I made some science tonight

I just finished this survey:

MIT offers five buttons for those completing the survey. I chose this one in homage to an unjustly maligned book.

Take the MIT survey and make some science!

A partial solution!

After more than a month, I finally have PART of the solution to the Destinations contest!

In a personal communication to me, Ron Lipman of Louisville correctly named Lewis Carroll as the author of the mystery poem containing an allusion to the complex number

(-7/2) + (i(sqrt(445/3))/2)

Mr. Lipman put the available clues together -- a British author who flourished between 1850 and 1900, who wrote poetry, and who (from the nature of the puzzle) must have had some interest in mathematics -- to arrive at the author's identity.

THE CONTEST REMAINS OPEN, however, since no one has yet identified the poem or derived the number from its text.

Here are the clues that remain relevant in the light of Carroll's identification:

(1) The poem appears in the standard editions of Carroll's complete works. (Note that editions of Carroll's complete works exclude the strictly mathematical works that he wrote under his real name, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.)

(2) The poem is untitled (and, so far as is known, was never titled).

(3) The poem was written between 1850 and 1898 (the date of Carroll's death; his literary career began in 1845).

(4) The principal subject of the poem is not mathematics.

I will add another clue:

(5) The only mathematics needed to extract the number from the text is that taught in first-year algebra.

As before, to win the $20 Destinations Booksellers gift card, a solver must give the first line of the correct Carroll poem and explain how the number is derived from the text of the poem.

Again, the derivation is fair. No tricks are involved -- you don't have to count letters or know how long Alice Liddell's hair was, or anything at all beyond the actual text of the poem and first-year algebra.

However, I will now accept solutions e-mailed to me at asilofreak[n-o-s-p-a-m]@yahoo.com (delete the brackets and everything between them) or posted as a comment to this post.

The new clues

More than a month has passed, and no one has won the $20 Destinations Booksellers gift card yet.

Therefore, first of all, Destinations owners Randy and Ann Smith have posted an announcement of the contest on Destinations' own blog ; and second, I am posting two new clues.

Once again, the question is:

What is the literary significance of the complex number (-7/2) + (i(sqrt(445/3))/2)?

This number is alluded to in a work by a major literary figure. The winning solution must: (1) indicate the author; (2) give the opening line of the work; and (3) show how the number is derived from the text of the work. (It is not written out explicitly, but is derivable from the text in a straightforward way.)

For nonmathematicians, a "complex number" is the sum of a "real number," a more or less ordinary number like 0 or 32 or the square root of 2, and an "imaginary number," which is a multiple of the square root of -1, denoted by the symbol i. The abbreviation sqrt stands for "square root."

I have given the following six clues:

(1) The work is in English.
(2) The work appears in the standard editions of the author's complete works.
(3) The author is primarily known as an author (rather than, say, a scientist).
(4) The work is not a work of science fiction.
(5) The work was written and published between 1850 and 1900.
(6) The work is an untitled poem.

Now for the seventh and eighth clues:

(7) The author is British.
(8) The principal subject of the poem is not mathematics.

I am also clarifying the fifth clue:

(5') While most of the author's works have known dates, the poem in question is one of the few whose date is unknown (though certainly between 1850 and 1900), at least according to the editions I have consulted.

Good luck and happy solving! Please post your solution, or any queries, as a comment to this post.

Report from Deposition Nation

I've just completed four years of editing legal depositions, and as each day passes I become more and more certain that Depo Nation has an oozing watch on its flag and Salvador Dali's birthday as its national holiday. It's worth a daily 50-mile round trip just to see what new manifestation of the surreal will display itself. Every one of the gems below crossed my desk during May or June of 2005.

Let's start with the attorneys, since depositions start with them. They're well-educated men and women, but once in a while they stray beyond the bounds of their expertise, Daubert be damned. Here's a lawyer who thinks he's an etymologist:

Q. And what is necrotic tissue?
A. It is tissue that no longer has circulation in it.
Q. Is it dead?
A. Yes.
Q. Hence the phrase "necro" --
A. Don't know.
Q. -- from the Latin. Okay. Before graduating from [Catholic high school], did you take Latin?
A. I did.
Q. Okay.
A. 15 years ago.

Fifteen years, fifteen minutes, fifteen centuries; the witness was never going to learn Greek roots in Latin class.

Then there are the amateur historians. The witness is a doctor who has just testified that he believes the plaintiff's carpal-tunnel syndrome to have been caused by overuse of vibratory tools, thereby provoking this lawyerly foray into the history of technology:

Q. So, [plaintiff]'s condition, he could not have possibly possessed had he lived before the Industrial Revolution, when they invented machines?

So it wasn't just the Great Pyramid that was put up by aliens, but the Parthenon, the Pantheon, Notre-Dame, St. Peter's, and Independence Hall, too. (And, for that matter, maybe there wasn't any carpal-tunnel syndrome before the Industrial Revolution. I've never seen any evidence that there was.)

