Sperm whales taught each other how to fend off whaling ships in the 19th century, scientists find

 A scientist from Nova Scotia and his team discovered that sperm whales shared information across the ocean on how to run away — and even fight back — against hunters

In the 18th and 19th centuries, industrial whale hunters in the North Pacific Ocean were having a field day hunting sperm whales. Riding rowboats and brandishing hand-thrown harpoons, the whalers would hunt large gatherings of whales for their oil. The business was booming.

But, according to old fishing logs, their hunts became less and less fruitful, until their yield was reduced by more than half in the span of two years.

Sperm whaling in the North Pacific from the ship Canton on the Japan Grounds in the North Pacific. Four whaling boats harpooned six whales. Three of those whales were killed (exhaling reddish blows) and the other three were lost when the harpoons pulled free or broke. One whaling boat, shown in the lower left, was destroyed. PHOTO BY INK AND WATERCOLOUR BY OLIVER

Now researchers say that the whales had actually learned how to avoid the whalers — and shared this information across the ocean.

Their paper published on March 17 in The Royal Society says that sperm whales shared tips among each other on how to prevent — and even fight back — against whalers in the 19th-century North Pacific, and reduced successful whale killings by 58 percent.

Hal Whitehead, one of the paper’s co-authors and a biology professor at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, has been studying whales — primarily sperm whales — and analyzing their behaviours and social systems for almost 40 years. His interest in this study began with the release of a trove of recently digitized documents; thousands of captains’ logs and fishing logs, providing extremely detailed accounts of whaling expeditions around the world.

Most historians focused on the history of the whalers themselves, but Whitehead said what piqued his interest was their descriptions of the whales’ behaviours. Sometime in the 19th century, whalers began complaining that they were catching significantly fewer whales.

Initially, Whitehead said, it was hard to find the culprit, as most of the first whaling expeditions didn’t keep detailed logs.

Sperm whales in the 19th century and beyond have shared information in a form of “culture”, researchers say.

“We don’t have good data sets to do this. The problem is, when we as humans start exploiting anything, we don’t tend to keep very good records of it,” Whitehead said. “This makes it hard to figure out the potential for animals reacting to this, because we don’t have good records.”

So his team, which included U.K. biologist Luke Rendell and data scientist Tim Smith, decided to pay close attention to American whaling expeditions in the North Pacific Ocean in the 19th century. Whitehead said, as one of the more recent areas that whalers began to hunt in, it was a region where the expedition logs were more complete, and at that time it was exclusively the domain of American whalers.

Before hunters encroached on their territory, the only predator sperm whales — who often weigh more than 40,000 kilos — had to fear were killer whales.

“These were the Texaco of this era, these guys killing sperm whales, getting the oil, selling the oil and making huge amounts of money,” Whitehead said.

According to the study, Smith compiled a dataset of 77,749 voyage days, which included 2,405 days where whalers spotted sperm whales.

When they discovered that there was a 58 percent drop in successful sperm whale hunts in an extremely small window of just over two years, Whitehead said he was “pretty well blown apart by that.”

“That was very remarkable,” he said. “I thought there might be a drop, but not that much and not that quickly. Usually, you expect it to increase as they figure out stuff and become more successful. That’s typically how our exploitation of wildlife goes. We become more efficient as we learn how to do it.”

Before hunters encroached on their territory, the only predator sperm whales — who often weigh more than 40,000 kilos — had to fear were killer whales. Typically, sperm whales defend themselves against killer whales by forming a large circle, with their young in the middle, and fight back with either their jaws or tails.

It works pretty well, Whitehead said, but has the opposite effect when confronted with humans.

“This is what they did to their previous enemy,” Whitehead said. “So they now have this new enemy, and this is almost the very worst thing you should do when faced with Captain Ahab. To form a tight group, slow-moving, just sitting there, it’s a wonderful target for someone throwing a harpoon.”

At first, whalers were extremely successful at catching and killing sperm whales. But there soon was a shift — instead of gathering in a circle when hunters arrived, the whales would quickly swim upwind, where the weak rowboats couldn’t follow. Some even attacked the fragile boats instead.

The sperm whales were communicating, the study finds, sharing their findings when new strategies helped fight off their attackers, and soon whales across the entire North Pacific were doing it.

Whitehead said the behaviours of the sperm whales in that area are indicative of their sharing of culture, which he defines as what information a creature passes on to those around them, and which potentially is passed on through generations.

“This pattern is more like agriculture, a new idea which develops and becomes really important,” Whitehead said. “I’m really interested in this diversity of culture in the whales, and this is a wonderful example of it.”

But despite the sudden shift in sperm whale safety in the 19th century, Whitehead said that more advanced whaling technologies — more powerful boats, explosive harpoon guns — eventually became too much for sperm whales to fight, though he said that they tried.

“Of course, none of it works,” he said. “The modern whalers are totally lethal. The whales cannot get away.”

Whitehead said he’s still seeing ways in which communities of sperm whales are sharing their culture to others, including learning how to safely harvest food from fishing lines, and is hopeful they’ll continue to adapt to their rapidly changing environment.

