Those are bison skulls, in the 1870s, waiting to be ground into fertilizer. Before Columbus there were 60 million bison in North America; by 1890 there were 750. They were holding up our railroads. Now they’re back up to 350,000, but 70 percent of those are being raised for human consumption.
“God is a Republican, and Santa Claus is a Democrat.” — H.L. Mencken
Clearly there are integers so huge they can’t be described in fewer than 22 syllables. Put them all in a big pile and consider the smallest one. It’s “the smallest integer that can’t be described in fewer than 22 syllables.”
That phrase has 21 syllables.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo‘s caricature of Rudolf II’s historiographer and librarian, Wolfgang Lazio (1514-1565) — a collector of coins and a lover of books.
84 + 24 + 04 + 84 = 8208
On the 8th of August, 1823, a young man, named Thomas Clements, lost his life in a manner as dreadful as it was extraordinary. He was fishing with a draw net, near Elizabeth Castle, Jersey, and taking a little sole out of the net, he put it between his teeth to kill it, when the fish, with a sudden spring, forced itself into his throat, and choked him. The unfortunate man had just time to call for assistance, but it came too late; he expired soon after in dreadful agony.
— The Cabinet of Curiosities, 1824
10/18/2017 UPDATE: It happened again in 2017, this time with a happy ending. (Thanks, Anatoly.)
Albert Einstein’s brain sat in a cardboard box for 43 years. After the physicist’s death in 1955, Princeton pathologist Thomas Stoltz Harvey removed the organ and took it with him as he moved around the country. He gave it up only in 1998.
Unrhymable English words: chimney, depth, month, orange, pint, purple, silver.
Remarkably, you can estimate π by dropping needles onto a flat surface. If the surface is ruled with lines that are separated by the length of a needle, then:
drops is the number of needles dropped. hits is the number of needles that touch a line. The method combines probability with trigonometry; a needle’s chance of touching a line is related to the angle at which it comes to rest. It was discovered by the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc in 1777.
Travelers are sometimes surprised to find hundreds of evenly spaced “barrels” of snow on a field or lake. Are they the work of elves?
In fact they’re created when strong winds arise after a fall of light, sticky snow.
When the conditions are right, they can reach 3 feet in diameter.