It describes the ship as “three tenths of a mile long”, and the gas cells as being “more than a hundred feet across”.
That works fine.
My guess is that some idiot changed the text for the American market without doing a proper conversion.
Sorry, I thought there’d be some guest access. I’ll quote as much as I think is allowable:
Charles Dodgson was a seriously good mathematician. One of his fields of interest was what we today call choice theory. In June 1874, he published a paper in which he proposed what he claimed to be the most exact method for expressing an ultimate preference among a multiplicity of alternative choices. It became known among mathematicians as “the Dodgson method”.
Dodgson’s interest in voting systems grew. He later developed other voting methods specifically for parliamentary elections, one of which he called “proportionate representation”.
When the [Autrslian] royal commission on elections reported in 1915, it recommended the adoption of the Dodgson method. (We don’t know whether the royal commissioners were aware that the mathematician who invented it was Lewis Carroll.)
Yup. When I was 13, my grandmother gave me a thick book, a compendium of Carroll/Dodgson’s shorter works (poetry, mathematical essays, etc.). I remember especially a mathematically fairer proposal for tennis tournaments (or any sports tournament, but he specified tennis) than the usual bracket system, in which the best player might not win the big prize.
Okay, thanks. Yeah, he had a great mind.
I can see how the second-best player in a bracket tournament may not finish in second place (losing in the final). Assuming winning is transitive, however, the best player would win the final.
I don’t know the history of this. There have been various such things in tournaments willing to have each participant play several times. Here’s a discussion of it mentioning that Carroll proposed it:
That’s weird. The copy I’m reading uses the metric units I quoted.
I’m reading a Tor paperback published in 1988 (Tor Double #1: A Meeting With Medusa/Green Mars). Is the text you linked to from the original Playboy publication of the story?
I don’t know where it comes from, I just found the text online.
But of course, winning isn’t transitive. A better player can lose to a worse player, in any given game. You can therefore never escape the possibility, in any finite tournament format, that the best player might not win. But you can change the odds of that happening.
That’s part of the reason why many sports have a championship series, instead of a single championship game, especially in sports like baseball where upsets are very common.
I always find it frustrating when watching a tournament like the World Cup when two teams are playing each other in the final round of the group stage, both already guaranteed to make it to the knockout round, and there’s some discussion about whether they should try to lose on purpose, because that will give them a better matchup in the next round. It would be cool if there was a tournament structure which eliminated all such perverse incentives… doesn’t seem impossible.
In the 1994 Caribbean Cup, Grenada played Barbados. Barbados needed to win by two goals to advance to the final, otherwise Grenada would advance. However, there was an unusual rule in place that a golden goal in extra time would count as two goals.
Barbados was leading 2-0 late, and then Grenada scored in the 83rd minute. If the score remained 2-1, Grenada would go to the final. A few minutes later, Barbados scored a deliberate own goal to tie the match, hoping to advance by winning the game in extra time. For the last three minutes, Grenada tried to score in either goal, but couldn’t.
Or so I’ve read. Seems to me that Grenada’s best bet would be to kick the ball to their own keeper, who could then carry the ball into his goal. I don’t know how Barbados would defend against that, but it seems they did. Barbados won 4-2 in extra time.
1994 was after the advent of the backpass rule (where goalkeepers can’t handle a ball deliberately kicked back to them by their own team). Although, come to think of it, it only applies to kicks and not headers or chests, so it would still have been possible, but probably difficult since the opposition would’ve been all over it.
That’s exactly the scenario the 2012 Olympic Badminton scandal was about. There was no ‘cheating’ involved - the players were doing their best to win the tournament, it’s just that the best strategy didn’t necessarily involve winning every match along the way.
“The game is afoot, Watson!” - Sherlock Holmes
I just realised today that “game” does not refer to the game-like contest between Holmes and the baddie-du-jour, but in the sense of prey, target of the hunt.
In the Today I Learned category:
Remember the Smashing Pumpkins video for Tonight, Tonight? The couple that we follow throughout the video are SpongeBob and Karen, Plankton’s computer wife.
Today I also learned that the voice actors of SpongeBob and Karen, Plankton’s computer wife, Tom Kenny and Jill Tally, are IRL married.
Remember this video?
Turns out that’s Maynard James Keenan and Danny Carey, singer and drummer from Tool, singing and drumming. This song came out when I was 12 and it’s all I’ve ever heard by them, so I’m sure it’s obvious to fans of either band, I had no idea. I just found out going down a rabbit hole after watching this youtube video from Drumeo of Mike Portnoy (Dream Theater, not that I would’ve known that on my own) playing a Tool song.
Also, looking at the wiki page for the song, I’m just now learning that one of the pig’s voices was Maynard, but the other two are Pauly Shore and Les Claypool.
That gag in Airplane! – “WZAZ in Chicago, where disco lives forever!”. The radio station is WZAZ, as in Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker, the filmmaking team who wrote and directed the movie.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 1, scene 2:
Bottom: Well, I will undertake it. What beard were I best to play it in?
Quince: Why, what you will.
Bottom: I will discharge it in either your straw-colored beard, your orange-tawny beard, your purple-in-grain beard, or your French crown-colored beard, your perfect yellow.
Nick Bottom is a WEAVER. Of course he has all of his beard options ready to go: he’s already got the yarn, and he’s naturally excited to show off all those quality colors. And of course he particularly wants to include the purple-in-grain, since a royal court performance offers some unparalleled opportunities for product placement.
My sister watched the old The High and the Mighty yesterday, and she was cracking up at how much of it was used in Airplane! She said it was almost enough to be considered a kind of re-make.
It is, of course, based heavily on Zero Hour!.