“We’re still affecting the ocean,” he said. “Whether they’re learning about those things and how to deal with them, we don’t know. But hopefully they are.“

(Source: National Post)

The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months

When a group of schoolboys were marooned on an island in 1965, it turned out very differently from William Golding’s bestseller, writes Rutger Bregman

For centuries western culture has been permeated by the idea that humans are selfish creatures. That cynical image of humanity has been proclaimed in films and novels, history books and scientific research. But in the last 20 years, something extraordinary has happened. Scientists from all over the world have switched to a more hopeful view of mankind. This development is still so young that researchers in different fields often don’t even know about each other.

A still from the 1963 film of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Photograph: Ronald Grant

When I started writing a book about this more hopeful view, I knew there was one story I would have to address. It takes place on a deserted island somewhere in the Pacific. A plane has just gone down. The only survivors are some British schoolboys, who can’t believe their good fortune. Nothing but beach, shells and water for miles. And better yet: no grownups.

On the very first day, the boys institute a democracy of sorts. One boy, Ralph, is elected to be the group’s leader. Athletic, charismatic and handsome, his game plan is simple: 1) Have fun. 2) Survive. 3) Make smoke signals for passing ships. Number one is a success. The others? Not so much. The boys are more interested in feasting and frolicking than in tending the fire. Before long, they have begun painting their faces. Casting off their clothes. And they develop overpowering urges – to pinch, to kick, to bite.

By the time a British naval officer comes ashore, the island is a smouldering wasteland. Three of the children are dead. “I should have thought,” the officer says, “that a pack of British boys would have been able to put up a better show than that.” At this, Ralph bursts into tears. “Ralph wept for the end of innocence,” we read, and for “the darkness of man’s heart”.

Golding had a masterful ability to portray the darkest depths of mankind

This story never happened. An English schoolmaster, William Golding, made up this story in 1951 – his novel Lord of the Flies would sell tens of millions of copies, be translated into more than 30 languages and hailed as one of the classics of the 20th century. In hindsight, the secret to the book’s success is clear. Golding had a masterful ability to portray the darkest depths of mankind. Of course, he had the zeitgeist of the 1960s on his side, when a new generation was questioning its parents about the atrocities of the second world war. Had Auschwitz been an anomaly, they wanted to know, or is there a Nazi hiding in each of us?

Savagery in the 1963 film adaptation of Lord of the Flies. Photograph: Ronald Grant

I first read Lord of the Flies as a teenager. I remember feeling disillusioned afterwards, but not for a second did I think to doubt Golding’s view of human nature. That didn’t happen until years later when I began delving into the author’s life. I learned what an unhappy individual he had been: an alcoholic, prone to depression; a man who beat his kids. “I have always understood the Nazis,” Golding confessed, “because I am of that sort by nature.” And it was “partly out of that sad self-knowledge” that he wrote Lord of the Flies.

I began to wonder: had anyone ever studied what real children would do if they found themselves alone on a deserted island? I wrote an article on the subject, in which I compared Lord of the Flies to modern scientific insights and concluded that, in all probability, kids would act very differently. Readers responded sceptically. All my examples concerned kids at home, at school, or at summer camp. Thus began my quest for a real-life Lord of the Flies. After trawling the web for a while, I came across an obscure blog that told an arresting story: “One day, in 1977, six boys set out from Tonga on a fishing trip ... Caught in a huge storm, the boys were shipwrecked on a deserted island. What do they do, this little tribe? They made a pact never to quarrel.”

The article did not provide any sources. But sometimes all it takes is a stroke of luck. Sifting through a newspaper archive one day, I typed a year incorrectly and there it was. The reference to 1977 turned out to have been a typo. In the 6 October 1966 edition of Australian newspaper The Age, a headline jumped out at me: “Sunday showing for Tongan castaways”. The story concerned six boys who had been found three weeks earlier on a rocky islet south of Tonga, an island group in the Pacific Ocean. The boys had been rescued by an Australian sea captain after being marooned on the island of ‘Ata for more than a year. According to the article, the captain had even got a television station to film a re-enactment of the boys’ adventure.

I was bursting with questions. Were the boys still alive? And could I find the television footage? Most importantly, though, I had a lead: the captain’s name was Peter Warner. When I searched for him, I had another stroke of luck. In a recent issue of a tiny local paper from Mackay, Australia, I came across the headline: “Mates share 50-year bond”. Printed alongside was a small photograph of two men, smiling, one with his arm slung around the other. The article began: “Deep in a banana plantation at Tullera, near Lismore, sit an unlikely pair of mates ... The elder is 83 years old, the son of a wealthy industrialist. The younger, 67, was, literally, a child of nature.” Their names? Peter Warner and Mano Totau. And where had they met? On a deserted island.

My wife Maartje and I rented a car in Brisbane and some three hours later arrived at our destination, a spot in the middle of nowhere that stumped Google Maps. Yet there he was, sitting out in front of a low-slung house off the dirt road: the man who rescued six lost boys 50 years ago, Captain Peter Warner.

