana state legislature had laid itself open to ridicule by the action already taken on the bill. He thought consideration of such a proposition was not dignified or worthy of the Senate.

Starting point is 00:08:51 He moved the indefinite postponement of the bill and the motion carried. And that's where it stands today. The bill wasn't defeated. It was just suspended. And I don't know how the rules work in Indiana, but presumably if they want to, someday they can take it up again. Somebody could revive it. I wonder if there was a certain amount of, because nobody really understood the math behind it, you don't want to come down against it completely, because maybe it is this brilliant mathematical breakthrough,

Starting point is 00:09:13 and you'll look stupid for not supporting it. The one question I had is whether Goodwin was present in the house at the time. I tend to think he was, because he had so much invested in this. The DePaul University mathematician Underwood Dudley, who I mentioned before, has said that he's written a whole book on mathematical cranks. And one of the characteristics he says they have in common is zeal, which makes them hard to talk to. If I come to you and say that I think the sky is green and you say, I don't think that's right, I'll say, I talked to Sharon Ross and she agreed with everything I told her. They're so in love with the idea of their own glory that it's hard to talk them down.

Starting point is 00:09:46 And the only way to do it is to be outright rude to them and say, look, you're flat wrong about this. Please drop it. And no one wants to be that uncivil. So I think particularly if Goodwin was present in the chambers as they were debating these things, no one wanted to come out and say, look, this is ridiculous that we're even considering this. I don't know. That's possible. Yeah, that's a possibility too. Anyway, finally it didn't pass.

Starting point is 00:10:01 It was just suspended. A bit of background on Goodwin, the man who'd introduced all this. Here's a description from the Indianapolis Sun, a description of Goodwin as a person. Dr. Goodwin is a tall, angular man and is stoop-shouldered. His hair is iron-gray and his mustache likewise. He wears a negligee shirt without necktie and buttons a long Prince Albert close up to his neck. He is nervous. While slipping off his tongue's end, an avalanche of mathematical terms and explanation of his discovery,

Starting point is 00:10:24 service while slipping off his tongues and an avalanche of mathematical terms and explanation of his discovery his left eye twitches both eyes flash and his features are electrified with genius or something akin to it he was 68 years old apparently when the bill was considered uh he lived in a little town called solitude indiana which i thought was poetic uh he'd graduated from a medical college in philadelphia and then practiced medicine for 42 years and then quit the practice entirely apparently under something of a cloud although it's hard to get information about that, and devoted the rest of his life to mathematical discoveries. It's curiously hard to understand. He was not very forthcoming when asked why he switched to math from medicine. When the Indianapolis son asked him what set him to studying mathematics, he repeatedly dodged the question and said,

Starting point is 00:11:01 if I were to say that the discoveries are revelations to me, they wouldn't believe it. This is an age of unbelief. Do you know it? The Valparaiso University mathematician Arthur Hallerberg found a monograph by Goodwin that says, during the first week of March 1888, the author was supernaturally taught the exact measure of the circle, just as he'd been taught three years before,

Starting point is 00:11:20 the scheme of universal creation. These revelations were due in fulfillment of scriptural statements and promises. All knowledge is revealed directly or indirectly, and the truths hereby presented are direct revelations and are due in confirmation of scriptural promises. To make of that what you will, apparently he thought he was divinely inspired. A lot of what he says is just completely incomprehensible. Here's a representative quote from the Indianapolis Sun. If I live 10 years, and I hope I shall, you watch out for Goodwin. My discovery will revolutionize mathematics. The astronomers have all been wrong.

