Quiz Of The Week
- To an order of magnitude, how many bird species exist in the world?
(i) 1,000
(ii) 10,000
(iii) 100,000
(iv) 1,000,000 - What is, or was, coverture?
(i) A legal doctrine merging a wife's identity into that of her husband
(ii) A fixed charge added to a restaurant bill
(iii) The moment of crowning during a coronation
(iv) Leather garments worn by knights beneath their armour - Where might you find goldbeater's skin?
(i) On a goldbeater
(ii) On an airship
(iii) Inside a cow
(iv) In a stamp album - What condition affects some 8% of human males, but only 0.5% of females?
(i) Dyslexia
(ii) Left-handedness
(iii) Stuttering
(iv) Colour-blindness - It is probably now a Gem. But a century ago it might have been a Fay, a Niagara, a Common-Sense, or an Owl. What is it?
(i) A faucet, or tap
(ii) A bicycle seat
(iii) A paperclip
(iv) A hairbrush
Answers at the foot of the page
From The Browser Eleven Years Ago
Do You Really Want To Live For Ever?
Ronald Bailey | Reason | 29 May 2012 | U
How humans have thought immortality to work in practice, why some claim to want it, and the philosophical problems of achieving it. The four main categories of imagined immortality are, in descending order of concreteness: Staying alive through medicine; being resurrected, as by cryogenics; advancing to another world, as most religions promise; living on in the memory of others (2,500 words)
From The Browser Eight Years Ago
Inside A London Taxi
John Bull | London Reconnections | 28th May 2015 | U
Insider's account of the London taxi trade, and of the challenge from Uber. Taxi drivers have already been forced into a grudging accommodation with licensed mini-cabs, but the threat from Uber goes deeper. Uber's technology can substitute both for the taxi-meter and for local knowledge. In effect, taxi-drivers must now ask government not merely to regulate their trade, but to preserve it (6,200 words)
Performance Of The Week
Rod Stewart, Gary Clark Jr, Ronnie Wood, Eric Clapton and friends perform People Get Ready at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 23rd May 2023, in the second of two concerts commemorating the late Jeff Beck. People Get Ready, written by Curtis Mayfield, was first recorded in 1965 by The Impressions and became closely associated with Martin Luther King Jr. and the American Civil Rights Movement.
Problem Of The Week
In front of you are two coins; one is a fair coin, and the other is biased toward heads. You’d like to try to figure out which is which, and to do so you are permitted two flips. Is your best course of action to flip each coin once, or one coin twice?
— from Mathematical Puzzles, by Peter Winkler
Solution below, after the crossword
Book Of The Week
NB By JC
James Campbell | Carcanet | 2023 | U
Recommended by Dwight Garner at the New York Times:
"One part of the Times Literary Supplement that no one skips is the NB column, a miscellany of three or four items, irreverent and journalistic. From 1997 to 2020, its golden age, the column was signed JC. JC was interested in everything. When he needed material for a column, he would sometimes walk to a bookstore, buy something unusual and write about its contents. He made it work”
Chart Of The Week
source: Chalkdust
Image Of The Week
An image produced by the Suffragette movement in early-20C Britain, repurposed as a contemporary French poster. More here on how the Suffragettes "broke with the stereotype of the frail, helpless and hysterical Victorian female, and replaced her with intelligent and determined women who know how to handle the physical assault of an assailant" — Cogpunk Steamscribe
Poem Of The Week
The Nonconformist
Donald Davie | Poetry Foundation | 1985
X, whom society’s most mild command,
For instance evening dress, infuriates,
In art is seen confusingly to stand
For disciplined conformity, with Yeats.
Taxed to explain what this resentment is
He feels for small proprieties, it comes,
He likes to think, from old enormities
And keeps the faith with famous martyrdoms.
continue reading at Poetry Foundation
Click here to print this week's puzzle
Click here to load this week's puzzle in Across Lite
Click here for past puzzles and solutions
Click here to solve the Browser Sevens
Editor's note — Setter Stella Zawistowski has a new book out called Tough As Nails Crosswords. They're not cryptic, but they're still fun and challenging — Dan Feyer
Problem Solved
Problem: In front of you are two coins; one is a fair coin, and the other is biased toward heads. You’d like to try to figure out which is which, and to do so you are permitted two flips. Is your best course of action to flip each coin once, or one coin twice?
Solution: To begin with, suppose you were allowed only one flip. If you were to flip coin A and it came up heads, then logically you would guess it to be the biased coin; if it came up tails, you would guess it to be the fair coin.
If you were then allowed a second flip, and you flipped coin B, and you got the opposite face, you would be even happier with your previous decision. If you got the same face, you would be reduced to no information; you might as well stick with the same choice. In effect, flipping the second coin is worthless.
