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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.