Starting point is 00:11:49 There's about 40 million square miles on the surface of this Earth that isn't here. I don't think even he knew what he meant by that. Watch out for Goodwin if you live 10 years. He didn't appear to understand his mathematics very well, but he was an absolute demon for publicizing. His solution was copyrighted in England as well as the United States. He corresponded with professors at the National Observatory in Washington, D.C., and thought he'd convince them of the truth of his results. He called upon officers of the Smithsonian Institution to award prizes of $10,000 each

Starting point is 00:12:18 that he would supply to any scientist who proved him wrong. I don't think anyone took him up on that, but they certainly could have. And he even attempted to give a lecture demonstration of his work at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, they eventually turned him away and they're the ones who put him on to trying to publish in a journal in the first place. I won't even try to get into the math because it's just an unholy mess and it's so inconsistent, it's hard even to try to make sense of it. This ancient task of squaring the circle, there's an important constraint that has to be done using a compass and a straight edge. Nowhere in his writings does he acknowledge that constraint.

Starting point is 00:12:48 He seems not even to be aware that that was part of it. So it's hard even to understand what he thought he was doing. The American Mathematical Monthly never published a criticism of this article, although criticisms did appear elsewhere at the time and certainly have since. Occasionally, a modern mathematician will put on a snorkel

Starting point is 00:13:04 and dive in and try to make sense of what he was writing about, but it's very hard to do. Dudley writes, his writing was so confused and confusing that it is impossible to determine exactly what he thought pi was. Occasionally, he wasn't trying explicitly to find a value for pi, but since he was trying to square the circle, you can go in and try to infer the values of pi that he was working with or implying at least.

Starting point is 00:13:24 And occasionally, people trylying at least. And occasionally people try to do that. The Valparaiso University mathematician Arthur Hallberg found two values for pi in his work, 4 and 3.2. And David Singmaster actually found nine different values for pi attributable to Goodwin, six in the bill itself and three other ones in an earlier article and in contemporary interviews with Goodwin. Singmaster just finally writes in the end, originally my only conclusion was that ignorance is consistently inconsistent. The inconsistency in Goodwin's writing is so great that I wonder if there's really any point other than amusement in trying to analyze it.

Starting point is 00:13:53 But that's how this whole idea got started, that the bill was actually legislating the value of pi, right? That's just an inference. As opposed to squaring the circle. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, and I think more people understand what pi is than in what squaring the circle is. Right.

Starting point is 00:14:13 Stories tend to take on the shape that is most useful to people, whether it's true or not. I've found over the years. But yeah, I think that's where that came from. It does sort of imply a value for pi. Goodwin lived another 15 years, presumably, in heartbreak. I don't know who wrote his June 1902 obituary, but I'll close with this. Someone wrote a very artful obituary that managed to avoid endorsing or condoning anything that he did, but trying to sort of praise him for at least his art or in doing it. It's titled, End of a Man Who Wanted to Benefit the World. Dr. E.J. Goodwin died at his home in Springfield Sunday, aged 77 years. He had been in feeble health for some time, and death came at the end of a long season of illness. Dr. Goodwin was no ordinary man, and those meeting him never failed to be inspired by this fact.

Starting point is 00:14:53 He felt that he had a great invention and wished the world to have the benefit of it. As years went on and he saw the child of his genius still unreceived by the scientific world, he became broken with disappointment, although he never lost hope and trusted that before his end came, he would see the world awaken to the greatness of his plan and taste for a moment the sweetness of success. He was doomed to disappointment, and in the peaceful confines of village life, the tragedy of a fruitless ambition was enacted. I've been saying for a couple of episodes that we'd be doing an update on what people call turkeys. Apparently, there's a lot more to this story than just the part of it that Greg mentioned in episode 99, where he said that in Turkey, the country, the birds are named for the country of India.

Starting point is 00:15:39 I think we got more email and messages from listeners on this topic than any other we've ever covered. Thank you to everyone who wrote in about this to us, and I'm sorry that I can't mention everyone by name, but it seemed that quite a number of people, except for us, knew that turkeys are named for other countries in different languages. What turned out to be so interesting is that they are not all named for the same country or for the same reasons. Nick Erickson sent in a very helpful link to a blog post written by Dan Juraski, a linguistics professor who wrote a book called The Language of Food. Although the birds that we call turkeys are native to North America, Juraski notes that the names for turkeys reference several different places in different languages.