Peter was the youngest son of Arthur Warner, once one of the richest and most powerful men in Australia. Back in the 1930s, Arthur ruled over a vast empire called Electronic Industries, which dominated the country’s radio market at the time. Peter was groomed to follow in his father’s footsteps. Instead, at the age of 17, he ran away to sea in search of adventure and spent the next few years sailing from Hong Kong to Stockholm, Shanghai to St Petersburg. When he finally returned five years later, the prodigal son proudly presented his father with a Swedish captain’s certificate. Unimpressed, Warner Sr demanded his son learn a useful profession. “What’s easiest?” Peter asked. “Accountancy,” Arthur lied.

Peter went to work for his father’s company, yet the sea still beckoned, and whenever he could he went to Tasmania, where he kept his own fishing fleet. It was this that brought him to Tonga in the winter of 1966. On the way home he took a little detour and that’s when he saw it: a minuscule island in the azure sea, ‘Ata. The island had been inhabited once, until one dark day in 1863, when a slave ship appeared on the horizon and sailed off with the natives. 

Since then, ‘Ata had been deserted – cursed and forgotten.

It didn’t take long for the first boy to reach the boat. 'My name is Stephen,' he cried. 'We've been here 15 months.'

But Peter noticed something odd. Peering through his binoculars, he saw burned patches on the green cliffs. “In the tropics it’s unusual for fires to start spontaneously,” he told us, a half century later. 

Then he saw a boy. Naked. Hair down to his shoulders. This wild creature leaped from the cliffside and plunged into the water. 

Suddenly more boys followed, screaming at the top of their lungs. It didn’t take long for the first boy to reach the boat. “My name is Stephen,” he cried in perfect English. “There are six of us and we reckon we’ve been here 15 months.”

The boys, once aboard, claimed they were students at a boarding school in Nuku‘alofa, the Tongan capital. Sick of school meals, they had decided to take a fishing boat out one day, only to get caught in a storm. Likely story, Peter thought. Using his two-way radio, he called in to Nuku‘alofa. “I’ve got six kids here,” he told the operator. 

“Stand by,” came the response. Twenty minutes ticked by. (As Peter tells this part of the story, he gets a little misty-eyed.) Finally, a very tearful operator came on the radio, and said: “You found them! These boys have been given up for dead. Funerals have been held. If it’s them, this is a miracle!”

In the months that followed I tried to reconstruct as precisely as possible what had happened on ‘Ata. Peter’s memory turned out to be excellent. Even at the age of 90, everything he recounted was consistent with my foremost other source, Mano, 15 years old at the time and now pushing 70, who lived just a few hours’ drive from him. The real Lord of the Flies, Mano told us, began in June 1965. The protagonists were six boys – Sione, Stephen, Kolo, David, Luke and Mano – all pupils at a strict Catholic boarding school in Nuku‘alofa. The oldest was 16, the youngest 13, and they had one main thing in common: they were bored witless. So they came up with a plan to escape: to Fiji, some 500 miles away, or even all the way to New Zealand.

Mr Peter Warner, third from left, with his crew in 1968, including the survivors from ‘Ata. Photograph: Fairfax Media Archives/via Getty Images

There was only one obstacle. None of them owned a boat, so they decided to “borrow” one from Mr Taniela Uhila, a fisherman they all disliked. The boys took little time to prepare for the voyage. Two sacks of bananas, a few coconuts and a small gas burner were all the supplies they packed. It didn’t occur to any of them to bring a map, let alone a compass.

The boys had set up a commune with food garden, gym, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire

No one noticed the small craft leaving the harbour that evening. Skies were fair; only a mild breeze ruffled the calm sea. But that night the boys made a grave error. They fell asleep. A few hours later they awoke to water crashing down over their heads. It was dark. They hoisted the sail, which the wind promptly tore to shreds. Next to break was the rudder. “We drifted for eight days,” Mano told me. “Without food. Without water.” The boys tried catching fish. 

They managed to collect some rainwater in hollowed-out coconut shells and shared it equally between them, each taking a sip in the morning and another in the evening.

Then, on the eighth day, they spied a miracle on the horizon. A small island, to be precise. Not a tropical paradise with waving palm trees and sandy beaches, but a hulking mass of rock, jutting up more than a thousand feet out of the ocean. These days, ‘Ata is considered uninhabitable. But “by the time we arrived,” Captain Warner wrote in his memoirs, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year.

The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. 

Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits. And their spirits needed lifting. All summer long it hardly rained, driving the boys frantic with thirst. They tried constructing a raft in order to leave the island, but it fell apart in the crashing surf.

Worst of all, Stephen slipped one day, fell off a cliff and broke his leg. The other boys picked their way down after him and then helped him back up to the top. They set his leg using sticks and leaves. “Don’t worry,” Sione joked. “We’ll do your work, while you lie there like King Taufa‘ahau Tupou himself!”

They survived initially on fish, coconuts, tame birds (they drank the blood as well as eating the meat); seabird eggs were sucked dry. Later, when they got to the top of the island, they found an ancient volcanic crater, where people had lived a century before. There the boys discovered wild taro, bananas and chickens (which had been reproducing for the 100 years since the last Tongans had left).

