Living Memory

An item for Independence Day: In 1937 the New York Times reported that the last living son of a Revolutionary War soldier was still in good health and living in North Calais, Vermont. William Constant Wheeler, then 89, was the son of Comfort Wheeler, who had been 81 when William was born.

Comfort had enlisted in the Continental Army as a teenager. According to the Boston Post, “Wheeler recollected many things he had been told by his father regarding the war of ’75. Many times Constant said his father spoke of meeting George Washington and he admired General Putnam, whose bluff, hearty way he often mentioned.”

William was himself a veteran of the Civil War. According to FindAGrave, he died in 1941 at age 93.

(Thanks, Bevan. Here’s a photo [!] of a man who crossed the Delaware with Washington.)

| History

Offensive Escargot

https://www.bl.uk/stories/blogs/posts/knight-v-snail

In the illuminated manuscripts of the 13th and 14th centuries, the margins are often decorated with images of armed knights fighting snails. “This has created a good deal of puzzlement amongst art historians and book historians, wondering just what do they mean?” University of York scholar Kenneth Clarke told the BBC.

“The basic idea is the overturning of existing or expected hierarchies,” suggested University of Chicago art historian Marian Bleeke. “It is supposed to be surprising and even funny — I think we get that implicitly today,” she says. Art historian Lilian Randall found 70 examples in 29 books, most printed between 1290 and 1310, commonly in France.

Perhaps the fight represents a struggle between classes, or illustrates cowardice. Possibly it’s political comment whose meaning has been lost. It may even represent the Resurrection. The meaning is still a matter of debate.

The British Library has a gallery.

(Thanks, Carsten.)

| Oddities

Sob Story

In 1886, on republishing Henry Mackenzie’s 1775 novel The Man of Feeling, University College London English professor Henry Morley underscored the book’s sentimentality by adding an “Index to Tears” that records every instance in which a character weeps — 46 occasions in less than 200 pages:

Hand bathed with tears                     27
I could only weep                          48
Tears, wrung from the heart                51
Tear stood in eye                          65
Dropped one tear, no more                  67
Tears, press-gang could scarce keep from   69
Big drops wetted gray beard                70
Moistened eye                              72
Girl wept, brother sobbed                  74
Tears gushed afresh                        75
Tears flowing without control              96

And so on. At the top he notes, “Choking, &c, not counted.”

| Literature

“An Autograph Inside a Tree”

https://archive.org/details/the-strand/The%20Strand%20v26%201903/page/117/mode/2up

‘The tree from which these pieces were taken was recently cut down and broken up for firewood, when at six and a half inches below the bark the carving was found in the solid timber. About fifty or a hundred years ago the letters and other figures were cut in the bark, with the usual result in the death of a thin layer of the exposed wood, which became surrounded by brown colouring matter. In time the bark grew over this, and finally covered it with fresh wood.’ — Prof. Stewart, of the Royal College of Surgeons, has been good enough to supply us with this interesting photograph.

— Strand, July 1903

| Oddities

Another Skeleton Pair

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tomba_degli_Amanti_di_Modena,_foto_P._Terzi.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

These remains were discovered in 2009 by archaeologists in Modena, Italy. They’re believed to have been buried between the 4th and 6th century AD. At first they were thought to be a male and a female, but it’s now been confirmed that they’re both male.

They were buried with their hands interlocked. They’re now on display at the Civic Museum of Modena.

Further affectionate skeletons: Iran, Italy, Greece, Romania.

| Death · Oddities

Wiggle Stereoscopy

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_typical_Irish_street_in_Cork,_Ireland_LC-USZ62-123727_-_Edit_2.gif

This street scene, taken in Cork in 1927, seems to give a 3-D effect, but it’s only alternating between two photos taken from slightly different perspectives. The sense of depth comes from parallax and the occlusion of distant objects.

Small animals bob their heads to produce this effect as they plan a jump; it helps them to estimate distance.

| Science & Math

Drive-Thru

The swans in the moat at the Bishop’s Palace in Wells, Somerset, pull a bell for their lunch. The tradition is believed to have started in the 1850s — in 1908 Helen Pratt wrote:

This bell-ringing call was taught to the bishop’s swans more than fifty years ago, by Miss Eden, the daughter of the Lord Auckland who was then Bishop of Wells and lived at the palace. It needed both ingenuity and patience to teach the lesson, but the young lady persevered until the swans learned it so successfully that they have never forgotten it and show no sign of forgetting so long as swans shall sail this moat.

The current pair of swans, Grace and Gabriel, teach each year’s cygnets how to ring the bell before they leave the moat to begin a life of their own.

| Oddities

Presentation

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Empty-frame.png

Frames kill, Picasso said one day, they are mourning borders to bad news. Whenever, in some house or other, he saw a canvas of his framed, he generally felt ill at ease — like the canvas itself. It had been dressed up. It had been made to wear gloves. It had been married and wreathed. It was no longer painting as such, but had become the dining-room picture.

— Hélène Parmelin, Picasso Plain, 1963

| Art

Essentials

Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel used to walk home together from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In Incompleteness (2005), Rebecca Goldstein gives a sample of their conversation, broached by Gödel:

All of his thinking is governed by an ‘interesting axiom,’ as Ernst Gabor Straus, Einstein’s assistant from 1944 to 1947, once characterized it. For every fact, there exists an explanation as to why that fact is a fact; why it has to be a fact. This conviction amounts to the assertion that there is no brute contingency in the world, no givens that need not have been given. In other words, the world will never, not even once, speak to us in the way that an exasperated parent will speak to her fractious adolescent: ‘Why? I’ll tell you why. Because I said so!’ The world always has an explanation for itself, or as Einstein’s walking partner puts it, Die Welt is vernunftig, the world is intelligible. The conclusions that emanate from the rigorously consistent application of this ‘interesting axiom’ to every subject that crosses the logician’s mind — from the relationship between the body and the soul to global politics to the very local politics of the Institute for Avanced Study itself — often and radically diverge from the opinions of common sense. Such divergence, however, counts as nothing for him. It is as if one of the unwritten laws of his thought processes is: If reasoning and common sense should diverge, then… so much the worse for common sense! What, in the long run, is common sense, other than common?

Somewhat related: Richard Feynman’s sense of “social irresponsibility.”

| Science & Math · Society