Starting point is 00:16:22 The name in many languages, including French and Dutch, refer to India or specific cities in India. Some languages, like Portuguese, have the bird name for Peru, while other languages reference Ethiopia. And of course, English, as well as a few other languages, use the country of Turkey. Juraski says, were turkeys just named after any random country? It turns out the story of all these names is one of massive, multilingual, mistaken identity between the turkey and another bird, the guinea fowl. And according to Juraski, guinea fowl are birds that are native to sub-Saharan Africa. They are about the size of a large chicken, have bald heads similar to turkeys, and are commonly black with white spots. similar to turkeys, and are commonly black with white spots.

Starting point is 00:17:07 And centuries ago, turkeys were considerably smaller than they are now, and so they were closer in size to guinea fowl. Juraski says that even modern-day guinea fowl handbooks note that the guinea fowl look quite a bit like turkey hens. By about 1500, guinea fowl were being brought to Europe by Turkish traders. The birds were called India or turkey chickens, as a reference for the Turkish traders. The birds were called India or turkey chickens as a reference for the Turkish traders who brought them or the confusion of the name India for some parts of Africa. By the mid-1500s, Portuguese traders were importing both turkeys from the New World

Starting point is 00:17:36 and guinea fowl from West Africa from a region they called Guinea. The Portuguese called the turkeys Peruvian chickens because the entire Spanish empire in South America was called the Vice Royalty of Peru. And incidentally, some of our listeners noted that turkeys are named for Peru and other languages also. The Turkish traders, which brought both kinds of birds to Europe, sometimes both even on the same ship, tended to brand many of their items as being from Calicut, same ship, tended to brand many of their items as being from Calicut, which was a major Indian commercial center, and gave rise to the Dutch word for turkeys, which means hen from Calicut. So they never actually were from Calicut, but they just tended to brand a lot of their items that way, which is kind of a weird thing, but I guess it made sense back then. They're all naming them according to their supposed origin.

Starting point is 00:18:23 They don't just call it like a chicken. You just call it a chicken. You don't say it's a bird from over there. That's true. I think it has to do with being native to an area or not. Like if you've always known chickens, you just call them chickens. But if something suddenly shows up that you've got no name for, you're like, well, it's the Turkish chicken because the Turkish people brought them or something. That makes sense.

Starting point is 00:18:42 So for the next hundred years in Europe, the two birds continued to be confused with each other, even by prominent naturalists of the time and by Shakespeare, who used the word turkey in Henry IV when he actually meant guinea hen. Oops. Yeah, so there's a piece of trivia for you. Juraski notes that some of the names for turkeys that arose a little bit later on,

Starting point is 00:19:00 such as in Russian, Polish, and Turkish, were based on the correct understanding that these birds were coming from the Americas and not Africa, but they were referring to the Americas as the West Indies. So there was like a further layer of confusion there. Yeah. So in a nutshell, basically, there was just a lot of confusion about which birds were which and where they had come from and what to call the places that they had come from. And thus, we end up with a bird that in Hindi, the official language of India, is called Turkey. But in Turkey, it's called India.

Starting point is 00:19:32 An article on this topic in The Atlantic notes that the turkey's scientific name is as much a muddled mess as its common names. The scientific name for the turkey is Meliagris galopevo, which is a mix of Greek and Latin that translates to guinea fowl rooster peacock. The Atlantic article says that, of course, there were many names for the bird in the Americas before the Europeans got here, but those were mostly ignored by the Europeans. And so, for example, the Blackfoot term for the bird literally meant big bird. But the article's author notes it's a bit vague, sure, but it certainly beats guinea fowl, rooster, peacock. For a few other notes on the names for turkeys, Daniel Sturman said,

Starting point is 00:20:16 the Hebrew word for a turkey, Tarnay Gol Hodu, means chicken of India. Hodu means India. But the word Hodu can also mean thank. So people often erroneously assume that Hebrew named its bird the chicken of thanks because it's what Americans eat at Thanksgiving. But Israel doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving. And the Hebrew word for a turkey, in fact, comes from the Yiddish word for turkey, indik, which means India. Ian Massey said that he was telling an Albanian co-worker about the words for turkeys, and the co-worker said the Albanian name for turkeys is French for chicken from the sea.