When they arrived home, they found the police waiting to meet them. They were arrested and thrown in jail

They were finally rescued on Sunday 11 September 1966. The local physician later expressed astonishment at their muscled physiques and Stephen’s perfectly healed leg. But this wasn’t the end of the boys’ little adventure, because, when they arrived back in Nuku‘alofa police boarded Peter’s boat, arrested the boys and threw them in jail. Mr Taniela Uhila, whose sailing boat the boys had “borrowed” 15 months earlier, was still furious, and he’d decided to press charges.

Fortunately for the boys, Peter came up with a plan. It occurred to him that the story of their shipwreck was perfect Hollywood material. And being his father’s corporate accountant, Peter managed the company’s film rights and knew people in TV. So from Tonga, he called up the manager of Channel 7 in Sydney. “You can have the Australian rights,” he told them. “Give me the world rights.” 

Next, Peter paid Mr Uhila £150 for his old boat, and got the boys released on condition that they would cooperate with the movie. A few days later, a team from Channel 7 arrived.

The mood when the boys returned to their families in Tonga was jubilant. Almost the entire island of Haʻafeva – population 900 – had turned out to welcome them home. Peter was proclaimed a national hero. Soon he received a message from King Taufa‘ahau Tupou IV himself, inviting the captain for an audience. “Thank you for rescuing six of my subjects,” His Royal Highness said. “Now, is there anything I can do for you?” The captain didn’t have to think long. “Yes! I would like to trap lobster in these waters and start a business here.” The king consented. Peter returned to Sydney, resigned from his father’s company and commissioned a new ship. Then he had the six boys brought over and granted them the thing that had started it all: an opportunity to see the world beyond Tonga. He hired them as the crew of his new fishing boat.

While the boys of ‘Ata have been consigned to obscurity, Golding’s book is still widely read. Media historians even credit him as being the unwitting originator of one of the most popular entertainment genres on television today: reality TV. “I read and reread Lord of the Flies ,” divulged the creator of hit series Survivor in an interview.

It’s time we told a different kind of story. The real Lord of the Flies is a tale of friendship and loyalty; one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other. After my wife took Peter’s picture, he turned to a cabinet and rummaged around for a bit, then drew out a heavy stack of papers that he laid in my hands. 

His memoirs, he explained, written for his children and grandchildren. I looked down at the first page. “Life has taught me a great deal,” it began, “including the lesson that you should always look for what is good and positive in people.”

• This is an adapted excerpt from Rutger Bregman’s Humankind, translated by Elizabeth Manton and Erica Moore. A live streamed Q&A with Bregman and Owen Jones takes place at 7pm on 19 May 2020.

(Source: The Guardian)

Shipping containers used to house homeless children

More than 210,000 children are estimated to be homeless, with some being temporarily housed in converted shipping containers, a report says.

The Children's Commissioner for England says that as well as the 124,000 children officially homeless, a further 90,000 are estimated to be "sofa-surfing".

Her report tells of families housed in repurposed shipping containers and office blocks, and whole families living in tiny spaces.

Councils blamed a £159m funding gap.

A spokesman for the Department for Communities and Local Government said anyone who feels they have been placed in unsuitable accommodation should request a review.

'Blisteringly hot'
The report, entitled Bleak Houses, found the use of shipping containers as temporary accommodation was leading to cramped conditions and inhospitable temperatures.

One mother told the report's authors she had to sleep with the front door wide open in the summer and her baby got heat rash - but in winter it was too cold.

Often, the units have not been properly designed with children in mind, the report found, with ovens and other dangers too close to the ground and in reach of very young children.

The Children's Commissioner, Anne Longfield, who visited children affected by homelessness, said it was sad and surprising to learn of the new developments councils were turning to in order to deal with the problem.

"Office block conversions, in which whole families live in single rooms barely bigger than a parking space, and shipping containers which are blisteringly hot in summer and freezing in the winter months," she said.

The report does not contain data on how many councils are using shipping containers to house families, but it said areas where this happens include Brighton, Cardiff, Ealing, in west London, and Bristol.

Bristol City Council said it did not direct families to the containers and only provided land for them, and the units were instead operated by a charity.

The Children's Commissioner also expressed concern about families living in converted offices.

In Harlow, Essex, 13 office blocks have been converted into more than 1,000 individual flats.

In one such building, Templefields House, some units measure 18 sq m and are being used to house whole families, with parents and children sleeping in a single room also used as the kitchen.

The average size of a home in England and Wales is 90 sq m.

In the area surrounding another building, Terminus House, also in Harlow, crime rose by 20% in the first 10 months after tenants moved there in April 2018.

Office block conversions are often located on or near industrial estates, presenting risks to safety, and are far away from shops and other amenities.

Living in the developments can also be a "stigmatising experience", the report said, with children being referred to as "office block kids".

This was "compounding their sense of isolation and difference to their peers".

'Intimidating'
B&Bs are also being used as temporary accommodation, creating "intimidating and potentially unsafe environments" for children.

The bathrooms in B&Bs are often shared with other residents and vulnerable adults, including those with mental health or drug abuse problems.

