“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
Author: Greg Ross
Peshtigo
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.
Apt
In Pig Latin, TRASH becomes ASHTRAY.
Satan’s Awful Majesty
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
In a Word
gammerstang
n. a tall, awkward person, usually a woman
Quiet!
Charles Babbage hated organ grinders. Calling them the worst of the “thousand nuisances” that made it “impossible for the householder to enjoy any quiet,” he claimed that such “instruments of torture” had cost him a quarter of his working life. At one point he tallied 165 “nuisances” in 90 days.
“It is difficult to estimate the misery inflicted upon thousands of persons,” he wrote, “and the absolute pecuniary penalty imposed upon multitudes of intellectual workers by the loss of their time, destroyed by organ-grinders and other similar nuisances.”
He spent £170 on a soundproof room in his Cheyne Row house to protect him from “vile yellow Italians”; it didn’t work. When a magistrate asked if he really believed that listening to a hand organ could impair a man’s brain, he replied, “Certainly not, for the obvious reason that no man having a brain ever listened to street musicians.”
Sadly, he was as much renowned for this crusade as for his scientific accomplishments — his 1871 obituary in the London Times notes that he lived to be almost 80 “in spite of organ-grinding persecutions.”
Catálogo
A self-inventorying Spanish sentence, discovered/invented by Miguel Lerma of the Universidad Politecnica of Madrid:
Esta frase contiene exactamente doscientas treinta y cinco letras: veinte a’s, una b, dieciseis c’s, trece d’s, treinta e’s, dos f’s, una g, una h, diecinueve i’s, una j, una k, dos l’s, dos m’s, veintidos n’s, catorce o’s, una p, una q, diez r’s, treinta y tres s’s, diecinueve t’s, doce u’s, cinco v’s, una w, dos x’s, cuatro y’s, y dos z’s.
See also The Quick Brown Fox, Bills of Lading, and Inventory.
Conflict of Interest
Eric Temple Bell led two lives. By day he was a mathematician at Caltech; by night he wrote science fiction as John Taine.
By a happy chance the two personalities met in 1951, when the Pasadena Star-News asked Taine to review Bell’s book Mathematics, Queen and Servant of Science.
Not one to lose an opportunity, he accepted. “The last flap of the jacket says Bell ‘is perhaps mathematics’ greatest interpreter,'” Taine wrote. “Knowing the author well, the reviewer agrees.”
Just So You Know
GREAT CRESTED GREBE is typed entirely with the left hand.
Hey Presto!
A bit of conjuring adapted from Augustus de Morgan:
1. Think of a one-digit number and remember it. (Example: 4.)
2. Write down a number of any length. Jumble the figures into another number, and subtract one from the other:
3. Count the letters in your father’s first name, your state capital, and the name of your favorite Beatle, and add them together.
4. Multiply this number by 4 and its reverse by 5. Add these together, plus the number from step 1.
For example, suppose your father’s name is William, your state capital is Oklahoma City, and you choose Paul. That’s 23 letters in all, and 23 reversed is 32. (4 × 23) + (5 × 32) + 4 = 256.
5. Mix these figures (256) into the result from step 2 (4600708659), in any order, say 4560207086569.
Seeing nothing but this final list of figures, the conjurer names the one-digit number from step 1.
How does he do it?