Okay, I’ll ask three questions, and if you miss one I get your house. Fair enough? Here we go:
Don’t be hasty — your house is on the line.
Maine is the only state with a one-syllable name.
There was a young lady named Psyche
Who was heard to ejaculate, “Pcryche!”
For, riding her pbych,
She ran over a ptych,
And fell on some rails that were pspyche.
The 1933 a thoroughbred stallion named Brokers Tip won the Kentucky Derby.
It was the only win of his career.
This question was proposed in the Scientific American, in 1868: ‘How many revolutions upon its own axis, will a wheel make in rolling once around a fixed wheel of the same size?’
The question brought to the editor of that paper many replies all claiming to have solved it. Yet the replies were about equally divided as to the number of revolutions, one part claiming one revolution and the other two revolutions. So much interest was manifested in it that Munn & Co. published The Wheel, June, 1868. It contains 72 pages, giving many of the solutions, illustrated by many diagrams.
— Miscellaneous Notes and Queries, August 1889
So who’s right?
New York’s Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is the largest suspension bridge in the United States.
Its towers are 1-5/8 inches farther apart at their tops than at their bases — to accommodate the curvature of the earth.
nihilarian
n. a person with a meaningless job
In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift describes two fictional moons of Mars:
They [the Laputan astronomers] have likewise discovered two lesser stars, or ‘satellites,’ which revolve about Mars, whereof the innermost is distant from the centre of the primary planet exactly three of his diameters, and the outermost five; the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one and a half; so that the squares of their periodical times are very near in the same proportion with the cubes of their distance from the centre of Mars, which evidently shows them to be governed by the same law of gravitation, that influences the other heavenly bodies …
That was in 1726. A century and a half later, two Martian moons were discovered. Phobos and Deimos were in fact about 1.4 and 3.5 diameters from Mars’ center, and they revolved in 7.7 and 30.3 hours, respectively. Voltaire had made a similarly prescient guess in his romance Micromegas of 1752.
Fittingly, two craters on Deimos have been named Swift and Voltaire.