Then there are the transcribers: a dedicated, overworked, sometimes insufficiently appreciated group. Like all other mortals, they err. Some of the errors are jewels, though, and I suspect that our more playful transcribers let a few slip just to tease me. Who could resist this tiny mistake, with its suggestion of an hitherto unsuspected cause of mad-cow disease? The witness is describing a feeding trough that for some reason had to be placed in the entrance to a silo, necessitating a risky climb for the farmhands:

Q. And if you didn't unwire it, how did you get into the silo?
A. Sometimes someone would climb up over it and -- when you get up on top of the chute there, the stationery chute. . .

Not just contented cows. . .educated cows. Might one have received a Dear John letter?

Then, you might want to avoid a certain hospital in North Carolina whose employees, according to the testimony of a doctor who once worked there (with just the slightest tweak by a transcriber), seem to be extraordinarily mutinous:

A. The best recollection I have is that you'd meet periodically to see what -- what infections were occurring within the -- within the hospital -- if you had an outbreak of staff or something and what was being done to solve it.

Higher pay and shorter hours might help. Really, though, management should never have let disaffection come to this pass. They should have done something substantial when there was only a staff infection, which is something like blue flu.

If you must go to North Carolina, it's probably best to plan your itinerary so as to avoid Danville, Kentucky, which apparently has swollen into a megalopolis while we all slept. The witness is an employee of a Danville nursing home:

Q. How many nursing homes does Danville have?
A. Two; us and [the other home].
Q. How far is it from [the witness' place of employment] to [the other home]?
A. In between -- about an hour and a half.

You can cross Chicago in an hour and an half. I've done it. The witness actually said "about a mile and a half," but the transcriber, new to this area, couldn't penetrate the Eastern Kentucky accent.

And what about the editors? What can I, an editor, say that wasn't said better two millennia ago? Read Matthew 7:3-5.

We have national champions!

While that other bee was winding down in Washington, two New Albanians won orthographical laurels in New York City! Randy Smith of Destinations Booksellers and his brother Larry teamed up to win the co-championship of the annual BookSense.com/American Heritage Dictionaries Spelling Bee, held in conjunction with the American Booksellers Association's BookExpo America on Saturday, June 4. They shared the title with a team from Chicago.

Hostess for the event was Myla Goldberg, author of Bee Season.

Here's the story.

The Smiths are now joint owners of Spellbound. They'll love it.

Congratulations!

The contest is still open

I have still received no solutions to the $20 question:

What is the literary significance of the complex number (-7/2) + (i(sqrt(445/3))/2)?

As I hope everyone recalls, this number is alluded to in a work by a major literary figure. The prize is a $20 gift card from Destinations Booksellers in New Albany. To claim this prize, you need to post the solution as a comment to this post.

The correct solution must: (1) indicate the author; (2) give the first line of the work; and (3) show how the number is alluded to in the text of the work.

So far, I have given five clues:

(1) The work is in English.
(2) The work appears in the standard editions of the author's complete works.
(3) The author is primarily famous as an author (rather than a scientist or the like).
(4) The work is not a work of science fiction.
(5) The work was written and published between 1850 and 1900.

I will add a sixth clue:

(6) The work is an untitled poem. (Please note that I have revised Requirement 2 for the solution accordingly and am no longer asking for the "title or first line.")

Good luck!

No joake

This is a picture of John Minnich of Roanoke, Virginia, as he was competing in -- yes -- the National Spelling Bee.

I owe this to the Argus eye of Cody Boisclair, a Georgian who placed fourth in the '97 NSB and who organized the Bee community on LiveJournal.

Mr. Boisclair also saved this screenshot in which someone posted a picture of champion Anurag Kashyap on the NSB Web site -- with his name misspelled.

Thanks, Cody!

The plan is fulfilled!

He Who created us that we might spell must surely be pleased tonight. Not only the 51 on stage in Washington were spelling, but also myriads in the television audience and even on the Web.

Today's segment of the competition was of nearly epic length, with a total of 192 words extending over 15 rounds and 5 hours 10 minutes. Thirteen of the 25 "championship" words were called into service -- had there been 12 more, co-champions would have been declared for the first time since 1962.

In the end, Fort Worth's Samir Patel fell foul of "Roscian" and lost to San Diego's Anurag Kashyap, who spelled "appoggiatura" for the victory.

I "participated" in this year's competition in an unusual way -- for me, at least. I recently found and joined an NSB community on LiveJournal, most of whose members are ex-NSBers. One of its members invited me to take part in The Apiary, an IM chat taking place in conjunction with the ESPN broadcast. I can't see my TV while I'm on the computer, but I turned it up loud, videotaped the broadcast, and happily IMed the other Apiarians as we tried (generally pretty successfully) to spell the increasingly recondite words. The others were all much younger than I, and several of them knew some of this year's contestants personally. They also had an extensive knowledge of what words had come up in which earlier bees.

How did I do? Reasonably well. I spelled 174 words correctly and missed 18. In recent years, it seems that the "championship" words have been easier than their immediate predecessors, and this was true again, at least for me, since I got all 13 of them. In contrast, I missed 5 of the 16 words in Round 9. "Synechthran"? Not even recalling the Echthroi in Madeleine L'Engle's A Swiftly Tilting Planet helped me with that "-an." I spelled it "synechthron."

But we Egglestonians are not called on to spell words always without error. There could be no bees if we did. We are called upon simply to spell as best we can. All 273 contestants fulfilled their commission worthily, as did the thousands in the audience; as, I hope, did I.