This is Improbable

by Marc Abrahams

  Deadliness of Monograms

  The great initial discovery – that a man’s monogram could cause his early death – was dismaying. But maybe it was all a mistake. A second look, a very careful look, done recently by two skeptical economists, says it just ain’t so.

  In 1999, the initial blockbuster report, called ‘What’s in a Name: Mortality and the Power of Symbols’, gave certain people the willies. It said: ‘individuals with “positive” initials (e.g., A.C.E., V.I.P.) might live longer than those with “negative” initials (e.g., P.I.G., D.I.E.).’ Three psychologists at the University of California, San Diego, discovered this by poring through death records, gathering, crunching, and pondering numbers. They then published a warning in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research.

  Nicholas Christenfeld, David Phillips, and Laura Glynn were deadly serious about it. ‘Males with positive initials live 4.48 years longer’ than most people, they explained, ‘whereas males with negative initials die 2.80 years younger’. They said the effects were smaller for women, perhaps because so many get a change of name when they marry, thus extending their lease on life. None of the research team, it should be noted, has especially interesting full sets of initials themselves.

  Christenfeld, Phillips, and Glynn explained the mechanism: ‘Parents might fail to notice that the initials they are about to give a child could have negative connotations. This oversight by parents suggests that there may be many offspring who have been inadvertently assigned initials with negative connotations. ... Initials like “A.P.E.” or “B.U.M.” may cause individuals not to think well of themselves, and the bearers of these initials may have to endure teasing and other negative reactions from those around them.’

  Initially, Christenfeld et al. hesitated. ‘Upon preliminary inspection’, they later wrote, ‘the longevity effects appeared too large to be genuine’. But they succumbed, in the end, to the apparently portentous power of their data. (David Phillips, by the way, used some of the same techniques to produce a series of studies in which the data suggested, among other things, that people commonly time their deaths to accord with birthdays or major holidays.)

  Gary Smith, an economics professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California, teamed up with his student Stilian Morrison to give the monogram results a good, hard statistical look-see. They looked, they saw, they shook their heads. Then they published their conclusions in the apparently rival journal Psychosomatic Medicine.

  The Christenfeld study compared the ages of all the people who died in a particular year. But, say Smith and Morrison, if – instead – you look at the lifespans of all the people who were born in a particular year, the pattern doesn’t show up. Also, they say, if you use a more complete list of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ words (including T.I.T., G.A.S., variations of the F-word, to name a few) the effect doesn’t appear.

  If Smith and Morrison are correct in their criticism, the initials big bang theory may have died at the untimely age of six years.

  Christenfeld, Nicholas, David P. Phillips, and Laura M. Glynn (1999). ‘What’s in a Name: Mortality and the Power of Symbols.’ Journal of Psychosomatic Research 47 (3): 241–54.

  Morrison, Stilian, and Gary Smith (2005). ‘Monogrammic Determinism?’ Psychosomatic Medicine 67 (5): 820–24.

  The Economic Art of Suicide

  A study called ‘Artists’ Suicides as a Public Good’ explains how we benefit when a famous artist kills himself. As far as I know, this is the only academic report that credits Kurt Cobain as its major source of information.

  Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of the grunge music group Nirvana, committed suicide in 1994 (though, as is traditional when celebrities do themselves in, some people insist it was murder). Professors Samuel Cameron, Bijou Yang, and David Lester theorized about the economic consequences of Cobain’s death. Cameron is an economics professor at the University of Bradford, in the UK. Yang and Lester are wife and husband, she an economist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, he a psychologist at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.

  By almost any numerical measure, Lester is the world’s preeminent suicide researcher. Since 1966, he has published more than eight hundred academic reports about suicide. His articles tend to be brief; many are one or two pages long. Typically, Lester analyses statistics that are on the public record. In the 2003 study ‘Suicide by Jumping From a Bridge’, for example, he reveals that of the 132 suicides jumping from the Delaware Memorial Bridge from 1952 to 2003, the majority were from Delaware.

