“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.

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

| Oddities

Update

Catullus wrote this poem in the first century B.C.:

Mourn, o Venuses and Cupids
and however many there are of more charming people:
my girl’s sparrow is dead—
the sparrow, delight of my girl,
whom that girl loved more than her own eyes.
For he was honey-sweet and had known
the lady as well as a girl [knows] her mother herself,
nor did he move himself from that girl’s lap,
but hopping around now here now there
he chirped constantly to his mistress alone,
he who now goes through the shadowy journey
thither, whence they deny that anyone returns.
But may it go badly for you, evil shadows
of hell, who devour all beautiful things.
You have taken from me so beautiful a sparrow.
Oh evil deed! Oh wretched little sparrow!
Now through your deeds the eyes of my girl,
swollen with weeping, are red.

In 1912 G.S. Davies translated it into, of all things, a Scottish brogue:

Weep, weep, ye Loves and Cupids all,
And ilka Man o’ decent feelin’:
My lassie’s lost her wee, wee bird,
And that’s a loss, ye’ll ken, past healin’.
The lassie lo’ed him like her een:
The darling wee thing lo’ed the ither,
And knew and nestled to her breast,
As only bairnie to her mither.
Her bosom was his dear, dear haunt—
So dear, he cared na lang to leave it;
He’d nae but gang his ain sma’ jaunt,
And flutter piping back bereavit.
The wee thing’s gane the shadowy road
That’s never traveled back by ony:
Out on ye, Shades! Ye’re greedy aye
To grab at aught that’s brave and bonny.
Puir, foolish, fondling, bonnie bird,
Ye little ken what wark ye’re leavin’:
Ye’ve bar’d my lassie’s een grow red,
Those bonnie een grow red wi’ grieving.

| Language · Poems

The Stepping Feet Illusion

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stepping-Feet-Motion-Illusion.gif
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Each of these buses is proceeding smoothly along the striped street. Yet each seems to be varying its speed dramatically.

When the blue bus encounters a white stripe, it becomes easy to see due to the high contrast, so it appears to move faster. When it encounters a black stripe it becomes harder to see, so its movement seems slower. The reverse is true of the yellow bus. When the stripes are removed, the buses stop staggering.

UCSD psychologist Stuart Anstis first demonstrated the illusion in 2003.

| Oddities

An Unsolved Cipher

https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/klaus-schmehs-list-of-encrypted-books/

What does this say? It’s an excerpt from a small bound volume given in 1841 by Harvard law professor Theophilus Parsons Jr. to John Davis of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Davis noted, “It was found in his father’s Library after his decease, its origin and contents unknown. I hoped to find some person of sufficient skill in stenography, to decipher the pages. But it is still, to me & those whom I have consulted, a Sealed Book.”

It seems to be a dated record of some kind. The anonymous writer used Arabic numerals, so we can see that the entries are organized by year, month, and day, with long entries on one side of each page and shorter ones on the other.

But no one has ever determined its meaning. It was conjectured that the volume might be the diary of a clergyman, perhaps Theophilus’ father, the Rev. Moses Parsons of Byfield, but the entries extend to 1799, 16 years after Moses’ death.

For now the diary (if that’s what it is) is kept at the Massachusetts Historical Society. MHS reference librarian Jeremy Dibbell writes about it here.

(Via Klaus Schmeh’s Encrypted Book List.)

| Oddities

Misc

  • The newsletter of the Procrastinators’ Club of America is called Last Month’s Newsletter.
  • Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary defines dross as “the recrement or despumation of metals.”
  • A sphere of radius n kilometers has almost exactly the same volume as a cube of side n miles. (Randall Munroe)
  • Cookie Monster’s real name is Sid.
  • “Henry James chews more than he bites off.” — Clover Adams

“There exist only two kinds of modern mathematics books: ones which you cannot read beyond the first page and ones which you cannot read beyond the first sentence.” — Physics Nobelist Yang Chen-Ning

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Elegy

Warm summer sun,
Shine kindly here,
Warm southern wind,
Blow softly here.

Green sod above,
Lie light, lie light.
Good night, dear heart,
Good night, good night.

— Mark Twain’s epitaph for his daughter Susy, adapted from Robert Richardson’s poem “Annette”

| Death · Poems

Less Art

Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” soliloquy rendered in Anglic, a simplified system of English spelling proposed in 1930 by Swedish philologist Robert Eugen Zachrisson:

To be, or not to be: that is the questshon:
Whedher ’tis noebler in the miend to sufer
The slingz and aroz of outraejus fortuen,
Or to taek armz agaenst a see of trublz,
And by opoezing end them? To die: to sleep;
Noe mor; and by a sleep to sae we end
The hart-aek and the thouzend natueral shoks
That flesh is aer to, ’tis a konsumaeshon
Devoutli to be wisht. To die, to sleep;
To sleep! perchaans to dreem: ie, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of deth what dreemz mae kum,
When we hav shufled off this mortl koil,
Must giv us pauz: there’s the respekt
That maeks kalamiti of soe long lief.

The Gettysburg Address would begin: “Forskor and sevn yeerz agoe our faadherz braut forth on this kontinent a nue naeshon, konseevd in liberti, and dedikaeted to the propozishon that aul men are kreaeted eequel.”

| Language

Interloper

The first edition of the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (1987) contains a fictitious entry, presumably to catch content thieves:

hink, hinks, hinking, hinked. If you hink, you think hopefully and unrealistically about something.

Phony or not, this is a useful word. If it’s adopted widely enough, perhaps the dictionary entry will bootstrap itself into legitimacy.

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