Found Poetry

William Whewell was a giant of 19th-century science, but he may have missed his true calling. Someone pointed out that his classic Elementary Treatise on Mechanics contains the following poetic sentence:

And hence no force, however great,
can stretch a cord, however fine,
into a horizontal line
that shall be absolutely straight.

Then again, maybe not: Whewell quietly changed the wording in the next edition.

Max Beerbohm noticed a similar happenstance in the first edition of his collected works:

‘London: John Lane, The Bodley Head
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.’
This plain announcement, nicely read,
Iambically runs.

| Poems · Science & Math

British Swearing

The top 10 most offensive British profanities, according to a 2000 study:

  1. cunt
  2. motherfucker
  3. fuck
  4. wanker
  5. nigger
  6. bastard
  7. prick
  8. bollocks
  9. arsehole
  10. Paki

Only 10 percent regarded crap as “very severe”; 32 percent said it was “not swearing.”

| Language

Virgil’s Pizza

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Supreme_pizza.jpg

Virgil’s Aeneid contains arguably the first written reference to pizza:

Their homely fare dispatch’d, the hungry band
Invade their trenchers next, and soon devour,
To mend the scanty meal, their cakes of flour.
Ascanius this observ’d, and smiling said:
“See, we devour the plates on which we fed.”

| Literature · Poems

The Ultimate Murder Mystery

On New Year’s Day, 1963, two bodies were found in a lovers’ lane in Sydney, Australia. They belonged to Gilbert Bogle, a top research physicist, and his mistress. Both were partially undressed and covered with clothes and cardboard. Police could find no trace of poison; their hearts had simply stopped beating.

To this day, no one has determined whether they were murdered, and if so, how or why. It is a perfect mystery.

| Crime · Oddities

Yap Stone Money

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yap_Stone_Money.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

“The great affair, we always find, is to get money.” So wrote Adam Smith, but he might have been surprised to visit the Micronesian island of Yap, where a coin’s value is determined by its size. If a native pays you a large debt, you might find yourself with a limestone coin 12 feet in diameter and weighing several tons. You might display it outside your home, as a status symbol — or you might just leave it where it is (even underwater) and agree that ownership has been transferred. Easier on the back.

| Oddities · Society