Noted

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Straight_tusked_elephant_Eemian_landscape.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

J.M. Roberts’ 1987 Hutchinson History of the World contains this arresting sentence:

At one site in Spain the mind of what one scholar called a ‘primitive Archimedes’ has been seen at work three hundred thousand years ago, directing the removal and use of the tusks of slaughtered elephants as levers to shift the carcasses for cutting up.

The scholar seems to be archaeologist François Bordes, who had written in his 1968 book The Old Stone Age that the Acheuleans of Torralba-Ambrona had killed elephants half engulfed in mud, “and that a primitive Archimedes had the idea of using their tusks as levers for shifting their enormous bulk and making it easier to cut them up.”

From what I can understand, the evidence for butchery at these sites is now thought to be ambiguous, but it’s a striking image nonetheless.

Completely unrelated, but similarly notable: In Days With Bernard Shaw, his 1948 memoir of his friendship with George Bernard Shaw, Stephen Winsten remembers Shaw remarking, “Leonardo da Vinci ruled his notebooks in columns headed fox, wolf, bear and monkey and made notes of human faces by ticking them off in these columns.” I can’t confirm this either, but it seems worth recording.

| Art · History · Science & Math

Conway’s 99-Graph Problem

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:33-duoprism_graph.svg

In this network of 9 points, any two points that are linked have 1 linked point in common, forming a triangle. Any two points that aren’t linked have 2 linked points in common, forming a quadrilateral. Is such a pattern possible in a network of 99 points? In 2014 Princeton mathematician John Horton Conway offered $1000 for the answer to this question; so far the prize is unclaimed.

| Science & Math

A Little Help

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jack_London_young.jpg

Jack London used to buy story ideas from the young Sinclair Lewis. He blamed his “damnable lack of origination”: “I’m damned if my stories just come to me,” he wrote. “I had to work like the devil for the themes.”

Of the 55 plots that Lewis sent him, London bought 27, paying $137.50. Of these, London used five: three for published short stories (“When the World Was Young,” “Winged Blackmail,” and “The Prodigal Father”), one for a novelette (The Abysmal Brute), and one for a novel that he never finished (The Assassination Bureau).

He once wrote to Elwyn Hoffman, “expression, you see — with me — is far easier than invention.”

| Literature

Upstream Contamination

This is surprising: When water is poured from one container into another, floating particles can climb upstream, like inanimate salmon, into the higher container. Argentine physicist Sebastian Bianchini first noticed the phenomenon while making tea during his studies at the University of Havana. His paper inspired further work at Rutgers, which has confirmed the effect, but exactly what’s happening isn’t fully understood.

| Science & Math

Track Record

A problem from the October 1964 issue of Eureka, the journal of the Cambridge University Mathematical Society:

“At noon precisely, a train leaves A for B, and another leaves B for A. They pass after 51 minutes. Each train stays 27 minutes at its destination and then returns by the same route. The trains from A and B travel throughout with constant speeds of 23 m.p.h. and 39 m.p.h., respectively. At what time do they pass for the second time?”

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Self-Assessment

Sennacherib, king of the Assyrians, would like you to remember how he fared against the Elamites in 691:

At the command of the god Ashur, the great Lord, I rushed upon the enemy like the approach of a hurricane. … I transfixed the troops of the enemy with javelins and arrows. … I cut their throats like sheep. … My prancing steeds, trained to harness, plunged into their welling blood as into a river; the wheels of my battle chariot were bespattered with blood and filth. I filled the plain with the corpses of their warriors like herbage. … As to the sheikhs of the Chaldaeans, panic from my onslaught overwhelmed them like a demon. They abandoned their tents and fled for their lives, crushing the corpses of their troops as they went. … They passed scalding urine and voided their excrement into their chariots.

He claimed that the Elamites lost 150,000 men. This is likely an exaggeration, but in The Might That Was Assyria (1984), H.W.F. Saggs observes that, “even if arbitrarily scaled down by a factor of as much as ten … this would still leave enormous casualties for an engagement of a few hours.”

| History

Rebus

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Six_moral_sentences_beginning_with_the_letter_T_LCCN2001706201.jpg

Currier & Ives published this lithograph in 1875: “Six moral sentences beginning with the letter T.” I can’t find the answers! My guesses:

True honesty brings prosperity.

Trace[?] the footsteps of the wise.

Those do well who never lie.

Tears of repentency are like diamonds.

Train yourself to be temperate.

That which is well earned is most comforting[?].

| Puzzles

Ah

From John Scott’s The Puzzle King, 1899:

“A locomotive with a truck is travelling over a straight level line at the rate of 60 miles an hour. A man standing at the extreme rear of the truck casts a small stone into the air in a perpendicular direction. The stone travels upward at an average rate of 30 feet per second for 3 seconds; the height of the man’s hand from ground when the stone leaves is 15 feet. At what distance behind the train will the stone strike the ground in its descent?”

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Juggling

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/4710716/crazy-fact-about-circles-drawn-on-base-of-triangle-between-cevians-they-alwa/4711623

Take any triangle and divide it into sub-triangles as shown. Inscribe a circle in each of these smaller triangles.

Rearrange the order of the circles and adjust the intervening lines so that each line touches two circles:

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/4710716/crazy-fact-about-circles-drawn-on-base-of-triangle-between-cevians-they-alwa/4711623

No matter how this is done, each circle will always fit perfectly in its triangle. Here are some proofs.

| Science & Math

“The Time-Traveling Hipster”

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Time_travelling_cool_dude.png

This photo was taken at the reopening of the South Fork Bridge in Gold Bridge, British Columbia, in 1941. It’s sometimes claimed that the man at the center appears too modern to belong in such a crowd. It’s true that he’s dressed more casually than those around him, but the sunglasses he’s wearing first appeared in the 1920s, and his “T-shirt” appears to be a sweater with an emblem sewn on, possibly that of the Montreal Maroons, a contemporary hockey team. His camera is small for the time, but Kodak had begun offering portable cameras of that size three years earlier.

And no one around him seems to feel he’s out of place.

| Oddities