Could flipping the same coin twice change your mind? Yes. If you got heads the first time you would be inclined to guess that coin to be the biased coin. But if you got tails the next time, you would change your best guess to unbiased.
We conclude that flipping one coin twice is strictly better than flipping each coin once.
— from Mathematical Puzzles, by Peter Winkler
Quiz Answers
- To an order of magnitude, how many bird species exist in the world?
(i) 1,000
(ii) 10,000
(iii) 100,000
(iv) 1,000,000
There are four master checklists of the world’s birds, each with its own set of taxonomic rules. The lists agree on roughly 85 percent of species; the rest are considered valid species in some lists but not in others. Depending on the list, the world’s bird species number between 10,906 and 11,189. The all-time record for birding is held by a retired American diplomat called Peter Kaestner, with sightings of 9,856 species. - What is, or was, coverture?
(i) A legal doctrine merging a wife's identity into that of her husband
(ii) A fixed charge added to a restaurant bill
(iii) The moment of crowning during a coronation
(iv) Leather garments worn by knights beneath their armour
Coverture was a legal doctrine, common in much of the world until the 20th century, that, when a woman married, most or all of her legal rights passed to her husband. According to an 18th-century English jurist: "By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband" - Where might you find goldbeater's skin?
(i) On a goldbeater
(ii) On an airship
(iii) Inside a cow
(iv) In a stamp album
All answers are possible, although goldbeaters are rare and issues of postage stamps on goldbeater's skin rarer still. "Goldbeater's skin" usually describes the processed outer membrane of the intestine of an animal, typically a cow. It is prized mainly for its strength against tearing: A pack of 1,000 pieces of goldbeater's skin requires the guts of some 400 oxen and is 1 inch thick. Goldbeater's skin acquired its name from its use in the making of gold leaf: layers of skin are interleaved between layers of gold-stock, like carbon-paper between typing-paper, so that many sheets of gold-leaf can be produced in a single beating. In the early 20th century goldbeater's skin was mainly used in the construction of airships, despite a known tendency to split under tension when waterlogged, a factor which may have helped bring down the R101 in 1930. - What condition affects some 8% of human males, but only 0.5% of females?
(i) Dyslexia
(ii) Left-handedness
(iii) Stuttering
(iv) Colour-blindness
Of the options given, the answer is colour-blindness, which is much more common among human males than among human females because the genes responsible for the most common forms of colour blindness are on the X chromosome. Humans aside, most mammals are red-green colour-blind; but most reptiles, amphibians, insects and birds perceive more colours than humans do. Dyslexia is thought to occur among some 3%-7% of humans, and may affect both sexes equally, though it is more commonly diagnosed in males. Stuttering affects some 1% of the population. Left-handedness is found among slightly more than 10% of males and slightly less than 9% of females. - It is probably now a Gem. But a century ago it might have been a Fay, a Niagara, a Common-Sense, or an Owl. What is it?
(i) A faucet, or tap
(ii) A bicycle seat
(iii) A paperclip
(iv) A hairbrush
The Gem, the Fay, the Niagara, the Common Sense and the Owl were all rival designs of paperclip in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the industrial production of cheap steel wire had first made paperclips possible. The Gem prevailed, thanks mainly to its ease of manufacture: It required only the bending of a length of wire at three points to form an incomplete double-loop with straight sides and semi-circular ends. The design has remained unchanged to this day, and has passed into the digital world as a symbol for documents and for office work in general – as in Microsoft's ill-fated Clippy online assistant, and in the icons used by many messaging programmes to warn of attachments.
Shortcode Glossary:
U = Ungated, free. M = Metered paywall. B = Metered paywall can be bypassed using private/incognito browsing. Full details of our shortcodes here.
This post is only for paying subscribers of The Browser, but please do forward it to any friends who deserve a treat today, especially if you think they might be interested in becoming Browser subscribers in the future.
Caroline Crampton, Editor-In-Chief; Robert Cottrell, Founding Editor; Jodi Ettenberg, Editor-At-Large; Dan Feyer, Crossword Editor; Uri Bram, CEO & Publisher; Sylvia Bishop, Assistant Publisher; Al Breach, Founding Director
Editorial comments and letters to the editor: editor@thebrowser.com
Technical issues and support requests: support@thebrowser.com
Or write at any time to the publisher: uri@thebrowser.com
Elsewhere on The Browser, and of possible interest to Browser subscribers: Letters To The Editor, where you will find constructive comment from fellow-subscribers; The Reader, our commonplace book of clippings and quotations; Notes, our occasional blog. You can always Give The Browser, surely the finest possible gift for discerning friends and family.