As Jekyll walk’d out in his gown and his wig,
He happen’d to tread on a very small pig:
“Pig of science,” he said, “or else I’m mistaken,
For surely thou art an abridgment of Bacon.”
— Anonymous, collected in I.J. Reeve, The Wild Garland; or, Curiosities of Poetry, 1866
An advanced civilization passes through eight stages:
Now, we haven’t observed any intelligent extraterrestrials. That implies that at least one of these steps is very improbable, a “filter” that prevents life from colonizing space.
We’re on step 7. If the filter is among steps 1-6, then we’re not likely to meet any neighbors — something prevents most life forms from getting as far as we have. If the filter is in step 8, then it appears some catastrophe must strike us soon. Our future, it seems, must be either lonely or ruinous.
“The larger the remaining filter we face, the more carefully humanity should try to avoid negative scenarios,” writes George Mason University economist Robin Hanson. “Our main data point, the Great Silence, would be telling us that at least one of these scenarios [e.g., nuclear war, ecological collapse] is much more probable than it otherwise looks.”
American chess grandmaster Harry Nelson Pillsbury was renowned for his memory — he could play whist, chess, and checkers simultaneously, without sight of the boards. In 1896, researchers gave him the following list of words to memorize:
antiphlogistine, periosteum, takadiastase, plasmon, ambrosia, Threlkeld, streptococcus, staphylococcus, micrococcus, plasmodium, Mississippi, Freiheit, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, athletics, no war, Etchenberg, American, Russian, philosophy, Piet Potgelter’s Rost, Salamagundi, Oomisillecootsi, Bangmanvate, Schlechter’s Nek, Manzinyama, theosophy, catechism, Madjesoomalops
Pillsbury looked over the list for a few minutes, returned it, and repeated the words correctly in order.
Then he recited them backward.
When he wasn’t inventing logarithms, John Napier took a keen interest in military affairs. In 1596 he composed a list of war machines that “by the grace of God and worke of expert craftsmen” he hoped to produce “for defence of this Iland.” These included a piece of artillery that could “clear a field of four miles circumference of all living creatures exceeding a foot of height,” a chariot like “a moving mouth of mettle” that would “scatter destruction on all sides,” and “devises of sayling under water, with divers and other strategems for harming of the enemyes.”
No one knows whether Napier built his machines, but by World War I they were certainly realities — he had foreseen the machine gun, the tank, and the submarine.
Born in 1939, George and Charles Finn were both retarded, with IQs around 60. But each twin could remember nearly every event that had ever befallen him, including the weather: “On April 15, 1956, Dr. Williams came to visit me and to ask me questions about dates. It was rainy and windy in the morning, but the sun came out in the middle of the afternoon.”
Both could also almost instantly tell the day of the week for every day on a 40,000-year calendar — and could answer such complex questions as “During what years between 1780 and 1795 did the 7th of August fall on a Wednesday?”
Thus they could have calculated the birthday of Daniel McCartney — who was doing the same thing a century earlier.
Al Capone’s jail cell, Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia. High-level gangsters retained amazing power even inside maximum-security penitentiaries. Visiting Frank Costello in prison in the 1950s, lawyer Edward Bennett Williams mentioned that he’d been unable to get tickets to My Fair Lady that evening. “Mr. Williams,” the Luciano boss upbraided him, “You should have told me. Maybe I could have helped.” Williams thought no more about it and returned to his hotel, where shortly there was a knock at the door. A broad-shouldered man handed him four tickets to that evening’s performance and silently walked away.
“It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in five years.”
— John von Neumann, 1949
The deadliest fire in U.S. history swept through Wisconsin on Oct. 8, 1871, consuming more than a million acres and killing 1,500 people:
Groups of dead bodies were found within a stone’s-throw of the water. Families rushing down for a breathing place, had been blown upon by the rushing blast and struck lifeless. The ghastly throng huddled, shrieking and bewailing, about the flaring embers, and the terrible roll of the missing was soon called from end to end of the ashen waste. … In a great many instances the human remains were distinguished from animals by the teeth alone. One horror-struck relative recognized the relics of his nephew by a pen-knife imbedded in an oblong mound of ashes.
So why haven’t you heard of it? Because, by a bizarre coincidence, the Great Chicago Fire occurred on the same day.
In Pig Latin, TRASH becomes ASHTRAY.
Now the means usually employed by a witch to possess his victims with a devil is to offer them some sort of food; and I have remarked that he most often uses apples. In this Satan continually rehearses the means by which he tempted Adam and Eve in the earthly Paradise. And in this connection I cannot pass over what happened at Annecy in Savoy in the year 1585. On the edge of the Hasli Bridge there was seen for two hours an apple from which came so great and confused a noise that people were afraid to pass by there, although it was a much-used way. Everybody ran to see this thing, though no one dared to go near to it; until, as is always the case, at last one man more bold than the rest took a long stick and knocked the apple into the Thiou, a canal from the lake of Annecy which passes under the bridge; and after that nothing more was heard. It cannot be doubted that this apple was full of devils, and that a witch had been foiled in an attempt to give it to someone.
— Henry Boguet, Examen of Witches, 1590