Ealing Council, which has converted shipping containers into temporary housing, says the accommodation is much better than standard B&Bs with shared facilities.

It says it has been pushed into using novel solutions because of the wider housing crisis.

Of the 2,420 families known to be living in B&Bs in December 2018, a third had been there for more than six weeks - despite this being unlawful.

Analysis in the report, released on Wednesday, found that in 2017, around two in five children in temporary accommodation had been there for at least six months.

Around one in 20 - an estimated 6,000 children - had been there for at least a year.

The figures used for the analysis of those in temporary accommodation relate to the end of 2018, while the number of those estimated to be sofa-surfing are taken from an official household survey for the year 2016-17.

At risk
The report warns that a further 375,000 children in England are in households that have fallen behind on rent or mortgage payments.

This means thousands more are at financial risk of becoming homeless in the future.

Polly Neate, chief executive of housing and homelessness charity, Shelter, said no child should be spending months, if not years, living in a shipping container, office block or emergency B&B.

She said the charity constantly heard of struggling families being forced to accept "downright dangerous accommodation" because they had nowhere else to go.

She said housing benefit must be increased urgently and that three million more social homes needed to be built.

Local Government Association housing spokesman Martin Tett said councils desperately wanted to find every family a secure home.

"However, the severe lack of social rented homes available in which to house families means councils have no choice but to place households in temporary accommodation."

He highlighted a £159m funding gap in councils' homelessness services budgets, and urged the government to fund and give back councils their historic role of building homes with the right infrastructure required.

The DCLG spokesman said the government had invested £1.2bn to tackle all types of homelessness which had helped reduce the number of families in B&B accommodation.

(Source: BBC)

Why are dusters often yellow?

The humble duster is a familiar household object but why do they often seem to be made of the same soft yellow fabric?

Dot Unwin, 64, from Mansfield in Nottinghamshire wrote to the BBC about this "oddity that has puzzled me for years".

"There are all sorts of colours for dishcloths and sponges but I've never seen a pink or blue duster," she said.

"When pompous folk pontificate on the meaning of life and the big questions I always wait until they've finished and throw that one in - 'and why are dusters yellow?'."

There are a number of theories as to why dusters are yellow

Roy Bartlett, 70, from Surrey said he had also been "searching for an answer for ages".

We spoke to some experts and a number of theories emerged.

The answer could lie in the naturally yellow cotton which originally came from China, according to Professor Beverly Lemire, a lecturer in material culture at the University of Alberta in Canada.

"The best of this hard-wearing cotton was made into trousers called nankeen trousers or breeches," she said.

When the trousers wore out, they would be cut up and recycled as cleaning clothes.

"Very likely there were lower grade cottons that became associated with cleaning clothes and dusters," she said.

Nankeen trousers like these were chopped up
and recycled as dusters when they were worn out,
according to Professor Beverly Lemire

The entry for nankeen in The Spinning World: the Global History of Cotton Textiles (2009) notes that Lancashire started to make nankeen cotton cloth by the late 1700s.

"For a widespread utilitarian use, consumers need to develop an association between a particular type of object and its use," said Professor Lemire. "This is why I think a mass market was created.

"Very likely Lancashire manufacturers were sourcing yellow cotton wherever they could as a means to cash in on the fad for this yellow fabric," she said.

Staff at the Royal Museums Greenwich said they had heard butter and cheese making could have a connection with dusters.

"Dusters and cleaning cloths were traditionally made from rags recycled within the domestic environment before mass production," a spokeswoman said.

"Muslin cloths used in the making of butter and cheese were recycled in this way, the yellow staining proving so popular that enterprising weavers produced cloth dyed yellow for this purpose."

But the connection could also be associated with flags, because the yellow flag was linked to disease on ships, she said.

The yellow flag is the international maritime signal for the letter Q, which
meant the ship needed to be quarantined due to disease on board

Lee, a cleaning contractor from Wokingham, told LBC: "When boats came into port they would wave a big yellow flag to show that everyone on board was disease-free. The colour yellow then became associated with cleanliness."

Charles Ashburner, chief executive of the Flag Institute, added: "The Q flag is a plain yellow flag and it originally meant your ship had disease on board and was under quarantine.

"In modern use it indicates the opposite, that the ship is free of disease and the vessel is ready for boarding and inspection, but it's very rarely used now."

Mr Ashburner said he had never heard of a link between the yellow flag and dusters but "supposed it could be possible".

"You would not have wanted to use a flag as a duster though because by the time it stops being used as a flag it's filthy."

(Source: BBC)

15 paradoxes that will make your head explode

"I know one thing," Socrates famously said. "That I know nothing."

It's a crucial insight from one of the founders of Western philosophy: You should question everything you think you know.

Indeed, the closer you look, the more you'll start to recognize paradoxes all around you.

Even Socrates is baffled.The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David (1787)

To go anywhere, you must go halfway first, and then you must go half of the remaining distance, and half of the remaining distance, and so forth to infinity: Thus, motion is impossible.

The dichotomy paradox has been attributed to ancient Greek philosopher Zeno, and it was supposedly created as a proof that the universe is singular and that change, including motion, is impossible (as posited by Zeno's teacher, Parmenides).

