Last Word

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In August 1947 a British South American Airways airliner en route from Buenos Aires to Santiago crashed into Mount Tupungato in the Argentine Andes. The wreckage wasn’t located for 50 years, but it’s believed today that, hindered by the jet stream, the pilots had started their descent before they’d cleared the mountaintops and crashed into Tupungato.

The last Morse code message received by the Santiago airport was “ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 HRS STENDEC.” The operator didn’t recognize the last word and asked that it be sent again. The flight transmitted STENDEC twice more and then was lost. The meaning of that last transmission is unknown — despite much speculation, it’s never been definitively explained.

| Oddities

Top Dog

A dominant male long-tailed manakin acquires a team of subordinate males to help him woo females. “It’s the only example of cooperative male-male displays ever discovered in the entire animal kingdom,” writes Noah Strycker in The Thing With Feathers.

It’s common for male animals to cooperate to impress females, but typically each of those males is hoping to mate. Among manakins the eldest male gets this right, and the others defer until they succeed him.

Strycker writes, “A pair of male long-tailed manakins may work together like this for five years, building up their jungle reputation as hot dancers, before the alpha male dies and the backup singer takes his place with a new apprentice.”

| Science & Math

Insight

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Conducting a workshop on paper folding and geometry for a group of gifted 10-year-olds in 1977, Santa Clara University mathematician Jean Pedersen passed around a collection of polyhedra and asked the students which shapes they’d classify as “regular.” To her surprise, the only one who chose the five platonic solids was Peter Wilson, a blind student.

The others immediately responded, “That’s not fair, Peter’s blind!” So Pedersen agreed to let them try again, this time feeling the models with their eyes closed. Now every student chose the five platonic solids.

“I’m not sure what all the ramifications of these events are,” Pedersen wrote in a letter to the Mathematical Intelligencer, “but begin with this: we can perceive things with just our hands that we miss when we use both our eyes and our hands. Sometimes less really is more.”

(Jean Pedersen, “Seeing the Idea,” Mathematical Intelligencer 20:4 [Fall 1998], 6.)

| Science & Math

For Short

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Henri Gatien Bertrand, Napoleon’s companion during his exile on Saint Helena, kept an impenetrable diary. The entry for January 20, 1821, reads:

N. so. le mat. en cal: il. déj. bi. se. trv. un peu fat; le so. il est f.g.

It’s not code, just extremely abbreviated French. Interpreter Paul Fleuriot de Langle referred to his work as “translating from French into French — the singular sport and strange pastime.” He rendered the passage above as:

Napoléon sort le matin en calèche. Il déjeune bien, se trouve un peu fatigué; le soir, il est fort gai

Or “Napoleon goes out in the morning in a carriage. He lunches well, finds himself a little tired; in the evening, he is very gay.” Not very incriminating — perhaps Bertrand was just trying to save paper.

(From David Kahn’s The Codebreakers, 1967.)

| Language

Memorial

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

In Vienna’s Judenplatz stands a construction of steel and concrete that takes the shape of a library turned inside out. Its walls are filled with books, but the spines are all turned inward, so the knowledge they contain is inaccessible. It bears two large doors, but these do not open.

It is a memorial to the Austrian victims of the Holocaust. Artist Rachel Whiteread said, “It was clear to me from the outset that my proposal had to be simple, monumental, poetic and non-literal. I am a sculptor: not a person of words but of images and forms.”

At the unveiling, Simon Wiesenthal said, “This monument shouldn’t be beautiful. It must hurt.”

| Art · History

Efficiency

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

In the 1920s, Fiat’s car factory in Turin, Italy, contained a spiral roadway — raw materials went in at ground level, and the cars ascended as they were assembled. At the top they emerged onto a test track on the roof.

Lauded at the time, the factory was eventually outmoded and has since been remodeled into a hotel and shopping mall, but the test track remains and is open to visitors.

| Technology

“She Was as Cute as a Washtub”

Raymond Chandler similes:

“He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.”
“She looked almost as hard to get as a haircut.”
“The smell of old dust hung in the air as flat and stale as a football interview.”
“Her face fell apart like a bride’s pie crust.”
“This car sticks out like spats at an Iowa picnic.”
“I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split.”
“A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock.”
“Then she straightened the bills out on the desk and put one on top of the other and pushed them across. Very slowly, very sadly, as if she was drowning a favorite kitten.”

“If you use similes,” he once suggested, “try and make them both extravagant and original.”

| Literature

Over There

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 1942, homesick GI Carl K. Lindley was ordered to repair a local signpost in the Yukon. He decided to add an indicator pointing to his hometown: DANVILLE, ILL. 2835 MILES. Others began adding their own signs, and today the “Sign Post Forest” holds 80,000 signs. It’s actively accepting more — you can bring your own or make one at the visitor information center.

| Oddities

Big Man on Campus

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

The balcony of Woolsey Hall at Yale has one extra-wide seat: Carpenters enlarged it to accommodate William Howard Taft, who returned to his alma mater after losing his re-election bid for the presidency in 1912.

Most of the seats in Woolsey measure 18″ x 17″; Taft’s measures 25″ x 20″. He once convinced an usher to admit him by leading him to the customized chair — he told another patron, “I lost my ticket, but was fortunately able to establish my identity by the breadth of my beam and the corresponding breadth of this seat.”

| History