Starting point is 00:20:51 So the Albanian name is actually a pretty correct term, since in Europe, all turkeys would have come by way of ship. Oh, yeah. That one didn't reference a specific country, just any chicken from the sea. Denise Montagna wrote and said, Let me say that I really enjoy every time you suggest something to research on, as it sounds like a little challenge. And this time it has been an opportunity for me to explore my local library,

Starting point is 00:21:16 something I've been wanting to do for months since I moved to a new city. And Denise did an impressive amount of research for us, Italian research for us on the turkey question, as well as made a valiant effort to find out more about the harp composition that you had also mentioned in episode 99. But one thing that really stood out for me in Denise's email was that turkeys are not alone in their naming confusion. Denise said that the Italian word for maize, grantorka, means Turkish wheat. But the Turkish word for maize, grand torca, means Turkish wheat. But the Turkish word for maize is the Turkish name for Egypt. So Denise says that there is apparently

Starting point is 00:21:50 some debate among scholars as to the origins of these terms. And after researching the turkey names myself, I can imagine similar scenarios playing out for maize. And I think we're just going to have to leave it there for food etymologies. Also in episode 99, I'd raised the question of accidental acrostics,

Starting point is 00:22:08 which are in a book or in any other body of text. If you take the initial letters of successive paragraphs, sometimes just by coincidence that spells out a word. The last time I'm aware of that anyone actually sought these was way back in 1980 when Games Magazine asked its readers to see what they could find. And the winner there, the longest one that anyone sent in, was the eight-letter word synonyms, which appears on page 10 of Elizabeth Graham's 1978 novel Heart of the Eagle. That was 36 years ago then, and I just asked whether anyone either knew about a longer example or was willing to look for one and see what they would come up with. And three people have written

Starting point is 00:22:42 in doing really beautiful work on this, and I'm going to put all of their results in the show notes. There's too much to go through here, but I just want to hit some of the highlights here on the show. The first is Julian Bravo, who looked at, all of them were looking at

Starting point is 00:22:55 Project Gutenberg books, which is the online corpus of 50,000 public domain books. It's just an easy, big, massive text to search through. Julian Bravo looked at 17 of these and found that fully 15 of them had words of four or more characters, again, looking at the initial letters of successive paragraphs. Some examples from those are he found the six-letter word stasis in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the six-letter words cassia, which is the cinnamon spice, and mighty in Frankenstein, and pleasingly, the word bait, B-A-I-T in Moby Dick. I'll put the positions there in the show notes if you want to try to look these up for yourself. Daniel Dunn

Starting point is 00:23:31 wrote a script to look through about 30 books in Project Gutenberg looking for acronyms at both the paragraph level and the word level. In other words, the initial letters of successive words. At the paragraph level, the longest one he found was seven letters, the word semims. A semim is a unit of meaning and language in the complete works of William Shakespeare. I think that was in the sonnets. In Jane Austen's Emma appears the word inhibit, which is seven letters long. Taiwan is in the King James Bible. He also found stasis in Huckleberry Finn. Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason contains the word swifts, which is six letters long, and Anna Karenina has twist at five letters. At the word level, in other words, initial letters are successive words in a text. Two that I particularly liked are the word piranhas in War and Peace. That's eight letters long. Book 15, chapter 1, paragraph

