The Long View

https://archive.org/details/the-strand/The%20Strand%20v25%201903/page/406/mode/2up

In 1903, David Walsh, M.D., proposed building a national monument in Hyde Park so that the greatness of the British empire might be remembered in 8,000 years.

A square pyramid 150 feet high could enclose sculptures depicting British life and serve as a mausoleum for distinguished Britons. The cost might be defrayed by public subscription.

Asked his opinion, architect Aston Webb wrote, “It sounds to me too grand to have much chance of being carried through in this material age of ours, but I wish you all success.”

| History · Oddities

Losing Chess

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Suicide_chess_1._d3_forced_loss.gif
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In losing chess, captures are obligatory, and the goal is to lose all one’s pieces or be stalemated. This makes it perilous from the start: Of White’s 20 legal opening moves, 13 allow Black to bait him successively through 16 consecutive captures, losing (and winning) the game by force. The example above shows what happens if White unwisely opens with 1. d3. If he’d started with 1. e3, he himself could have forced a win — if he knew all the correct lines.

| Entertainment

Read It Aloud

Center Alley worse jester pore ladle gull hoe lift wetter stop-murder an toe heft-cisterns. Daze worming war furry wicket an shellfish parsons, spatially dole stop-murder, hoe dint lack Center Alley an, infect, word orphan traitor pore gull mar lichen ammonol dinner hormone bang. Oily inner moaning disk wicket oiled worming shorted, ‘Center Alley, gad otter bet, an goiter wark! Suture lacy ladle bomb! Shaker lake!’ an firm moaning tell gnat disk ratchet gull word heifer wark lacquer hearse toe kipper horsing ardor, washer heft-cistern’s closing, maker bets, gore tutor star fur perversions, cooker males, washer dashes an doe oily udder hoard wark. Nor wander pore Center Alley worse tarred an disgorged!

— Howard L. Chace, Anguish Languish, 1956

| Language

The Oppel–Kundt Illusion

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fig_OK.tif
Image: Wikimedia Commons

A segment of an image tends to seem larger when it’s filled with visual elements. This is true whether the elements are discrete or continuous.

Above, the right part of the top figure and the left part of the bottom figure each seems to fill more than half of its tier, though plainly these impressions can’t both be valid.

The illusion was first studied by German physicists Johann Joseph Oppel and August Kundt in the 1860s.

| Science & Math

The Camel Girl

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ella_Harper_(The_Camel_Girl).jpg

Born with an orthopedic condition that caused her knees to bend backward, Ella Harper made a virtue of necessity and joined W.H. Harris’s Nickel Plate Circus, where she took up a starring role and earned $200 a week ($7,200 today). Her pitch card reads:

I am called the camel girl because my knees turn backward. I can walk best on my hands and feet as you see me in the picture. I have traveled considerably in the show business for the past four years and now, this is 1886 and I intend to quit the show business and go to school and fit myself for another occupation.

She married a schoolteacher in 1905 and died in 1921 at 51.

| Oddities

Down and Up

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Encyclopedie_volume_5-140.jpg

The Vermin only teaze and pinch
Their Foes superior by an Inch.
So, Nat’ralists observe, a Flea
Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey,
And these have smaller yet to bite ’em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.

— Jonathan Swift

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.

— Augustus De Morgan

| Poems

The Koffka Ring

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Koffka-Ring_1.svg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In all three of these figures, the gray ring’s color is uniform. But in the second and third figures the upper half appears distinctly darker, showing that the brain exaggerates differences in brightness between adjacent surfaces. German psychologist Kurt Koffka first reported the effect in 1935.

| Science & Math

Memory Span

The peculiar architecture of Echo Bridge, in Newton, Massachusetts, will re-echo a human voice 18 times and a pistol shot (reportedly) 25 times.

In 1889 author Moses King wrote, “The favorite word to hurl at the arch is JULY, and the serious charge of lie — lie — lie is thrown back as vigorously and almost as frequently as if the bridge were a political newspaper in campaign time.”

| Oddities

Family Ties

In Riddles in Mathematics (1961), Eugene Northrop proposes that two men can simultaneously be each other’s uncle and nephew:

Mr. and Mrs. Allen … had a son Tom, and Mr. and Mrs. Black … had a son Dick. Mr. Allen and Mr. Black both died. And Tom and Dick, after they were grown men, each married the other’s mother. Dick and Mrs. Allen then had a son Harry, and Tom and Mrs. Black a son George. Now consider the relationship between Harry and George. Since Harry is the brother of Tom, George’s father, Harry must be George’s uncle. On the other hand George is the brother of Harry’s father, Dick, so Harry must be George’s nephew. In exactly the same way George is Harry’s uncle and nephew.

In Fun for the Family (1939), Jerome S. Meyer observes that if you father a son with the mother of your father’s second wife, and if your stepmother also has a son, then you can dine alone and still enjoy the company of your stepbrother’s nephew’s father, your father’s mother-in-law’s husband, and your stepmother’s father-in-law. Lewis Carroll considered a similar dinner.

| Oddities

Limerick

A certified poet from Slough,
Whose methods of rhyming were rough,
Retorted, “I see
That the letters agree
And if that’s not sufficient I’m through.”

— Clifford Witting

| Language · Poems