Bookmarks (194)

I was in the chair at a most interesting meeting at the Wakefield Asylum last night. It was, too, a curious sensation, sleeping under the same roof as 1,500 lunatics. I was kept awake by thoughts of the kind of sleep that was going on about me. … I made some preliminary remarks on the wide and desolate borderland of cerebral disturbance that lies...

George Herrick notes this oddity in his 1997 commonplace book: The record of this U.S. congressional hearing on dirigible disasters contains an inadvertent poem — the encoded weather report for April 3, 1933: Washington numoil nihilist radnell deadly wabash. Titusville sanno reflect unripe turfs. Harrington bonfire gecko unfold. George felger naked neggins. Pas roofage gedby gafol. Havana sorrow mabin caramel. Father safable oak barfee...

This rank impossibility by Kokichi Sugihara won second prize in the Neural Correlate Society’s 2016 illusion of the year contest. The key is that the top of each cylinder is not a planar curve. Dickinson College mathematician David Richeson has created an interactive applet that you can use to examine the shape, and see his paper below for an explanation of the math and...

In Ambrosia and Small Beer (1964), Edward Marsh describes a way of passing time during a long sermon: [Y]ou look out for words beginning with each letter of the alphabet in succession, and if you get as far as Z (for which you may count a Z in the middle of a word) you cast a Bible on the ground and leave the building....

Pensées of Mauritian aphorist Malcolm de Chazal: Birdsong is always in pitch. Birds sound wrong only when frightened. The underbrush makes the light chubby. A trotting dog: his hind legs knit and his forelegs crochet. Night softens the mind’s irritations and inflames the body’s. The mouth and eyes are each anagrams of the other. An animal’s feet are as intelligent as a man’s hands....

Perhaps the most touching story is told by a Canadian, Flight-Commander R. Leckie, D.S.O., in a letter home, published in an American paper. After an engagement with hostile aircraft over the North Sea he came down, his seaplane riddled with shrapnel, over fifty miles from land, and then had to act as rescuer and host to the crew of an aeroplane, wrecked by engine...

From Lee Sallows: “The above three strips of ten numbers have an intriguing property. They record how many times each of the decimal digits (shown at left) occur in the other two strips. Hence the 6 in the left-hand strip identifies the number of 0’s in strips B and C, while the 2 in the centre strip counts the number of 3’s present in...

In November 1795, Samuel Taylor Coleridge took a volume of Apuleius from the Bristol Library. In the borrowers’ register, in place of the date, he wrote, “9 Dutch ships taken, with 3000 troops Bravo.”

hippomaniacally adv. in a manner reminiscent of a mad horse frample v. of a horse: to paw the ground accoy v. to quiet or soothe tournure n. graceful manner or bearing In an 1884 letter, Augustus Hare noted that the Bishop of Lichfield drove horses named Pride and Prejudice. “He says people may consider it a terrible thing for a bishop to be drawn...

The Greek architect Dinocrates proposed carving Mount Athos into a colossal man who held a city in one hand and with the other poured a river into the sea. Alexander the Great rejected the proposal because (among other things!) it would have required importing grain by ship rather than growing it near the city.

For decades, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. kept a record of the books he read. Pleasingly, the last entry is Thornton Wilder’s 1935 novel Heaven’s My Destination. In Winter Rules, George Gardner Herrick claims that the book was not to be found in Holmes’ library in Washington or Massachusetts. I can’t confirm that, though. Sort of related: The definition of confection in Samuel Johnson’s...

NUTHATCH and UNTHATCH are nearly the same word. Vladivostok is farther south than Venice. Thackeray called George IV’s prose style “lax, maudlin slipslop.” dollop reads the same upside down. “I shall stipulate that I will only go into Heaven on condition that I am never in a room with more than ten people.” — Edward Lear

One of the most moving epitaphs I ever read — actually it is an inscription — is in Ixelles cemetery, Brussels, on the tomb of a girl who had been the mistress of Gen. Georges Boulanger, a former War Minister of France. She died in July 1891; that September, heartbroken, Boulanger made the supreme romantic gesture, one that many, many bereft lovers have threatened,...

In their 1943 handbook The Reader Over Your Shoulder, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge note that writers are prone to exaggerate descriptions of quantity and duration. “There should never be any doubt left as to how much, or how long.” They offer this quantified example: (100%) Mr. Jordan’s fortune consisted wholly of bar-gold. (99%) Practically all his fortune consisted of bar-gold. (95%) His fortune...

When old Green, the frame-maker, had finished the frame for Holman Hunt’s The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, Hunt went to see it and told him it was quite satisfactory. ‘Ah,’ said Green, ‘but you’ll see the picture will set it off amazingly.’ — Henry Holiday, Reminiscences of My Life, 1914

In his 2007 history The Slave Ship, Marcus Rediker reports that sharks would sometimes follow slave ships entirely across the Atlantic, “that they might devour the bodies of the dead when thrown overboard,” in the words of veteran captain Hugh Crow. Observer Alexander Falconbridge wrote that sharks swarmed “in almost incredible numbers about the slave ships, devouring with great dispatch the dead bodies of...

