The Embracing Skeletons of Alepotrypa

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 2015, archaeologists discovered a pair of human skeletons in a cave in southern Greece, where a human settlement had flourished in the Neolithic age. The two, a man and a woman in their early 20s, had been embracing for 5,800 years.

“They’re totally spooning,” anthropologist Bill Parkinson told National Geographic News. “The boy is the big spoon, and the girl is the little spoon: Their arms are draped over each other, their legs are intertwined. It’s unmistakable.”

Archaeologist Anastasia Papathanasiou added, “It’s a very natural hug; it doesn’t look like they were arranged in this posture at a much later date.” How the two had met their end is unknown.

More embracing skeletons.

| Death

Penmanship

In 1855, the town of Salitpa in southern Alabama applied for a federal post office. The residents had intended to name their community after nearby Satilpa Creek, but in completing the paperwork the applicant mistakenly crossed the L instead of the T. The town has been Salitpa ever since.

| Language · Trivia

The Silver Rule

“When asked by a disciple if there were one single word which could serve as a principle of conduct for life, Confucius replied, ‘Perhaps the word reciprocity will do. Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.'” — Analects

| Society

Seniority

Annie, Betty, Carrie, Darla, and Eve all have the same birthday, but all are different ages. On their shared birthday:

  • Darla said to Betty: “I’m 9 years older than Eve.”
  • Eve said to Betty: “I’m 7 years older than Annie.”
  • Annie said to Betty: “Your age is exactly 70 percent greater than mine.”
  • Betty said to Carrie: “Eve is younger than you.”
  • Carrie said to Darla: “The difference between our ages is 6 years.”
  • Carrie said to Annie: “I’m 10 years older than you.”
  • Carrie said to Annie: “Betty is younger than Darla.”
  • Betty said to Carrie: “The difference between your age and Darla’s is the same as the difference between Darla’s and Eve’s.”

Whenever one of them spoke to someone older than herself, everything she said was true, but when she spoke to someone younger, everything she said was false. How old is each person?

Click for Answer
| Uncategorized

“To a Lost Sweetheart”

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When Whistler’s Mother’s Picture’s frame
Split, that sad morn, in two,
Your tense words scorched me like a flame —
You shrieked, “Ah, glue! Get glue!”

O Glue! O God! there was not glue
Enough in all the feet
Of all the kine the wide world through
To hold you to me, Sweet!

— Don Marquis

| Poems

A Union Cipher

This baffling message illustrates a cipher adopted by the Union Army in 1862:

TO GEORGE C. MAYNARD, Washington

Regulars ordered of my to public out suspending received 1862 spoiled thirty I dispatch command of continue of best otherwise worst Arabia my command discharge duty of my last for Lincoln September period your from sense shall duties the until Seward ability to the I a removal evening Adam herald tribune.

PHILIP BRUNER

The address and signature are “covers” that don’t enter into the cipher. The first word, Regulars, is a code indicating that the original message had been written in five columns of nine words each. Tribune, herald, spoiled, Seward, for, and worst are null words; Lincoln is code for Louisville, Kentucky; Adam means General Henry Wager Halleck; and Arabia is code for Major General Don Carlos Buell. The word Period indicates a full stop. This had been the original message:

Louisville, Kentucky
September thirty 1862

General Halleck:

(Adam)   (period)   I           received     last
evening  your       dispatch    suspending   my
removal  from       command.    Out          of
a        sense      of          public       duty,
I        shall      continue    to           discharge
the      duties     of          my           command
to       the        best        of           my
ability  until      otherwise   ordered.

D.C. Buell,
Major General

This message had been enciphered by reading up the fourth column, down the third, up the fifth, down the second, and up the first; inserting the null words; and encoding the most sensitive particulars. The system worked well until July 1864, when Union cipher operator Stephen L. Robinson was captured by Confederate guerrillas and the key seized.

(John Laffin, Codes and Ciphers Secret Writing Through the Ages, 1964.)

| History · Puzzles · Science & Math

Conclusions

From John Boyce Bennett’s 1980 logic textbook Rational Thinking:

If it’s false that no dopips are fraks, characterize each of these propositions as true, false, or doubtful:

a. All dopips are fraks.
b. Few dopips are fraks.
c. Some dopips are fraks.
d. No fraks are dopips.
e. Some dopips are not fraks.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

The Last Straw

In Marriage and Morals (1929), Bertrand Russell mentions that, while “[c]ruelty is in theory a perfectly adequate ground for divorce, … it may be interpreted so as to become absurd”:

When the most eminent of all film stars was divorced by his wife for cruelty, one of the counts in the proof of cruelty was that he used to bring home friends who talked about Kant.

I haven’t been able to figure out who this is. Russell writes, “I hardly suppose that it was the intention of the California legislators to enable any woman to divorce her husband on the ground that he was sometimes guilty of intelligent conversation in her presence.”

05/11/2026 UPDATE: Russell was referring to the 1920 divorce of Mildred Harris from Charlie Chaplin. The two had married in 1918, when Chaplin was 29 and Harris was 16. In 2015, Silent Film Quarterly republished an interview with Harris: “He brought men home to dinner. But such men! Old, grave, and intellectual men! They were 50 years old or more. They talked of things I could not possibly understand. I was seventeen. What could I know of philosophy, or of Voltaire, or Rousseau, or Kant?” Thanks to everyone who wrote in about this.

| Society