  ‘Artists’ Suicides as a Public Good’ is mainly a study in economics, the so-called dismal science, but the paper’s tone is almost cheerful. ‘The perspective on suicide from the discipline of economics’, the report says, ‘has to lead us to the position that suicide may be a good thing.’

  The three professors walk us through the debits and credits of Kurt Cobain’s suicide. Mostly, they see credits: increased sales of his music and associated merchandise; increased ‘iconic value’ of the products his fans had already purchased; and a variety of emotional benefits which could theoretically be given a financial value. The musicians associated with Kurt Cobain, especially his wife, Courtney Love, and her band, Hole, also presumably benefit from an increase in attention and perceived value.

  Lester and his colleagues point out some further, subtle benefits to Kurt Cobain’s suicide. Cobain died at twenty-seven, early in a human lifespan, but perhaps fairly late in a pop singer’s expected career. ‘The potential productivity of his future artistic productivity may be much less than was generated by his suicide’, they write. ‘Indeed, it is possible that future mediocre works might have blighted a legacy, leading to negative reappraisals and possibly lower sales of his peak-period work.’

  Of suicide in general – and specifically of any me-too suicides that Cobain’s death may have inspired – the professors describe what they see as a higher sort of economic benefit to society. There is, they write, a ‘selective elimination of those who are unable to cope adequately with the requirements of the environment in which they are trying to survive’.

  At the end of the study, Lester, Yang, and Cameron mention that they were actually unable to obtain most of the data needed to do their study properly. ‘Thus’, they write in the report’s final sentence, ‘at the present time it has been impossible to conduct a methodologically sound study of this phenomenon.’

  Cameron, Samuel, Bijou Yang, and David Lester (2005). ‘Artists’ Suicides as a Public Good.’ Archives of Suicide Research 9 (4): 389–96.

  Lester, David (2003). ‘Suicide by Jumping From a Bridge.’ Perceptual and Motor Skills 97 (1): 338.

  May We Recommend

  ‘Fatalities Attributed to Entering Manure Waste Pits’

  (published in the US National Institute of Health’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 7 May 1993)

  Gravely Mistaken

  When a stranger says he wants to dig up a corpse that might be buried beneath the pews of your church, should you let him? Would it help if he explains that: (a) he recently dug up a corpse on the other side of an ocean; and (b) he’s not certain who that foreign corpse is, but he thinks it might be a relative of the corpse that might be buried in your church; and (c) he’s doing this to bring attention to a man who played an early role in a small, miserable failure four centuries ago?

  American historian William M. Kelso thinks you should. Kelso’s book Jamestown – The Buried Truth tells how (a) he convinced two British churches to let him poke into their bowels; and (b) he also convinced the Church of England to, for the first time in its history, give permission for such poking; and (c) the digging did not proceed smoothly; and (d) the church corpses turned out to be, probably, not the ones he was looking for.

  Jamestown, Virginia, was Britain’s first real settlement in North America. After a sea voyage filled with flounderings, calamities, and mutinies, the settlers settled in ineptly. Early Jamestown was a catastrophe. Still, in 2007, historians celebrated its four-hundredth
anniversary.

  Five years earlier, Kelso had dug up an old coffin at Jamestown. The skeleton inside, he speculated, just might be Bartholomew Gosnold, an expedition leader who died a few weeks after arriving. Kelso has a theory that, if only Gosnold had lived, the colony might have succeeded. ‘The discovery of his remains’, writes Kelso, ‘might help inspire a more careful reading of the record of initial English colonization.’

  Inspired by this chance to inspire others, Kelso set out to prove that these were Gosnold’s bones. His strategy: compare DNA from this inspirational skeleton with DNA from dead Gosnold relatives, if he could find any. ‘With skillful deduction from evidence found in various wills and church records’, Kelso says, he identified two places he might look. Bartholomew’s sister was, possibly, buried under All Saints Church in Shelly, near Ipswich. Bartholomew’s niece was, possibly, beneath a church in Stowmarket. Kelso describes at length his battle to obtain all the necessary permissions. ‘The international significance of Gosnold won the day’, he writes.

  Then came the digging. Kelso did find skeletons, but they seem not to be Gosnold’s relatives. Of course, Kelso says, he cannot rule out the possibility.