People have intuitively rejected this paradox for years.

From a mathematical perspective, the solution -- formalized in the 19th century -- is to accept that one-half plus one-quarter plus one-eighth plus one-sixteenth and so on ... adds up to one. This is similar to saying that 0.999... equals 1.

But this theoretical solution doesn't actually answer how an object can reach its destination. The solution to that question is more complex and still murky, relying on 20th-century theories about matter, time, and space not being infinitely divisible.

In any instant, a moving object is indistinguishable from a nonmoving object: Thus motion is impossible.

This is called the arrow paradox, and it's another of Zeno's arguments against motion. The issue here is that in a single instant of time, zero seconds pass, and so zero motion happens. Zeno argued that if time were made up of instants, the fact that motion doesn't happen in any particular instant would mean motion doesn't happen.

As with the dichotomy paradox, the arrow paradox actually hints at modern understandings of quantum mechanics. In his book "Reflections on Relativity," Kevin Brown notes that in the context of special relativity, an object in motion is different from an object at rest. Relativity requires that objects moving at different speeds will appear different to outside observers and will themselves have different perceptions of the world around them.

If you restored a ship by replacing each of its wooden parts, would it remain the same ship?

Another classic from ancient Greece, the Ship of Theseus paradox gets at the contradictions of identity. It was famously described by Plutarch:

"The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, in so much that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same."

Can an omnipotent being create a rock too heavy for itself to lift?

While we're at it, how can evil exist if God is omnipotent? And how can free will exist if God is omniscient?

These are a few of the many paradoxes that exist when you try to apply logic to definitions of God.

Some people might cite these paradoxes as reasons not to believe in a supreme being; however, others would say they are inconsequential or invalid.

There's an infinitely long "horn" that has a finite volume but an infinite surface area.

Moving ahead to a problem posed in the 17th century, we've got one of many paradoxes related to infinity and geometry.

"Gabriel's Horn" is formed by taking the curve y = 1/x and rotating it around the horizontal axis, as shown in the picture. Using techniques from calculus that make it possible to calculate areas and volumes of shapes constructed this way, it's possible to see that the infinitely long horn actually has a finite volume equal to π, but an infinite surface area.

As stated in the MathWorld article on the horn, this means that the horn could hold a finite volume of paint but would require an infinite amount of paint to cover its entire surface.

A heterological word is one that does not describe itself. Does "heterological" describe itself?

Here is one of many self-referential paradoxes that kept modern mathematicians and logicians up at night.

An example of a heterological word is "verb," which is not a verb (as opposed to "noun," which is itself a noun). Another example is "long," which is not a long word (as opposed to "short," which is a short word).

So is "heterological" a heterological word? If it were a word that didn't describe itself, then it would describe itself; but if it did describe itself, then it would not be a word that described itself.

This is related to Russell's Paradox, which asked if the set of things that don't contain themselves contained itself. By creating self-destructing sets like these, Bertrand Russell and others showed the importance of establishing careful rules when creating sets, which would lay the groundwork for 20th-century mathematics.

Pilots can get out of combat duty if they are psychologically unfit, but anyone who tries to get out of combat duty proves he is sane.

"Catch-22," a satirical World War II novel by Joseph Heller, named the situation where someone is in need of something that can only be had by not being in need of it -- which is a kind of self-referential paradox.

Protagonist Yossarian is introduced to the paradox with regard to pilot evaluation but eventually sees paradoxical (and oppressive) rules everywhere he looks.

There is something interesting about every number.

After all, 1 is the first nonzero natural number; 2 is the smallest prime number; 3 is the first odd prime number; 4 is the smallest composite number; etc. And when you finally reach a number that seems not to have anything interesting about it, then that number is interesting by virtue of being the first number that is not interesting.

The Interesting Number Paradox relies on an imprecise definition of "interesting," making this a somewhat sillier version of some of the other paradoxes, like the heterological paradox, that rely on contradictory self-references.

Quantum-computing researcher Nathaniel Johnston came up with a clever resolution of the paradox: Instead of relying on an intuitive notion of "interesting" as in the original paradox, he defined an interesting whole number as one appearing somewhere in the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, a collection of tens of thousands of mathematical sequences like the prime numbers, the Fibonacci numbers, or the Pythagorean triples.

Based on this definition, as of Johnston's initial blog post in June 2009, the first uninteresting number -- the smallest whole number that didn't show up in any of the sequences -- was 11,630. Since new sequences are added to the encyclopedia all the time, some of which include previously uninteresting numbers, as of Johnston's most recent update in November 2013, the current smallest uninteresting number is 14,228.

In a bar, there is always at least one customer for whom it is true that if he is drinking, everyone is drinking.

Conditional statements in formal logic sometimes have counterintuitive interpretations, and the drinking paradox is a great example.

At first glance, the paradox suggests that one person is causing the rest of the bar to drink.

In fact, all it's saying is that it would be impossible for everyone in the bar to be drinking unless every single customer were drinking. Therefore, there is at least one customer there (i.e., the last customer not drinking) who by drinking could make it so that everyone in the bar was drinking.

