GIANT KILLER Chapter One

 

I find it odd that such a minor player as the Methodist minister, the Reverend Henry Benjamin Turk is always the villain of the story of the Cardiff Giant. Turk's pompous ignorance is what motivates and justifies the heroic sins of George Hull. See, in Christian theology, ignorance is not one of the seven deadly sins. Greed, yes, lies, yes, lust and envy, surely, gluttony, and wrath: these are all the "forgiven" the sins of George Hull.  

Meanwhile, a fervent evangelical blind faith in the dyslexic translation of  Old English, via Latin and Hebrew, was the Reverend Turk's chosen path to piety.  And for obtusely following that path ad nauseam, the Reverend generally gets all the blame. Maybe the problem is that hypocrisy is not considered a deadly sin.  

George Hull came close to being a giant himself. At six feet three inches tall, he towered half a foot above the average man of his day, and intimidated them with his broad muscular shoulders, and round face behind a slick black mustache all beneath his black, slicked back hair. But other than his size and villainous appearance, what most people remembered were George's small sharp intelligent blue eyes always darting about. His chief delight, recalled the post master in the Wisconsin Dells town of Baraboo, was expounding on the advantages of infidelity and betting on everything from pool games to local elections. 

In August of 1867 the tobacco warehouse George had opened just four months earlier, and which he had insured to the amount of $12,000, burned to the ground, under circumstances which the insurance company thought highly suspicious. Despite George's declarations of innocence and threats of legal action, he accepted a $1,000 settlement and moved on.

According to George, he moved on to the tiny Iowa hamlet of Ackley -   because his brother-in-law who lived there,  had taken a consignment of 10,000 cigars, and was having trouble selling them. This could not have been surprising since Ackley had barely 300 residents. Even if every man woman and child smoked a dozen cheap cigars a day, it is difficult to envision how they could ever smoke 10,000 cigars before hacking up a lung and dropping dead.

George Hull had gotten into the business through his uncle, the front half of the Hull and Grummand Company, which had recently opened a cigar factory at Water and Henry streets in Bimginham, New York, on the Pennsylvania border.  The young George needed work after a short stint in jail for selling marked cards, and the cut throat cigar business seemed a natural for him.

The 8,000 citizens of Bimingham had strict anti-union laws, encouraging  local sweat shops to employ unskilled workers at starvation wages - 40 cents for a day spent rolling stale tobacco scraps and assorted agricultural detritus, dust and rodent droppings,  into 100 cigars that sold from three to five cents each. It inspired a business model long on salesmanship, and short on morality.

But it was while residing with his sister and brother-in-law that George Hull briefly crossed paths with the fulcrum of his giant morality tale. According to George, “At that time a Methodist revivalist was in Ackley, and prayed all over the settlement....One night he was at my sister’s house, and after supper we had a long discussion and a hot one.” Specifically, according to George, the hot discussion centered around a quote from the King James Biblical book of Genesis, chapter six, verse four, “There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.”.

Besides sounding like a “Christianized” version of ancient Greek theology, the King James edition of the bible which the Reverend Turk quoted, was an English translation of a compilation written in Latin, of stories originally composed in Aramaic and Greek . And as any skilled translator will tell you, and any reader of a Google translation will confirm, conveying the meaning from one language to another is as much social art as lexicography. Translating a translation only increases the inevitable misunderstandings. And in this particular text, the scholars compromised on the word “giants”, when a more precise word was “Nephilim”. But that word requires an uncomfortable explanation.

The mysterious Nephilim are mentioned only twice in the bible, this once in Genesis, and once in Numbers, chapter 13, verses 32 and 33 . “And there we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, who come of the Nephilim; and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.'” But they also appear in the Book of Enoch, which is not part of the conical bible, but a conservative Judaic variation of the Torah.  The Nephilim were the products of male angles mating with human woman. This was far too close to the pagan religions Yawah was so critical of.  Later Christian scholars chose to mention them only twice, hoping to avoid the theological torture required to explain them, by using the word “giants” instead.  And it was on the foundation of this compromised pebble that the Reverend Turk built his temple of biblical literalism.

