People were retouching photos long before PhotoShop. In 1938 Nikolai Yezhov, a leader of the Soviet secret police, fell out of favor with Stalin — and literally disappeared.
Author: Greg Ross
Fallow and Fertile
Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I might brood about thwarted creativity, but it contains one of the most brilliant magic squares in all of European art.
You can reach the sum of 34 by adding the numbers in any row, column, diagonal, or quadrant; the four center squares; the four corner squares; the four numbers clockwise from the corners; or the four counterclockwise.
As a bonus, the two numbers in the middle of the bottom row give the date of the engraving: 1514.
“New Mode of Revenge”
Monkeys in India are more or less objects of superstitious reverence, and are, consequently, seldom or ever destroyed. In some places they are even fed, encouraged, and allowed to live on the roofs of the houses. If a man wish to revenge himself for any injury committed upon him, he has only to sprinkle some rice or corn upon the top of his enemy’s house, or granary, just before the rains set in, and the monkeys will assemble upon it, eat all they can find outside, and then pull off the tiles to get at that which falls through the crevices. This, of course, gives access to the torrents which fall in such countries, and house, furniture, and stores are all ruined.
— Edmund Fillingham King, Ten Thousand Wonderful Things, 1860
The Nakhla Dog
In June 1911, a meteorite fell to earth in Alexandria, Egypt. A local farmer named Mohammed Ali Effendi Hakim claimed that one fragment had landed on his dog. If it’s true, this would be the first recorded instance of a meteorite killing an animal. But it’s hard to verify without evidence — the dog, if it ever existed, was vaporized.
The Rich Are Different
The 10 richest fictional characters, as judged by Forbes magazine in 2006:
- Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks
- Charles Montgomery Burns
- Scrooge McDuck
- Richie Rich
- Jed Clampett
- Rich Uncle Pennybags (the Monopoly mascot)
- Bruce Wayne
- Anthony Stark (Marvel Comics’ Iron Man)
- Prince Abakaliki
- Thurston Howell III
Abakaliki, new to the Forbes list, is the fictional Nigerian “entrepreneur” mentioned in millions of fraudulent spam messages.
Math Notes
0588235294117647 × 1 = 0588235294117647
0588235294117647 × 8 = 4705882352941176
0588235294117647 × 3 = 1764705882352941
0588235294117647 × 2 = 1176470588235294
0588235294117647 × 7 = 4117647058823529
0588235294117647 × 5 = 2941176470588235
0588235294117647 × 9 = 5294117647058823
0588235294117647 × 6 = 3529411764705882
0588235294117647 × 4 = 2352941176470588
Showoff
In Boston’s Museum of Science is a computer made of Tinkertoys that plays tic-tac-toe.
It has never lost a game.
Knotty Thinking
The “Death’s-head Dungeon,” from Henry Dudeney’s Canterbury Puzzles (1908), in which a youth rescues a noble demoiselle from a dungeon belong to his father’s greatest enemy:
“… Sir Hugh then produced a plan of the thirty-five cells in the dungeon and asked his companions to discover the particular cell that the demoiselle occupied. He said that if you started at one of the outside cells and passed through every doorway once, and once only, you were bound to end at the cell that was sought. Can you find the cell? Unless you start at the correct outside cell it is impossible to pass through all the doorways once, and once only.”
Insult to Injury
Being a slave was hard enough in the American South — but wanting to escape was once classified as a psychiatric disorder. In 1851, physician Samuel A. Cartwright of the Louisiania Medical Association decided that runaway slaves suffered from “drapetomania”:
If the white man attempts to oppose the Deity’s will, by trying to make the negro anything else than ‘the submissive knee-bender’ (which the Almighty declared he should be) by trying to raise him to a level with himself, or by putting himself on an equality with the negro; or if he abuses the power which God has given him over his fellow-man, by being cruel to him, or punishing him in anger, or by neglecting to protect him from the wanton abuses of his fellow-servants and all others, or by denying him the usual comforts and necessaries of life, the negro will run away; but if he keeps him in the position that we learn from the Scriptures he was intended to occupy, that is, the position of submission; and if his master or overseer be kind and gracious in his hearing towards him, without condescension, and at the same time ministers to his physical wants, and protects him from abuses, the negro is spell-bound, and cannot run away.
Cartwright wrote that with “proper medical advice, strictly followed, this troublesome practice that many Negroes have of running away can be almost entirely prevented.” But for slaves who were “sulky and dissatisfied without cause,” he recommended “whipping the devil out of them” as a “preventative measure.”
Clara
An enterprising rhinoceros could make a pretty good living in 18th-century Europe, where people clamored to see such an outlandish creature. A rhino named Clara toured the continent for 17 years in a special wooden carriage, meeting royalty in England, France, Prussia and Poland and posing for portraits and sculptures. The French navy even named a ship after her.
She died in 1758, probably wondering what all the fuss was about.