A ball that can be cut into a finite number of pieces can be reassembled into two balls of the same size.

The Banach-Tarski paradox relies on a lot of the strange and counterintuitive properties of infinite sets and geometric rotations.

The pieces that the ball gets cut into are very strange-looking, and the paradox only works for an abstract, mathematical sphere: As nice as it would be to take an apple, cut it up, and reassemble the pieces so you have an extra apple for your friend, physical balls made of matter can't be disassembled like a purely mathematical sphere.

A 100-gram potato is 99% water. If it dries to become 98% water, it will weigh only 50 grams.

Even when working with old-fashioned finite quantities, math can lead to strange results.

The key to the potato paradox is to closely look at the math behind the nonwater content of the potato. Since the potato is 99% water, the dry components are 1% of its mass. The potato starts at 100 grams, so that means that it contains 1 gram of dry material. When the dried-out potato is 98% water, that 1 gram of dry material now needs to account for 2% of the potato's weight. One gram is 2% of 50 grams, so this must be the new weight of the potato.

If just 23 people are in a room, there's a better-than-even chance at least two of them have the same birthday.

Another surprising math result, the birthday paradox comes from a careful analysis of the probabilities involved. If two people are in a room together, then there's a 364/365 chance they do not have the same birthday (if we ignore leap years and assume that all birthdays are equally likely), since there are 364 days that are different from the first person's birthday that can then be the second person's birthday.

If there are three people in the room, then the probability that they all have different birthdays is 364/365 x 363/365: As above, once we know the first person's birthday, there are 364 choices of a different birthday for the second person, and this leaves 363 choices for the third person's birthday that are different from those two.

Continuing in this fashion, once you hit 23 people, the probability that all 23 have different birthdays drops below 50%, and so the probability that at least two have the same birthday is better than even.

Most people's friends have more friends than they do.

This seems impossible but is true when you consider the math.

The friendship paradox is caused by how, in most social networks, most people have a few friends, while a handful of people have a large number of friends. Those social butterflies in the second group disproportionately show up as friends of people with smaller numbers of friends, and drag up the average number of friends-of-friends accordingly.

A physicist working on inventing a time machine is visited by an older version of himself. The older version gives him the plans for a time machine, and the younger version uses those plans to build the time machine, eventually going back in time as the older version of himself.

Time travel, if possible, could result in some extremely strange situations.

The bootstrap paradox is the opposite of the classic grandfather paradox: Rather than going back in time and preventing oneself from going back in time, some information or object is brought back in time, becoming a "younger" version of itself, and enabling itself later to travel back in time. One then has to ask: How did that information or object come into being in the first place?

The bootstrap paradox is common in science fiction and takes its name from a short story by Robert Heinlein.

If there's nothing particularly unique about Earth, then there should be lots of alien civilizations in our galaxy. However, we've found no evidence of other intelligent life in the universe.

Finally, some see the silence of our universe as a paradox.

One of the underlying assumptions in astronomy is that Earth is a pretty common planet in a pretty common solar system in a pretty common galaxy, and that there is nothing cosmically unique about us. NASA's Kepler satellite has found evidence that there are probably 11 billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy. Given this, life somewhat like us should have evolved somewhere not overly far away from us (at least on a cosmic scale).

But despite developing ever-more-powerful telescopes, we have had no evidence of technological civilizations anywhere else in the universe. Civilizations are noisy: Humanity broadcasts TV and radio signals that are unmistakably artificial. A civilization like ours should leave evidence that we would find.

Furthermore, a civilization that evolved millions of years ago (pretty recent from a cosmic perspective) would have had plenty of time to at least begin colonizing the galaxy, meaning there should be even more evidence of their existence. Indeed, given enough time, a colonizing civilization would be able to colonize the entire galaxy over the course of millions of years.

The physicist Enrico Fermi, for whom this paradox was named, simply asked, "Where are they?" in the middle of a lunchtime discussion with his colleagues. One resolution of the paradox challenges the above idea that Earth is common and posits instead that complex life is extremely rare in the universe. Another posits that technological civilizations inevitably wipe themselves out through nuclear war or ecological devastation.

A more optimistic solution is the idea that the aliens are intentionally hiding themselves from us until we become more socially and technologically mature. Yet another idea is that alien technology is so advanced that we wouldn't even be able to recognize it.

(Source: BI UK)

Anne Bonny: One of the few female pirates to sail the high seas

Known for her role as a pirate in the crew of “Calico Jack” Rackham from 1718 to 1720, Anne Bonny’s name has gone down in the history books. She didn’t allow her gender to hinder her–she was as intimidating as any pirate that sailed the high seas.

She is known for her career along with fellow female pirate Mary Read as the two drank, swore, and dressed as men. In 1720 she was captured along with the rest of Rackham’s crew. Piracy demanded a direct death sentence, but Bonny escaped the gallows when her sentence was commuted due to her pregnancy. This didn’t stop her from being forever remembered in song, stories, books, and films.