Starting point is 00:24:20 19, the string of text is, put it right, and now he again seemed. If you take the initial letters of those words, you get the word piranhas. And in the King James Bible, he found the word Muhammad, spelled here M-O-H-A-M-A-D. That's seven letters long. That's in Galatians. The string is, mine own hand, as many as desire. And listener Vadas Gintautas said, inspired by your segment on accidental acrostics, I've attempted to systematically search for these in the almost 37,000 English language books in Project Gutenberg. And he sought acrostics in three different ways. One is just seeking the initial letters of each paragraph as I'd asked. He says the longest example he found is in the book English Economic

Starting point is 00:24:57 History by Brown, Taney, and Bland. He says what a great list of author names. The word he found is pontianak. That's nine letters long, which is itself an interesting word. It refers to the vampiric ghost of a woman who died in pregnancy in Indonesian and Malaysian folklore. The threshold seems to be about seven or eight letters. It's very hard to get above that. And this is nine, so that's significant. A few others that I like, these are all eight letters long. The word maintain appears in The Stamps of Canada by Bertram W.H. Poole. Lattices appears in History of the Buccaneers of America by James Burney.

Starting point is 00:25:33 And the word catacomb appears in Cyrano de Bergerac. Vadas also looked for accidental acrostics in the King James Bible, taking the first letter of each verse in sequence. The longest example he found here is the word batons, referring to the Baton province in the Philippines. That's seven letters long. He also found in the Bible the word Satan, which starts at verse 814 in the book of Esther. A few other notable Bible acrostics. These are all five letters long, and again, I'll put the full list in the show notes. Floss appears in the Gospel according to St. Luke.

Starting point is 00:26:03 Santa appears in the first book of the Chronicles. Stote in the book of the prophet Jeremiah, and Igloo in the Proverbs. Finally, Vadas did something I wouldn't have thought to do, which is to look for acrostics in typeset text, meaning if you take the full text of, say, a novel and just put it into a word processor, and then start to narrow the column of text or widen the margins without hyphenation, as you narrow the text, the last word on the first line, for example, eventually will jump down to the first word of the second line. And each time that happened, he would just scan the first column of this narrowing column of text to see if any words appeared. And surprisingly, long ones did.

Starting point is 00:26:38 In Jane Austen's Emma, you eventually get the word brainwash, which is nine letters long. Make of that what you will. A few others that are eight letters long. Scofflaw appears in James Joyce's Ulysses, Plutarch in The Count of Monte Cristo, Stepsons in Plato's Republic, and Athletic in The Time Machine. Again, I'll put all the full results that these three listeners sent in in the show notes. Thanks to all three of them for sending in what they had. If you have any comments about this or about anything else, please write to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com.

Starting point is 00:27:19 It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me an odd-sounding situation, and I have to try to figure out what's going on, asking only yes or no questions. This is from listener Larry Miller, who heard it on the NPR program Car Talk. It was sent in there by a person named Willie Myers. A spectator takes their seat

Starting point is 00:27:37 and begins watching a baseball game already in progress. There's nobody on and two outs. The spectator watches a batter step up to the plate and hits a ground ball towards first base, where the first baseman fields it successfully. However, the batter starts running towards third base instead of first, and the first baseman, instead of stepping on the bag to make the out, fires the ball across the diamond to the third baseman, who steps on third base,

Starting point is 00:27:58 and the umpire signals an out before the batter arrives. The first baseman and the other fielders begin trotting to the dugout. What's going on? Okay. All right. Not sure I completely followed that, but the first thing that struck me is the batter runs to third base rather than first base. Yeah. He hits the ball basically to first, but runs to third, and the first baseman throws the ball to third. Okay. Would you say this is a standard regulation major league baseball game? Yes. You would?

Starting point is 00:28:28 A standard game, like a season game? Yes. Not like some exhibition or they're playing with little leaguers or something? Correct, yes. Okay. When the batter ran to third base, would that have surprised people like it surprised me? I can't answer that. You can't answer whether that would have surprised people.

