Big news of the week, via Hacker News: Someone has engineered a 1D spaceship in Conway’s Game of Life! That is, there exists a pattern which initially fits into a bounding box of dimensions (3,707,300,605\times 1) — that “1” is what makes it “1D” — and, when evolved for (133,076,755,768) steps, reforms itself into exactly the same pattern shifted two cells to the left.

Visualizing such a pattern seems essentially impossible for a human being. Like the atom, this spaceship is almost entirely empty space. In its initial state, only 0.8% of the cells within its bounding box are alive. If you could display it at a resolution of 10,000 cells per inch, its 1-cell-high initial state would stretch for 5.8 miles. If you could watch it evolve at a rate of 10,000 frames per second, it would still take five months to complete a single cycle (in which time it would move two cells, or about 5 µm).

Here are some more numerical questions about this pattern. Email me if you know the answers, and I’ll fill them in here!

• What is the pattern’s (minimum, maximum, mean) population over its lifetime?
• What is its (minimum, maximum, mean) density within its convex hull?
• What is its (minimum, maximum, mean) width? Maximum height? (Its minimum height is, obviously, 1.)

A flag with one star

The other week I spent a while researching the WWI-era origins of the term “gold star mother,” i.e., the parent of a U.S. serviceman whose life was lost in the service. This sent me down a rabbit hole re: the service flag on which blue stars (for those currently serving) and gold (for those deceased) would be displayed, and the minor furor that erupted in manufacturing and Congressional circles when it was discovered that the inventor of said flag had patented it and was seeking royalties.

Appropriately to this Christmas season, I found a 1918 sermon by Edwin Keigwin, D.D., in which he tells “the delightful little story of a Boston miss”:

This little girl was gazing upward from a southern window as night came on. Noting resplendent Venus in the sky, she ran to the door of another room and called, “Mamma, Mamma, come quick and see! God’s hung out his service flag, and it has one star in it.”

Naming a telephone exchange

The 23rd Annual Report of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society to the Legislature of the State of New York (1918) contains, among many other fine articles, a description of the painstaking process by which New York’s CAthedral telephone exchange was named.

Probably few of the hundreds of thousands of persons who make the millions of calls over the New York City telephone lines have any idea of the care taken in the selection of telephone “central” names, and we take this occasion to express our appreciation of the civic spirit and the discriminating intelligence shown by the New York Telephone Co. in this matter. The names adopted by it are an excellent example of the perpetuation of historical memories and traditions in public nomenclature.

The description that follows is largely copied from an article that appeared in the Telephone Review 7(10), October 1916. (Published monthly by the New York Telephone Company.)

As early as July 1911 a memorandum was written containing a list of all the names of avenues and streets (past and present), parks, descriptive names and others not descriptive, and the names of owners of former estates in the district […] This list of names was finally reduced by elimination to six, one of which was “Cathedral.”

The names selected for test, and about 150 names of existing central office districts, are [distributed to various exchanges, where they are] read over the telephone and recorded by different operators a sufficient number of times, so that each of the new names will be tested approximately 1,000 times. In many of these tests the names are read over the telephone and recorded in the aggregate from 80,000 to 100,000 times.

Iolanthe business

From the January/February 1995 GASBag (the University of Michigan G&S society’s newsletter):

Decorum at the Supreme Court, not exactly known as a hotbed of sartorial activism, was shaken yesterday when none other than Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist assumed his place at the center of the bench. In a break from tradition, the chief was dressed in a snappy black robe adorned with four bright gold stripes on each upper arm. “He designed the robe himself,” said court press officer Toni House, “after having seen a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe last June in which the Lord Chancellor wore a similar robe.”

VLOC’s Larry Garvin added:

The Court’s information office confirmed that the Chief Justice was inspired by the Victorian Lyric Opera Company’s production of Iolanthe in June of 1994. We at VLOC were tremendously chuffed by the news. After all, how many G&S companies have made their mark on U.S. law?

Also in that issue: a very ’90s list of “computer viruses inspired by G&S,” including the Ko-Ko virus (which makes a list of your files it wants to delete, but never gets as far as actually deleting them), the Jack Point virus (causes your computer to die during shutdown; or maybe not; we’re not sure), and the Grosvenor virus (which isn’t a virus at all, but behaves like one because you meet more computers that way).

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I had been searching Iolanthe-related literature because I was inclined to grumble at recent sad neglect of what I perceive as the traditional business in Private Willis’s song (“When all night long a chap remains”). I preferred to link to somebody else’s description of it if I could. But, having failed in my search, here’s my original description and gripe:

The song’s refrain occurs twice. On the first refrain, Willis expresses his bemusement that “every little boy and gal that’s born into the world alive / Is either a little liberal or else a little conservative.” The proper implication of little here is “possesses a slight tendency in the liberal resp. conservative direction,” accompanied by a gentle vertical waver of the hand to suggest a “little” leaning to the left, and again a “little” to the right. Everyone’s a little (bit) one or the other.

On the second refrain, having considered “the prospect of a lot / Of dull MPs, in close proximity, / All thinking for themselves,” Willis expresses his satisfaction that every little boy or gal, etc. The proper implication here is “exists simply as a future member of one or the other party,” accompanied by an avuncular head-patting gesture to suggest the presence of a “little” liberal voter, and again a “little” conservative voter. Everyone’s one or the other, from birth.

Too often (which is to say, ever) I’ve seen the singer do the head-pat gesture on both refrains; which not only telegraphs the punch line, but also blows past Gilbert’s deliberate pun on “little” by admitting only the one interpretation (and, by the gesture, refusing even to permit the audience to consider the other). It’s an egregious betrayal of the fine art of wordplay. It’s like extending your arms in supplication on the words “Take my wife,” instead of on the “please.” Don’t do it!

Those who can’t read, review

From Arthur Schopenhauer’s preface to the first edition of The World as Will and Representation (tr. Norman, Welchman, and Janaway), after listing several hundred pages’ worth of “propaedeutic” readings he considers prerequisites for any prospective reader of his own book:

Most readers will have already felt their impatience mounting: how dare I put a book before the public under such demands and conditions? How, the indignant reader might ask, will there ever be an end to it if we have to do so much work for a single book?

Since I have absolutely nothing to say to such reproaches, I can only hope for some gratitude on the part of those readers for having warned them in time so that they do not waste a single hour with a book that it would be useless to read […]

But I am afraid that even this will not let me off the hook. The reader has paid good money for the book, and wants to know how he can be compensated. — My last resort now is to remind him that he knows other things to do with a book besides reading it. It can fill a space in his library as well as any other book, and it will look quite good there with its fresh, clean binding. Or he can leave it in the dressing room or on the tea table of his educated lady friend. Or finally, by far the best option of all and one that I would particularly advise, is for him to write a review of it.