Early life of Anne Bonny:
Information about Anne Bonny is mostly unverified, and all the information about her comes from Captain Johnson. He wrote the famous account of pirates called A General History of The Pyrates. In his book, he states that Bonny was born in Ireland, most likely near Cork, around 1700.  Although it was unverified, Johnson stated that her father was a lawyer and her mother was his maid. The affair was sensational and, to escape the gossip, her father was forced to relocate with them to America.

Life in America:
Her father chose Charleston as the place to begin their new life. There he initially set up as an attorney, later becoming a successful merchant. Anne was just as good at getting into trouble as her father was good at being a merchant. One incident that she was involved in is when she protected herself from a sexual assault and beat up her attacker. Although her father did well in his business, Anne was turning out to be a disappointment.

Instead of attracting a rich suitor she settled for a poor sailor named James Bonny, much to her father’s disapproval.  He disowned her when she married Bonny. She may have only been sixteen at the time.

Life as a sailor’s wife:
Not discouraged by her father’s rejection, Anne and James set out for New Providence. There they set up in Nassau, but living was difficult. Anne’s husband found work as a sell-out, turning over pirates for small amounts of money. This made Anne resent her husband and led to the dissolution of their marriage. It’s suggested around 1718 or 1719 she met Edward England, better known as “Calico Jack” Rackham.

He was a previous crew member of notorious pirate Charles Vane, who he deposed of his captaincy. Anne then went to Cuba to give birth to a child, only to return and be the world’s most fearsome pirate.

It’s a pirate’s life for Anne:
The life of a pirate suited Anne Bonny just fine; so much so that she drank, swore, and fought like one too. It is at her trial that details of how fearsome she actually was came to light.  Based on the testimony of these sailors, Anne and her fellow female cohort were the worst of the bunch.

Once vessels were captured the captives told how the two females would suggest to other pirates to commit acts of brutality on the captives. Anne and Mary were notorious for dressing up as men, but there seemed to be two differing accounts of the underlying story of the two ladies. The first is that Anne tried to seduce Mary one day aboard the ship – she revealed to Mary that she was not a man and was, in fact, a lady. This lead Mary to also reveal to her that she was also a lady. Another account is that the two were lovers who had already made their acquaintance while still in Nassau.

The end of the line as the crew is captured:
Anne Bonny is remembered as a fierce and brutal pirate in history, but actually, her career as a pirate was short. She and the entire crew had a bounty placed on their heads, and in the late 1720s Captain Jonathan Barnet, under the authority of then-governor Woodes Rogers, caught up to the pirates. He received information about their location and cornered them.

The reports of the fight state that the male pirates hid away under the deck while the ladies put up the last stand. Anne and Mary lived up to their names as they fought to the end, cursing their male counterparts. In part due to the men having drunk the entire night long, they didn’t put up too much resistance, and they were all soon captured.

The trial didn’t last long but was a sensation:
During the golden age of piracy, there was a lot of trading and a lot of money to be made as a pirate. This meant that merchants had also lost a lot due to theft by pirates. The situation drew out the wrath of the governments, which did not hesitate to demand the death penalty as punishment to deter would-be pirates. This was the fate of Rackham’s crew – their trials were swift and so too were their executions. According to reports, the trial of the men was rapid, and they were found guilty. Their executions were set for November 18 at Gallows Point at Port Royal. Before Rackham met his death, Anne went to see him.

She told him that had he fought, he would not have needed to hang. But he was soon executed alongside four of his men. As for Anne and Mary Read, both their deaths were postponed due to both of them claiming that they were pregnant. This news was declared on November 28 towards the end of their trials and both women were spared the gallows. But Mary would not live very long thereafter, as she died in prison after a few months.

Life after the trial:
Anne Bonny was a sensation, and one would expect much detail to come to light after her trial. But this is not the case, as she faded into obscurity. Most of what is known about her, and in fact about most pirates of this era, comes from Captain Charles Johnson’s book. Many historians have problems verifying his sources. But what he did reveal in his 1724 book is that she did not die in prison and she was not executed. After giving birth, her sentence was changed repeatedly.

After that, it’s anybody’s guess what became of Anne Bonny, and there are many different versions. Some reports state that she may have returned to her father in Charleston, where she reconciled with him and turned to a life of nobility.  She was supposed to have married someone respectable and lived out her years peacefully until her death.

She may have had several children and never returned to the sea. Others reported that she married in Port Royal or Nassau. All these reports are unverifiable, but her impact on folklore and culture is still notable, About Education reported.

What can be known about Anne is that she had a spirited character, and refused to accept the repression of other women of her time, who were kept mostly indoors. Thus she was seen as an inspiration and role model for many women who came after her. She went against the grain of what women of that time were supposed to be. She disobeyed her father and ran away from her husband.

She had led a new way of thinking, and not just because of her life as a pirate. Jack Rackham himself was a small-time pirate who preyed on the weak merchant boats.

Read another story from us: Captain William Kidd – the unluckiest pirate in history

Bonny’s fame came about because she led a life which was out of the ordinary, and she seized an opportunity that many wouldn’t dream of taking. She rewrote the role played by women and is one of the most notable female pirates in history.

(Source: The Vintage News)