But to return to the theology of George Hull, “At midnight we went to bed, and I lay wide awake wondering why people would believe those remarkable stories in the Bible about giants, when suddenly I thought of making a stone giant and passing it off as a petrified man.” But, of course, there is nothing in George Hull's past which would have give any reason to believe that is what George thought. As one recent biographer put it, “ "Once Hull had an idea, he had no qualms about breaking partnerships, or laws, to get what he wanted.” And George Hull's obsession was not logic, or heaven, but money.

Five years earlier, Mark Twain had written his first humorous article for the Virginia City, Nevada “Territorial Enterprise”, which began, “A petrified man was found some time ago in the mountains south of Gravelly Ford. Every limb and feature of the stony mummy was perfect, not even excepting the left leg, which has evidently been a wooden one during the lifetime of the owner...”  In Twain's story the locals want to bury the defunct stone man, but cannot separate him from the rock which has engulfed him. So, “Everybody goes to see the stone man, as many as three hundred having visited the hardened creature during the past five or six weeks.”

Twain (above) later explained his inspiration. “One could scarcely pick up a paper without finding...one or two glorified discoveries of this kind....and I felt called upon to destroy this growing...petrifaction mania with a delicate, a very delicate satire.” Except the joke did not kill the idea of a petrified man. Twain was “stunned to see the creature I had begotten to pull down the wonder-business with, and bring derision upon it, calmly exalted to the grand chief place in the list of the genuine marvels our Nevada had produced.” Over the next year, Twain's joke was reprinted as fact in newspapers across America, and even England, where it was published in “The Lancet”, the premiere scientific medical journal of the day.

It seems unlikely that George Hull realized that Twain's story, if he ever read it, was intended as a joke. In the history we have of him, George Hull does not display a sense of humor about anything that does not entail some degree of humiliation for somebody other than George Hull.  In fact, a witness said in the summer of 1867 George had considered “salting” an “Indian burial mound” outside of Barboo, Wisconsin. And that was long before he ever met the Reverend Turk. 

 It did not even matter to Hull that there were no dead Indians in most of  the Wisconsin mounds. They were in truth drumlins,  formed by moving rivers of ice more than 10,000 years earlier, proving again that the truth is more complex and fascinating than the theology of angels dancing on the head of a pin, or mating with human women.

I don't know if the native peoples got the idea for their burial mounds from the moraines, but I do know that George Hull did not get the idea for the Cardiff Giant from the maligned Reverend Turk. And we should stop blaming him for it

- 30 -

HUMBLE PI

 

I suspect the problem begins with the oft quoted but shockingly misunderstood phrase, “pi are squared.”  It is a fact that you cannot perfectly square a circle. Which is comforting for those of us who are math-impaired. Seems obvious. Seems logical. But prove it.

You can, but you have to use math. And in proving it you stumble across something very odd. There is a constant mathematical relationship between the length of the line forming a circle, divided by the distance across that same circle. And this relationship, no matter how large or small the circle,  always works out to be 3.141592653589793238…etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitas, add infelicitous, and never ever repeating. This makes Pi an irrational number, which is confusing again because I find all numbers irrational, even on Pi day.

To express the problem in another way,  A(rea) of a circle equals the radius of the circle squared. But you see...     

...you can never turn a circle into a square of the exact same size. Close, but never exactly the same size.  And it doesn’t matter if it is a great big circle or an itty-bitty one. Pi is always 3.141 etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, but never ending and never reaching zero no matter how many places beyond the decimal point you go.  It's been tried. And is still being tried.

If you are a math freak this is obvious, while the rest of us have to be satisfied with accepting that Pi is an irrational number and live with it. But I ask you, what is the value of knowing pi? 

I had a fourth grade teacher who was so obsessed with having her students memorize the value of Pi to twenty decimal places that she had us memorize the following poem: “Sir, I send a rhyme excelling, In sacred truth and rigid spelling, Numerical sprites elucidate, For me the lexicon’s full weight”. Each of the 20 words of that poem has the number of letters required to read out the first twenty digits of pi, in order.  I had to memorized that poem again in my thirties because as a ten year old I couldn’t spell the word Nantucket, and as a sixty year old I rely upon a spell checker to detail any word long enough to rhyme with  “elucidate”. So this poem was as much a mystery to me then as the number Pi remains.