Starting point is 00:28:51 Now, he was batting the ball from like the typical spot to bat at a ball. Yeah. And then he ran like directly to third rather, like cut across the pitcher's mound or does it matter what route he took to get to third? No, he went directly from, I'm trying to think how to say this. He went directly from the home plate to third base. The spectator saw him running. The spectator saw this.

Starting point is 00:29:17 The spectator took him to be running from first to third. I'm trying to say this. But this wasn't what was actually happening. Was the spectator just completely confused or mistaken? Yes. Oh, oh, oh, oh. I'm trying to give you a subtle hint, and there aren't really subtle hints in this case. Oh, that's a pretty broad hint that I just should have understood that the spectator just didn't understand what he was seeing.

Starting point is 00:29:36 So the spectator misunderstood something that was going on. Yes. So the trick is why? Yes. Did the spectator, it sounds like somehow he was seeing a mirror image of what was happening. But I'm trying to understand why would the spectator have been seeing a mirror image? Did he have some sort of neurological or visual impairment that I should know about? No.

Starting point is 00:29:59 Was he somehow seeing a reflection? Yes. He was seeing the whole game reflected in or on something. Yes. Hmm. Was he sitting in the normal stands? No. Oh, he was watching the game from some unusual location? Yes. Inside the ballpark? No. Oh. Oh. No, you're on the right track. Keep going. Okay, so the spectator, was he in his car? No. He was outside the ballpark? Yes.

Starting point is 00:30:28 Was he watching this on TV? Yes. Was everybody who watched this on TV saw it backwards? No. Oh, oh, oh. Was he somehow involved in the production or televising of the show? No. Oh, okay. He may have been the only person who experienced it this way.

Starting point is 00:30:49 Because something was wrong with his TV? No. No. For where his TV was located? Was he in an interesting location? Was he in the International Space Station? No. No, that would be a very interesting puzzle. I don't know why that would matter, but I'm like, okay.

Starting point is 00:31:07 Was he in an odd location to be watching a game from? No, actually quite a common location. Quite a common location to be watching a game on TV. Yes. And there wasn't something funny with his TV. Correct. He wasn't alone. He was with other people.

Starting point is 00:31:24 But he's still the only one who saw it this way. Yes. Was he wearing some kind of unusual glasses? No. And he didn't have some kind of impairment. Was he upside down? No. No. Was he watching it in a reflection? Yes. You've almost got it. Like he was in a bar and the game was being televised and he was seeing the reflection of it in a window or mirror or something. That's perfect. Is that it? You just walk right into it. That's seriously it? Oh.

Starting point is 00:31:51 The spectator is not watching the baseball game at a stadium but is watching at a sports bar. The seat they select is at the bar where a TV is visible in the mirror behind the bar but they're seeing the game in reverse. Since there's nobody on base, the infielders are evenly distributed around the infield, that is, the first baseman and the third baseman are both standing off the bag. Without knowing instinctively if the batter or pitcher are left or right-handed, or looking closely at the team name on the uniform or the numbers on their back, it is not obvious to the spectator that the image they are looking at is a mirror image. Okay. Thanks very much, Larry, for sending that in.

Starting point is 00:32:20 That totally confused me. You got it, though. I did, eventually. And if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to use, you can send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. That wraps up another episode for us. If you like our podcast and want to help support it so that we can keep on making it, please check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset.

Starting point is 00:32:43 The show is a big commitment of time to research and produce each week. So we're really grateful to everyone who has pitched in to help keep it going. If you're looking for more quirky entertainment, check out our books on Amazon or visit the website at futilitycloset.com where you can sample more than 9,000 extraordinary distractions. At the website, you can see the show notes for the podcast and listen to previous episodes. Just click podcast in the sidebar. If you have any questions or comments about the show, you can reach us by email at podcast at futilitycloset.com.

Starting point is 00:33:15 Our music was written and produced by Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 103-Legislating Pi

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