When an editor complained that Gerald Kersh used too many long words, Kersh bet him £50 that he could write a story entirely in monosyllables. Kersh won: We met on the stairs of Time: I was on my way up; he was on his way down. I was young; he was old, and poor — so poor that he did not know when luck...

According to a popular story, a resident of Mechelen, Belgium, emerged unsteadily from an inn one foggy night in 1687, looked up at St. Rumbold’s Cathedral, and raised an alarm — the tower was on fire. Residents flung open their windows and saw the same reddish glow. The rumor raised an uproar, and the mayor organized a chain of volunteers to pass buckets of...

On May 19, 1914, G. Howell Parr of Baltimore lay down and rolled three continuous miles to win a bet of $1,000. Details, from the New York Times: Wagered $1,000 he could roll three miles. Made the time limit June 1. Started at 8 o’clock last night from the Elk Ridge Kennels. Finished at 11:10 A M. to-day at Charles Street and University Parkway....

TO WIDOWERS AND SINGLE GENTLEMEN. — WANTED by a lady, a SITUATION to superintend the household and preside at table. She is Agreeable, Becoming, Careful, Desirable, English, Facetious, Generous, Honest, Industrious, Judicious, Keen, Lively, Merry, Natty, Obedient, Philosophic, Quiet, Regular, Sociable, Tasteful, Useful, Vivacious, Womanish, Xantippish, Youthful, Zealous, &c. Address X. Y. Z., Simmond’s Library, Edgeware-road. — Times, 1842

An optical illusion. These circles are concentric. (Baingio Pinna and Richard L. Gregory, “Shifts of Edges and Deformations of Patterns,” Perception 31:12 [December 2002], 1503-1508.)

Franz Liszt’s 1851 étude “La Campanella” is one of the most technically demanding pieces ever written for piano. In bar 102, below, the left hand has to jump 35 half-steps, nearly three octaves, in the space of a sixteenth note. That’s about 46 centimeters.

Say what you will about hell, it’s very well organized. According to the 17th-century grimoire Ars Goetia, the underworld is ruled by 72 demons, each with its own sigil (above) and served by a sort of infernal bureaucracy: Aim (also Aym or Haborym) is a Great Duke of Hell, very strong, and rules over twenty-six legions of demons. He sets cities, castles and great...

When Qantas’ last Boeing 747 departed Australia to retire in the United States, it drew a kangaroo with its flight path.

“We discover in ourselves what others hide from us, and we recognize in others what we hide from ourselves.” — Vauvenargues

A problem from the January-February 1991 issue of Quantum: Prove that the area of the yellow rectangle is half that of the full octagon.

Apocryphal but entertaining: Allegedly the Duke of Wellington sent this letter to the British War Office during the Peninsular War of 1808-1814: Gentlemen: Whilst marching to Portugal to a position which commands the approach to Madrid and the French forces, my officers have been diligently complying with your request which has been sent by H. M. ship from London to Lisbon and then by...

Thomas Taverner published this remarkable problem in the Dubuque Chess Journal in 1889. White is to mate in two moves.

Sir, The hymn ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, sung to the right tune and in a not-too-brisk tempo, makes a very good egg timer. If you put the egg into boiling water and sing all five verses and chorus, the egg will be just right when you come to Amen. — Mrs. G.H. Moore, letter to the Daily Telegraph, 1983

Writing home from Princeton in 1939, 21-year-old Richard Feynman challenged his father to solve “this problem in long division. Each of the dots represents some digit (any digit). Each of the A’s represent the same digit (for example, a 3). None of the dots are the same as the A (i.e., no dot can be a 3 if A is 3).” We don’t know...

Psychoanalyst Robert Lindner received a remarkable client at his Baltimore practice: “Kirk Allen” had read a series of science fiction novels and “In some weird and inexplicable way I knew that what I was reading was my biography.” (Lindner never revealed which series this was, but some have theorized that it was the Barsoom books of Edgar Rice Burroughs, which describe the adventures of...

A popular mathematical puzzle asks: Suppose Earth were perfectly spherical and wrapped with a string at the equator. If we wanted to raise the string 1 meter off the ground, all around the world, how much longer would it need to be? Surprisingly, the answer is only about 6.3 meters. A circle of radius r has a circumference of 2πr. We’re adding a meter...

Two sadistically addressed letters, from the Strand, August 1897: “The accompanying envelope looks hopeless at first glance. It is a fair sample of the kind of thing which is specially invented to try the patience of the splendid staff of officials at the G.P.O. Hold it horizontally, on a level with the eyes, and you will read the address: ‘Miss J. M. Holland, Albion...