  Kelso’s book is, mostly, a catalogue of the colony’s horrible struggles and difficulties. Its most famous figure, John Smith, was a boastful liar. The colonists, many of them gentlemen ill-prepared to be settlers, achieved failure at almost everything they tried. When the food ran out, they fell to eating ‘dogs, cats, rats and mice’, and apparently, in the case of at least one husband, his pregnant wife.

  And the possibly most important figure, Captain Bartholomew Gosnold, lies buried in mystery, though one cannot with certainty say exactly where.

  Kelso, William M. (2006). Jamestown – The Buried Truth. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

  An Improbable Innovation

  ‘Edged Non-horizontal Burial Containers’

  by Donald E. Scruggs (US Patent no. 8,046,883, granted 2011)

  Scruggs’s previous invention – ‘The Easy Inter Burial Container’ provided, for the first time, ‘a series of burial containers which can be pressed, agitated, screwed and or self bored into a receiving material and provide low cost interment methods’ a/k/a a screw-in coffin. The new container makes further progress towards time and space savings.

  Figure: ‘A tractor backhoe using a square section clamping gripper driver to hold, revolve and press a casket into a pre-bored or augered hole

  He Ate the Silverware

  A study called ‘Account of a Man Who Lived Ten Years After Having Swallowed a Number of Clasp-Knives, with a Description of the Appearances of the Body after Death’, published in 1823, has an accurate title. But in a sense, it is misnamed. The author could, with just as much accuracy, have chosen to call it ‘Account of a Man Who Died Ten Years After Having Swallowed a Number of Clasp-Knives’.

  The author, Alex. Marcet, MD, FRS, etc., was a London physician. This monograph is his most enduring legacy to scholars, doctors, and perhaps also to pocket-knife manufacturers. Marcet called it ‘a most striking illustration of the self-preserving powers of the stomach and intestines’.

  The hero – or at least the central figure – of the story is John Cummings, an American sailor who died in 1809 in Guy’s Hospital under the care of Marcet’s colleague Dr Curry. Marcet wrote about what had happened. He based his account partly on accounts by Curry, and partly on ‘a narrative, written with great distinctness and simplicity, by the patient himself’ that was ‘found in the patient’s pocket after his decease’.

  One day, on shore leave in France with some buddies, Cummings saw an entertainer pretend to swallow clasp knives. Later, ‘after drinking freely’, Cummings ‘boasted that he could swallow knives as well as the Frenchman’. With goading from his companions, Cummings swallowed his own pocket knife. After further encouragement, he ate three more.

  Three of the knives emerged fairly soon from his digestive system. The fourth did not.

  Six years later, at the behest of crowds of revellers, Cummings swallowed fourteen clasp knives in Boston, Massachusetts. In subsequent weeks, Cummings was, as he himself put it, ‘safely delivered of his cargo’.

  The basic pattern repeated many times. Knives entered the system. Some left. Some stayed.

  Time, tides, and fair winds later brought Cummings to England. Several times he was admitted for treatment at Guy’s Hospital. In 1808 he ‘became a patient of Dr Curry, under whose care he remained, gradually and miserably sinking under his sufferings, till March 1809, when he died, in a state of extreme emaciation’.

  Marcet’s report includes a handsome drawing that shows thirty-eight objects, some clearly identifiable as knife parts, retrieved during an autopsy of the late Mr Cummings.

  The Cummings cutlery collection, notable at the time, now seems almost paltry when compared with achievements in later centuries. Most impressive, perhaps, is the collection of seventy-eight forks and spoons (but no knives) removed from the innards of someone who also swallowed salt-and-pepper-shaker tops and more than a thousand additional items. These and other rare collectibles are on display at the Glore Psychiatric Museum in St Joseph, Missouri. They are a silver-plated example of the excesses of consumer mentality.

  I should thank Dan Meyer, president of the Sword Swallowers Association International and Ig Nobel Prize-winning co-author of the BMJ study ‘Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects’, for demonstrating some of the fine points of this research.