But I am older now and I have grown so used to making mistakes in public that I hardly notice the embarrassment anymore. So I openly admit that I still find pi a puzzle. What's so special about pi? And why Pi, anyway?

Legend has it that the great Greek mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse was struggling over the solution to pi when a Roman soldier blundered into his garden. The old man supposedly snapped, “Don’t touch my circles!”, whereupon the chastised legionary pulled his Gladius and separated Archimedes’ head from his face. I suppose that if Archimedes had been sitting in his bathtub, as he allegedly was when he discovered that displaced water could be used to measure density (Eureka!), something else might have been separated. But, suffice it to say that before computers, finding pi was a great big pain in the Archimedes. He managed to figure out that pi was somewhere between 3 10/71 and 3 1/7. He might have done better if he had invented the decimal point, first. But...

About the year 480 CE the Chinese mathematician Zu Chongzhi figured out that pi was a little more than 3.1415926 and a little less than 3.1415927. After that the decimal point zealots took over. The German mathematician and fencing instructor Ludolf van Ceulen worked out pi to 35 decimal places. And in 1873 the amateur geek, William Shanks, worked it out to 707 decimal places. But William made one tiny little mistake in the 528th number and that threw everything else off. But it was such a good try that nobody noticed his screw up until 1944. Today computers have figured pi out to one trillion digits to the right of the decimal point and still no repeatable pattern has been detected, and still it never quite reaches zero.  It is still a little bit less than 3.15 and a little bit more than 3.14. All that has changed is the definition of “a little bit”. It keeps getting smaller and smaller -  but it will never be zero.

But what does that mean? What does Pi mean, beyond its face value? Well, it turns you can find it in the  curve of the double helix of a DNA molecule, the chemical code of all living plants, animals and bacteria, and the behavior of light coming from distant galaxies, or out of our sun.  Einstein himself realized that if you want to describe why and how a river "meanders"  to the sea, you need to use Pi , because the actual length of a stream, with twists and bends,  is usually between 1.3 and 1.4 times the straight line distance - called the "meander ratio".  It's always pi! All the geologists have to do is plug in the variables for soil type, and angle of slope and latitude and drawing rivers on a map becomes predictable. Pi is why why so many rivers look the same when seen from space or on a big map. Pi is what all rivers have in common with DNA. And airplane wings. And sewer pipes. And eye balls, human and otherwise. 

Pi reveals the underlying structure of the universe, the lines of force - magnetic,  gravity, chemical or electrical.  Even atomic. Pi is like a master key, that with a little jiggling, can be made to open just about any door. The mere fact that such a key exists, tells you that everything we can see, hear and feel is connected to everything else, even the stuff we can't see. Pi tells you the chaos inside an exploding super nova is governed by the same laws that control the budding of a flower. It is the mathematical proof that there is a logic to the entire universe, and that logic is 3.141592653589793238...etcetera, etcetera.        

Thus pi is the “admirable number” according to the devilish little Polish poetess Wislawa Szmborska. While being infinitely long it includes “…my phone number, your shirt size, the year nineteen hundred and seventy-three, sixth floor number of inhabitants, sixty-five cents, hip measurement, two fingers, a charade and a code, in which we find how blithe the trostle sings!” (…and no, I have no idea what or who the hell a trostle is or what makes it blithe or unblithe. Do you?)

Daniel Rockmore, in the pages of "The Chronicle of High Education" for 12 March 1999, wrote that Pi was "Foreign, unpredictable, otherworldly, yet as common as a circle...it's easy to find, but hard to know. Among mathematicians there still rages a fierce, unsettled debate about whether pi is a "normal" number--that is, whether each of the digits 0 through 9 each occur on average one-tenth of the time in the never-ending decimal expansion of pi...making...Pis...a veritable poster number for the fashion world's ambiguous and androgynous advertising campaigns."  And you thought mathematics had no sex appeal  Why, if Pi was a plain old 3 or a dull old 4, there would be no sex. Sex is made possible by being 3.14159265358979.... etcetera, etcetera.. And it cannot be and will not be controlled. And certainly not owned.