Is Dracula Moriarty? Is Holmes Van Helsing? In an article in the Baker Street Journal Christmas Annual of 1957, William Leonard points out that the events of Bram Stoker’s novel unfold between May and November 1890, a period in which Watson records only three cases with Sherlock Holmes. Stoker’s novel cites several news accounts about the growing mystery, which would certainly have attracted Holmes’...

The infinite monkey theorem holds that a monkey typing at random for an infinite amount of time will almost certainly produce the works of Shakespeare. This may be true, but mathematicians Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta of the University of Technology Sydney find that it would take an extraordinarily long time — longer, in fact, than the life span of the universe. Assuming a...

This unusual memorial stands in the New Forest National Park near Lyndhurst, Hampshire. At the start of World War I, manpower shortages prevented England from importing enough Canadian timber to supply the war’s needs, so English forests had to be felled to meet the requirement. The local foresters were away fighting, so a Portuguese Army unit with the Canadian Timber Corps lent its aid....

If I take a single glance at a speckled hen, I know that I’ve seen many speckles, but I can’t say how many I’ve seen. I have immediate experience of a determinate fact, but the experience doesn’t provide certain knowledge of the fact. “[O]ur difficulty is not that there must be characteristics of the many-speckled datum which pass unnoticed,” writes philosopher Roderick Chisholm. “[I]t...

Before 1963, hungry squirrels in Longview, Washington, had to leave their park and run across Olympia Way to collect nuts near a local office building. After seeing many of them killed, resident Amos Peters built a dedicated 60-foot bridge above the road. It’s now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Three girls dressed up in white, green, and blue dresses. They also wore shoes of these three colors. Only Ann wore a dress of the same color as her shoes. Neither Betty’s dress nor her shoes were white, and Carol’s shoes were green. What was the color of each girl’s dress?

Richard Jefferies’ 1885 novel After London is one of the first post-apocalypse stories, an adventure tale set in a future England after an unspecified catastrophe has destroyed civilization, cut off communication with the continent, and set the surviving human population back to a quasi-medieval existence among the overgrown ruins of the “ancients.” The nature of the disaster is never explained, but it must have...

In 1784, in the margin of a math notebook, English schoolboy Richard Beale drew a chicken wearing trousers. The Museum of English Rural Life tweeted the find after acquiring 41 Beale family diaries in 2016. Program manager Adam Koszary told the Guardian, “When you see a 13-year-old from the 18th century doing the kind of doodles that kids are doing today, it is so...

Four people are traveling in the dark when they arrive at a river. The narrow bridge can accommodate only two people at a time, and the group has only one torch, which must accompany each party that makes a crossing. Persons A, B, C, and D can cross in 1, 2, 5, and 8 minutes, respectively, and any pair of travelers can move only...

The least knotted of all knots is a simple closed loop, the “unknot.” Certainly this is easy to spot on its own, but adding even a few twists can make it hard to recognize: An elaborately draped loop can be quite difficult to distinguish from a knottier knot. Is this an unknot? (Yes, it is.) Surprisingly, while research is ongoing, it remains unknown whether...

In the 18th century Leonhard Euler famously addressed the question whether it was possible to walk through the city of Königsberg and return to one’s home having crossed each of seven bridges exactly once. The answer, briefly, was no, but in 2013 network scientist Thilo Gross noticed that the city of Bristol has a similar layout, and here the task is possible: If you’re...

Rinaldo Carnielo’s sculpture Tenax Vitae stands in the Galleria Rinaldo Carnielo in Florence. After meeting the sculptor in 1893, Helen Zimmern observed that “for him, the shadow of death pervades all existence,” but “he cares not one jot whether his statues find purchasers so long as he himself is satisfied with the results.”

A paradox by Columbia University logician Haim Gaifman: line 1: The sentence on line 1 is not true. line 2: The sentence on line 1 is not true. line 3: The sentence on line 2 is not true. line 4: The sentence on line 3 is not true. line n + 1: The sentence on line n is not true. All these sentence are...

In the middle of winter when fogs and rains most abound they have a great festival which they call Exmas and for fifty days they prepare for it in the fashion I shall describe. First of all, every citizen is obliged to send to each of his friends and relations a square piece of hard paper stamped with a picture, which in their speech...

A pleasing little detail: In Arthur C. Clarke’s 1946 story “Rescue Party,” a federation of aliens visit Earth immediately before the sun explodes, hoping to rescue its inhabitants. To their surprise, they don’t find us (it turns out we’ve fled the planet), and they comb our deserted civilization. The explorers were particularly puzzled by one room — clearly an office of some kind —...

To disrupt German morale during World War II, the Allies hatched a plan to send anti-Nazi propaganda to German citizens through the mail. They quizzed prisoners of war about the German postal service and drew on local telephone directories to identify 2 million addressees who might receive forged letters and subversive material. Then the letters were loaded into counterfeit mailbags and dropped near destroyed...