Truth, Fiction, and Strangeness

So I was re-reading some Subnormality and encountered the one about Princess Washburn. That got me thinking. The debunkery on display here is nice, but what exactly is she debunking?

Well, she's trying to debunk the idea that "truth is stranger than fiction". That's an aphorism, and debunking one of those is a little like debunking poetry. And if you look at how she goes about it, you can tell how she thinks about the aphorism.

She's using a counterexample, which tells me she thinks of the aphorism as a statement of the type "P always has property Q," specifically, "Fiction is always less strange than truth." She then provides a counterexample consisting of a character who is more strange than truth. QED!

Still, I wonder...

First of all, how do you measure strangeness? If it has to do somehow with averages, then any discrete object you choose is likely to fall away from that average on some scale of measure. The "normal" is an abstraction, even an illusion. Strangeness is more of an intuitive sense of difference from lived or imagined experience. A red, fire-breathing dragon seems less strange than a plaid, gravel-breathing one even though both are equally nonexistent. The red kind is just more common in the domain of fantasy.

Princess Washburn is certainly strange as far as fantasy people go, relative both to other fantasy and reality. But there are real people just as singular relative to other real people, as she is to fantasy people. She just gets to be extra weird by having properties no real person could have. There is a sense in which fiction has the luxury of being stranger because it need not exist. Truth is constrained by reality; fiction only by imagination. Fiction has another degree of weirdness freedom.

But that leads to another question. Is Princess Washburn really fictional? I don't mean, of course, that I think she might be real. I'm not talking about the axis of real vs. fictional. I'm talking about what it means to be fictional, given that one is known to be imaginary. Anything made up is imaginary, but what is fictional?

It seems reasonable to claim that the fictional is anything pertaining to fiction. And except for the fact that she is being discussed by fictional characters in a comic, Princess Washburn has only a tenuous connection to any narrative structure or fictional construct. The details that make her so weird are chosen randomly for the effect of strangeness. What connects coins, spiders, the Rolling Stones, and ultraviolet light, except for being related somehow to Princess Washburn?

Not a whole lot. Her personal details have the broad, scattered effect that the details of a real person do, the effect of springing from a deep, complex, and unstructured development process that is largely opaque to outside observers. Fictional characters, on the other hand, are generally expected to have fairly clear motivations within the confines of the narrative arc.

I think that may be where the aphorism comes from. Saying that truth is stranger than fiction is acknowledging that fiction is a human artifact with fairly simple rules and an expected structure. Fiction, as people say, has to make sense. True stories also make sense, just in a different kind of context. All the motivations are richer, and the character development is more organic, because it is real. Princess Washburn is strange because everything that makes her who she is, is hidden from us. Any real person would also seem strange if all you know about them was a dozen or so random facts.

The personal details of fictional characters are meant to advance the story. But Princess Washburn is a character without a story, or at least not an accessible one. She is more like a real person, in a sense, than a fictional one, except for the part where she doesn't exist. She isn't fictional. She's imaginary.

Fiber arts and Mathematics

"Have you ever wanted to explore the symmetries of the cube and octahedron through an old Japanese art form? Or to investigate fractals using tatting and string art? Or to study the helix by knitting bed socks?" Plus magazine has a review of a book called Crafting by Concepts.

When I saw that, it reminded me of this TED talk from 2009 involving coral, crochet, and hyperbolic geometry.

And writing this post reminded me of the old favorites, Klein Bottle Hat (and Mobius Scarf!)

Henry VIII

A jolly comic!

Plush statistical distributions?

Oh yeah, here you go.

Word Problem of the Week: Unlikely Maternal Scenario

"The past is a foreign country," says the first line of The Go-Between. "They do things differently there." In the case of Gilbert Dyer's Most General School-Assistant, do they ever. On page 182, question 7, we have this amazing scenario:

• Hodge, to inherit, must marry.
• That is, he must marry a specific person.
• His first cousin.
• And gets more money the more kids she has.
• She has 24 boys.
• In 12 years.

Now, I think everyone expects algebra problems to be a bit contrived, possibly to abstract out some real life detail for the sake of the simplicity of the solution. Dyer certainly does this. But something about the little details he does include, makes me find this hilarious. Hodge is honest, Polly is pretty, and they start having kids "honestly, one Year after Marriage."

There are several questions in here that say a lot about the differences we have with those in the 18th century. The next question is about a four-day family beer party and the one after that concerns, as far as I can tell, a patent medicine seller who, for some reason, is operating at a loss.

Word Problem of the Week: Whiskey Rations Aboard Ship

There are two things I find interesting about this problem. First, the detail offered gives it a level of realism that is not typically found in these sorts of texts. On the other hand, the quantities are all represented as variables, which adds a level of abstraction. Thus, the answer gives us a formula for any possible scenario of this type. The problem is number 23 on page 479:

Word Problem of the Week(s): Classical History and Mythology

These problems come from Mathematicall Recreations, or

A Collection of many Problemes extracted out of the Ancient and Modern Philosophers, as Secrets and Experiments in Arithmatick, Geometry, Cosmographie, Horologiographie, Astronomie, Navigation, Musick, Opticks, Architecture, Staticks, Mechanicks, Chemistry, water-works, Fire-works, &c.

Basically, a seventeenth century Dangerous Book For Boys.

Several of the arithmetic questions have to do thematically with the stories of ancient Greece. These are:
Of the number of Souldiers that fought before old Troy.
Of Pythagoras his Schollers.
Of the number of Apples given amongst the Graces and the Muses.
Of the Cups of Croesus. (He gave the Temple 6 golden cups weighing a total of 600 drams, with each one a dram heavier than the next.)
Of Cupid's Apples. (The Muses steal them.)