“Reported Capture of the Sea-Serpent”

In February 1852, the New York Tribune published an account by a Charles Seabury, master of the whaleship Monongahela, of a titanic struggle with a sea serpent in the South Pacific. The crew harpooned the 103-foot monster on Jan. 13 and killed it with lances the following morning:

None of the crew who witnessed that terrible scene will ever forget it; the evolutions of the body were rapid as lightning, seeming like the revolving of a thousand enormous black wheels. The tail and head would occasionally appear in the surging bloody foam, and a sound was heard, so dead, unearthly, and expressive of acute agony, that a thrill of horror ran through our veins.

The serpent was too large to get into port, so the crew resolved to save the skin, head, and bones. As they were dissecting the creature they encountered the brig Gipsy, to whom Seabury gave his story. “As soon as I get in I shall be enabled to furnish you a more detailed account.”

That’s the story. But neither Seabury, his serpent, nor his detailed account ever appeared, and the Gipsy later told the Philadelphia Bulletin that it had never met such a ship. By that time the original 2700-word account had run in Galignani’s Messenger, the Illustrated London News, the London Times, and Spenerishe Zeitung.

Zoologist editor Edward Newman concludes, “Very like a hoax, but well drawn up.” You can decide for yourself — the original account is here.

| Hoaxes · Oddities

The Great Filter

An advanced civilization passes through eight stages:

  1. A congenial star system
  2. Reproductive molecules
  3. Simple single-cell life
  4. Complex single-cell life
  5. Sexual reproduction
  6. Multicellular life
  7. Tool-using animals with big brains
  8. Colonization explosion

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.”

| Science & Math · Society

Showoff

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pillsbury2.jpg

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.

| Oddities

Future Tense

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.

| Oddities · Science & Math · Technology

The Bronx Calendar Twins

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.

| Oddities

Connected

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Al_Capone%27s_Cell_In_Eastern_State_Penitentiary.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

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.

| Crime

Unquote

“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

| Quotations · Technology

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.

| Oddities