  Marcet, Alex. (1823). ‘Account of a Man Who Lived Ten Years After Having Swallowed a Number of Clasp-Knives, with a Description of the Appearances of the Body after Death.’ Medico-Chirurgical Transactions 12 (1): 52–63.

  Witcombe, Brian, and Dan Meyer (2006). ‘Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects.’ BMJ 333: 1285–87.

  The eponymous number of clasp knives

  ‌Ten

  ‌‌Just Add. What, Er?

  In Brief

  ‘A Cute Characterization of Acute Triangles’

  by H. J. Seiffert (published in the American Mathematical Monthly, 2000)

  Some of what’s in this chapter: Dry, laundry, dry • The rise and fall of hairdresser-mathematicians • Ham sandwiches in the minds of mathematicians • How to pour another cup of coffee • Lead versus feathers • Statistical faces • Beautiful maths in the mouth • Cheddar cheese, mechanically • A tittle obliquity measurer • The lazy bureacrat problem • Promoting people, randomly

  On the Drying of Laundry

  ‘It is striking that the drying process familiar to most people, namely, that of drying laundry hung from a clothesline, does not seem to have been investigated in a quantitative, scientific manner.’

  With those words, and many more, Eric B. Hansen introduced a generation to the subtle mathematical pleasures of damp cloth. Hansen’s treatise ‘On Drying of Laundry’ holds a treasured place in the collections and hearts of countless mathematicians, engineers, and persons of the cloth. Countless, certainly, for there is no reliable way to count, even very roughly, how many individuals own copies (or copies of copies) of the report, and how many have read borrowed copies, and how many others have learned its contents by word-of-mouth.

  The ten-page paper presumably delighted the readers of the SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics when it appeared in the October 1992 issue. But to some of them, it must have been a matter of anticipation being satisfied. Eric Hansen had discussed the drying of laundry a full two years earlier, in Montreal, at the International Conference on Free Boundary Problems. So far as I have determined, that was the first time that drying laundry had been aired in public, at least in a mathematically correct manner.

  Hansen was based at the Technical University of Denmark, and his work must have been the talk of the event, despite the inclusion there of other, even more dry, presentations. That was the year of Klarbring, Mikelic, and Shillor’s ‘On the Rigid Punch with Friction’, and M. Chipot’s ‘New Remarks on the Dam Problem’. (Chipot gave utt
erance in a plenary session. You can learn details by reading a copy of the Proceedings of the Montreal Meeting on Free Boundary Problems.)

  Drying laundry is a complex and subtle phenomenon. Hansen did a laudable job of keeping it clear and relatively simple. Equations are of course clearer and more concise than prose, and Hansen managed to transform what would have been a huge amount of dense prose, wringing it down into twenty-one crisp, clean equations.

  Skeptics may try to write this off as a ‘mere’ theoretical exercise, but they would be wrong. Hansen went way beyond theory. He performed an experiment with a wet T-shirt. He reports that the results agree well with his theoretical predictions.

  The examination and analysis of wet T-shirts is something that many non-scientists believe they understand, at least on a practical level. But Eric Hansen’s delightful paper suggests that when a scientist looks at a wet T-shirt, he deeply appreciates it.

  Hansen, Erik B. (1992). ‘On Drying of Laundry.’ SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics 52 (5): 1360–69.

  Chipot, M. (1993). ‘New Remarks on the Dam Problem.’ In Chadam, John M., and Henning Rasmussen, eds. Emerging Applications in Free Boundary Problems: Proceedings of the International Colloquium ‘Free Boundary Problems: Theory and Applications.’ Pitman Research Notes in Mathematics Series 280. Harlow, UK: Longman Scientific and Technical: 2–12.

  Klarbring, A., A. Mikelic, and M. Shillor (1993). ‘On the Rigid Punch with Friction.’ In Chadam, John M., and Henning Rasmussen, eds. Emerging Applications in Free Boundary Problems: Proceedings of the International Colloquium ‘Free Boundary Problems: Theory and Applications.’ Pitman Research Notes in Mathematics Series 280. Harlow, UK: Longman Scientific and Technical: 35–40.