A physician and a crackpot amateur mathematician from Solitude, Indiana named Doctor Edwin J. Goodwin,  thought that he had “solved” pi to the last digit - and none of this irrational numerical horse feathers for him!  And having achieved that which no other human had ever done, he decided to make Pi his own personal private property by copyrighting it. But in order to profit from his discovery (you know how wealthy the Pythagoras estate is) Dr. Goodwin needed a legal endorsement. And rather than subject his brainchild to the vagaries of the copyright peer review, the good doctor instead offered his theory as an accomplished fact to the local politicians. 

The proposal, Indiana House Bill 246, sponsored by Representative T.J. Record of Posey, Indiana, was  “…an act introducing a new mathematical truth and offered…to be used only by the State of Indiana free of cost…provided it is accepted and adopted by the official action of the Legislature…”. This insanity actually made it through the Committee on Canals and Swamps (Perfect place for it!) in record time, and was passed by the full Indiana house on 5 February, 1897, by a vote of 67 to 0.  Who says politicians don't spend time on important issues?

Unfortunately, in the Indiana Senate some wiseacre showed the bill to a visiting Purdue party- pooper, Professor of Mathematics C.A. Waldo. And now we at last know where Waldo was, at least was in 1897.  He was on the banks of the Wabash. The lawmaker asked if the professor would like the honor of meeting the amazing Dr. Goodwin, and Professor Waldo replied that he already knew all the lunatics he cared to know, thank you very much. And with that comment Dr. Goodwin’s brief bubble of fame was burst. On 12 February, 1897 any further vote on the bill to copywrite the perfect definitive solution to Pi was postponed indefinitely.  Hoosier lunatics have since moved on to more productive fields.

It was not a victory for logic so much as an avoidance of a victory for ignorance, which is pretty much the same thing that happened in Tennessee about 30 years later when they tried to make evolution illegal. Don't tell the whales. They'll have to go back to being dogs. 

Still pi remains one of the most popular mathematical equations, if mostly poorly appreciated by those of us who aren’t trying to generate a random number or navigate a jet plane across the North Pole, or predict the next stock market bubble, or launch a satellite, or run a radio station, or process an X-ray or a Cat-scan, drive a submarine, drill for oil, purify gold or etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitas, add infelicity.

Just trust me, and always trust pi. It lifts your spirit, gives you a sense of security and keeps your circles on the square. To share it just try singing..."Pi, Pi, Me oh my, Nothing tastes sweet, wet, salty and dry, all at once, ...oh my, I love pi!

- 30 -

TIME TRAVELERS

 

I can’t believe we are doing this again. We got along for nine thousand years without doing it, and now we do it twice a year. It was a dumb idea when we did it the first time and doing a dumb thing twice a year does not make it smart. Why are we changing our clocks again?! 

The persons to blame for this are the obsessive-compulsive bureaucrats who champion the so-called Daylight Saving Time – and there is no “s” at the end of “Saving” because it’s modifying time, not daylight, which turns out to be more than a symbolic difference,  I told you these clock watchers were obsessive compulsive.  But that dropped “s” should also give you a hint that this whole thing is one great fraud being perpetrated on each and every one of us in the name of good grammar. 

So on 13 March,  at 2:00 AM, we will "Spring Forward", adjusting our clocks again because we’re all supposed to.  It's a unity thing, I guess. One nation under a one really dumb decision. We are all dumb together because being dumb together is better than being smart individually.  I guess being smart together is not an option. And I have to tell you that I am not going to feel like  "springing" anywhere an hour earlier, no matter how you insist on repeating "Spring Forward".   Just because its the law, or a rule or something. These endless adjustments are an endless treadmill of dumbness.

