Famous diabetics:
- Jack Benny
- James Cagney
- Johnny Cash
- Paul Cezanne
- Ty Cobb
- Miles Davis
- Thomas Edison
- Joe Frazier
- Dizzy Gillespie
- Ernest Hemingway
- Howard Hughes
- Elvis Presley
- Giacomo Puccini
- Elizabeth Taylor
- H.G. Wells
- Mae West
Author: Greg Ross
A CIA Mystery
This is a little embarrassing — the CIA is having trouble decrypting a sculpture on its own grounds.
The piece, called Kryptos, was dedicated 15 years ago by American artist James Sanborn. It’s inscribed with four different messages, each encrypted with a different cipher. Sanborn would say only that the sculpture contains a riddle within a riddle, which will be solvable only after the four passages have been decrypted. He gave the complete solution to CIA director William H. Webster, who has passed it on to his successors.
The first three messages have been solved by CIA analysts, but the fourth — and the final riddle — remains open.
If you don’t want to work on this yourself, you can wait for Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown — reportedly it’s the subject of his next book.
Mental Calculator
On Dec. 17, 2004, Alexis Lemaire computed the 13th root of a 100-digit number in his head.
He gave the correct answer — 45,792,573 — in 3.625 seconds.
Hitchcock’s Lifeboat Cameo
In the film Lifeboat, the action is set entirely in a small boat. This left director Alfred Hitchcock momentarily at a loss how to make his traditional cameo appearance.
Finally, inspired by a recent diet, he hit on a solution — Hitchcock can be seen briefly in a newspaper advertisement for “Reduco, the Obesity Slayer.”
Jesus Carved in Salt
“Intellectual passion dries out sensuality,” wrote Leonardo da Vinci. Someone took him literally — and carved this likeness of the Last Supper into the wall of a Polish salt mine.
“The 1729 Anecdote”
The Indian mathematical prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan showed an almost supernatural facility with numbers. British mathematician G.H. Hardy once visited him in the hospital:
I had ridden in taxicab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. “No,” he replied, “it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.”
“Every positive integer,” remarked J.E. Littlewood, “is one of Ramanujan’s personal friends.”
Baseball Players Who Died on Their Birthdays
Baseball players who died on their birthdays:
- Bucky Harris, 81
- Gabby Hartnett, 72
- Bob Moose, 29
- Joe Tinker, 68
Balloon Mail
Besieged by Prussians in 1870, Paris found a clever way to get mail to the outside world. For 20 centimes you could write a letter on a thin piece of green paper; these were collected and sent hopefully upward on unguided mail balloons. Each 4-gram postcard carried an address; the Parisians hoped that the balloons would drift to earth somewhere and that whoever found the messages would forward them.
It worked. During the four-month siege they sent up 65 balloons, and only two went missing.
Valentino’s Real Name
Rudolph Valentino’s real name was Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Piero Filiberto Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antoguolla.
A Spaceborne Time Capsule
You can write a message to future generations at the KEO project. It’ll be launched on a satellite that won’t return to Earth for 50,000 years.
Even more ambitious is the LAGEOS satellite, which will re-enter our atmosphere in 8.4 million years bearing a plaque that shows the arrangement of the continents. Let’s hope our descendants still have catcher’s mitts.