Just a few.
• Brainteaser solutions. The June brainteaser was too easy to be worth a full solution page; and in any case, Twitter users could easily find it. Flipping the bottom-most-but-one pixel of the rightmost ”1” turns the right-hand side of the equality into ”7!” That’s factorial seven, which is 5040; and that is indeed equal to (71+1) times (71-1).
For the really difficult March brainteaser that gave me so much trouble, we now have a neat proof using a couple of standard (well, at the math-undergraduate level) inequalities. See the last effort here.
• Race-targeting bioweapons in sci-fi. In my July 21st podcast I observed that Irwin Shaw’s 1967 story The Mannichon Solution was
to the best of my knowledge ... the first appearance in fiction of a bioweapon that targeted specific races. I was reading sci-fi and imaginative fiction all through my teens and early twenties: I can’t recall another example.
My reading didn’t go far enough back into sci-fi history. A reader has alerted me to Heinlein’s novel Sixth Column, published in 1941 as a serial in Astounding, then in 1949 as a hardback novel. Wikipedia gives a good account of the plot. (This was a race-targeting death ray, not germ warfare, but it allowed Americans to fire at the occupying ”Pan-Asians” without worrying about friendly fire.)
I could just as well have said that my reading didn’t go deep enough into the Heinlein oeuvre. But then, whose does? ”The Robert A. Heinlein bibliography includes 32 novels, 59 short stories and 16 collections published during his life.”
• Bioweapons in general. Other readers drew my attention to pre-modern biological warfare.
Medieval—perhaps also ancient—armies, when besieging a city, thought it fair game to catapult diseased corpses in over the walls. One such episode may have triggered the Black Death in Europe.
There are stories from our own colonial times of smallpox-contaminated blankets being given to hostile Indian tribes with deliberate intent to spread disease among them.
(I dimly recall reading somewhere that Imperial China tried something similar with the Mongolians or Central Asians they were always at odds with on their own frontier, but I can’t now find a reference. If Imperial China was doing it, I’ll bet Imperial Russia was too.)
Sure, biowarfare goes way back. And yes, it was targeted at your enemy, who was frequently of a different race or ethny. However, the practitioners always understood that the pathogens involved were universally lethal. When handling the infected blankets (or whatever) they took care to protect themselves from infection.
With the ideal Mannichon Solution you don’t need to bother with such precautions. Your weapon is lethal only to the enemy. That’s probably where bioweapons research is headed.
• The perils of decline. My June Diary had a segment with this title in which I asserted that: ”The golden rule of hill walking is: Going up is hard but safe, going down is easy but dangerous.”
A friend emailed in to tell me that: ”Our hiking guide says one of their sayings is ’Uphill trains, downhill maims.’”
Yep. (That guide also agrees precisely with my estimate that ninety percent of hiking injuries are acquired when going downhill.)
• New York City’s finances. In my July 21st podcast I passed some brief comments about the cost to New York City of taking in tens of thousands of illegal aliens.
A listener:
Dear Derb:
I was surprised that you didn’t bring up the $1.8 billion award to blacks and hispanics who failed the examination to become school teachers in NYC ... because of racial discrimination, of course.
In addition to which, they’ll be getting school teacher pensions after never having worked a day. It was covered in the NY Post early in the week. Maybe you missed it?
No, I didn’t miss it; and yes, I should have passed comment on the payout. It is of course outrageous. These are the costs of race denialism.