Experts assure us that during Daylight Saving Time we’re going to save 10,000 barrels of oil a day, reduce crime and spend more time out of doors with our families during summer evenings. If you knew my family, you might not want to spend an extra hour with them, anywhere. Of course your iPad and your iPhone might start displaying some rare Lapland dialect if you tried to instruct it to ignore the whole thing.  But why are we doing this again?!  They first tried this half baked scheme back in World War One, and as soon as the war was over they dumped it. Because it didn't actually work. And now, every time some one-world type comes up with another energy saving idea, we are all required to smile and call it "green":  

But I wonder about all that extra fossil fuel we will burn this spring, to generate electricity to light our darkened bedrooms, not to mention run our computers, TVs, hair dryers, electric razors and toothbrushes, water heaters and all those headlights we can't get out of bed without . We used to say that people who rose early got up with the cows. Well, the cows are not getting up any earlier. Nor are the chickens. Why the hell are we?

As everybody keeps pointing out, it was Ben Franklin who first purposed Daylight Saving in his essay “An Economical Project”, (but in French, of course) (above)  in which he suggested that if authorities were to “…Oblige a man to rise at four in the morning, …it is probable he will go willingly to bed at eight in the evening." Well. duh. Unless, of course, he takes a nap. But, yeah, if you make him get up earlier he will probably go to bed earlier. 

And if we set him on fire, it is probable he will not litter. It is an interesting idea from the eighteenth century’s second most famous reprobate, but it strikes me like accepting interior decorating suggestions from the eighteenth century's first most famous reprobate, the Marque de Sade. Besides, how do we know that Ben wasn't just joking? I know the Marque wasn't.

Well, if Ben was kidding, then Congressman Fred Upton (R-Mich.), who wrote the amendment to the Energy Policy Act of 2005 requiring Daylight Saving Time, missed the punch line. What a surprise, a Republican with no sense of humor.  So the same Congress that has refused to raise the minimum wage for over a quarter of a century,  found the time to steal an hour of my  sleep every March and screw with my sanity every November.  In the next election I suggest voting for Ben Franklin.

Ben was trying to save about 64 million pounds of candle wax a year. Well, look how much wax we saved by inventing electricity! And, didn't Ben have something to do with that?  Kite, key, electrical storm -  any of this sound familiar?  Listen, didn't Ben see this whole electricity thing coming? And speaking of electricity, according to the New Jersey Public Service Enterprise Group, Daylight Saving has “no impact” on energy demands in their service area. And the government of Kazakhstan has already dropped the whole idea of “saving daylight”.  Are Americans dumber than the Kazakhastanies? 

According to the University of California Energy Institute, daylight saving does not actually save energy, it just moves it around. And a recent study of electric bills in Indiana found that the time "shifters" are actually costing each Hoosier almost $3.00 a year MORE -  about $8.6 million a year in total, plus somewhere between $1.6 and $5.3 million in pollution costs for generating all that extra electricity for getting up and going to work in the dark all winter!. And if that is what it costs Hoosiers (like me), think what it costing people in New Jersey!  Just think about it. A little more energy conservation like this and we might as well just start burning coal again.

And another problem with this bi-annual adjustment to our sense of reality is that our brains can’t adjust just because we tell them too. Meanwhile, computers solve the problem without a hitch. So while our electronics no longer need a "time patch” for programs, humans require psychiatric assistance to adjust to the depression brought on by lost sleep every spring!  To quote from Ken Fisher’s article for ARS,  “So while the US government pats itself on the back for at least looking busy, know that the main goal – energy conservation – has not been met….Isn’t arbitrary, mostly meaningless change, great?”  Hell, no, it isn’t.

A January 2020 study by the  University of Boulder reveals that fatal car accidents "spike" 6% upward in the week following the spring forward, meaning an additional 28 deaths each year nationwide. And for citizens living in the western edges of each time zone the risk of death rises to 8%. That means, say the scientists from Boulder, that over the last 22 years, 627 people have died simply to placate Ben Franklin.  Hey! He's dead. could we not worry so much about hurting his feelings, anymore?  And it ain't like we have to win World War One all over again.  We done did that.

Still, I’m willing to be cooperative.  If we need more daylight then let’s move the clocks forward and be done with it. Why fall back in the fall? Listen, if the majority of the population decides that at noon tomorrow we should all pretend that it is now 10:45 AM, I’d go along with that. But for heaven’s sake please stop moving the clocks back and forth and back and forth as if we were keeping time with Mexican jumping beans. Why are we doing this to ourselves? Pick a damn time and leave it the hell alone!

- 30 -