Around January 31 and November 11 each year, the setting sun illuminates the “Infinite Corridor,” the 251-meter hallway that runs through five main buildings at MIT.
The hallway isn’t optimally aligned, so the phenomenon lasts only about 2 minutes. MIT maintains a page with predictions, etiquette, background, and more photos.
“[Braxton] Bragg was a remarkably intelligent and well-informed man, professionally and otherwise. He was also thoroughly upright. But he was possessed of an irascible temper, and was naturally disputatious. A man of the highest moral character and the most correct habits, yet in the old army he was in frequent trouble. As a subordinate he was always on the lookout to catch his commanding officer infringing his prerogatives; as a post commander he was equally vigilant to detect the slightest neglect, even of the most trivial order.
“I have heard in the old army an anecdote very characteristic of Bragg. On one occasion, when stationed at a post of several companies commanded by a field officer, he was himself commanding one of the companies and at the same time acting as post quartermaster and commissary. He was first lieutenant at the time, but his captain was detached on other duty. As commander of the company he made a requisition upon the quartermaster — himself — for something he wanted. As quartermaster he declined to fill the requisition, and endorsed on the back of it his reasons for so doing. As company commander he responded to this, urging that his requisition called for nothing but what he was entitled to, and that it was the duty of the quartermaster to fill it. As quartermaster he still persisted that he was right. In this condition of affairs Bragg referred the whole matter to the commanding officer of the post. The latter, when he saw the nature of the matter referred, exclaimed: ‘My God, Mr. Bragg, you have quarrelled with every officer in the army, and now you are quarrelling with yourself!'”
— Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, 1885
Astronomer Thomas Dick believed that every planet in the solar system was inhabited. In his 1838 book Celestial Scenery he worked out that they contain 21 trillion inhabitants in all — assuming “280 inhabitants to a square mile, which is the rate of population in England.”
In 2000, mathematician Mike Keith rearranged the letters in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 143 to tell a familiar story:
Lo, as a careful huswife runs to catch
One of her feathered creatures broke away,
Sets down her babe and makes all swift dispatch
In pursuit of the thing she would have stay,
Whilst her neglected child holds her in chase,
Cries to catch her whose busy care is bent
To follow that which flies before her face,
Not prizing her poor infant’s discontent:
So run’st thou after that which flies from thee,
Whilst I, thy babe, chase thee afar behind;
But if thou catch thy hope turn back to me,
And play the mother’s part: kiss me, be kind.
So will I pray that thou mayst have thy Will,
If thou turn back and my loud crying still.
The gal named Mary shuffles through the house —
But view her as she strokes her frisky lamb,
Whose brow is whiter than a snowy mouse,
Fleece chalky as French cliffs of epigram
Each place she’d bathe, attain or hie without
(To parish church or at the stuffy crypt),
The lamb’s instinct did follow her about
(So close around that twice she nearly tripped).
Back to her class that zany lamb would fly
And cause a hubbub (then they fetched it in);
It whacked the inkwell, overturn’d the pie,
Though this was chief and total public sin.
“Anoint this lofty one,” the brats then cried,
“For now it’s certain: school is rather fried!”
(Michael Keith, “Another Mary Sonnet,” Word Ways 33:3 [August 2000], 233.)
In November 1970, a man and his daughters came upon the charred remains of a woman in the foothills near Bergen, Norway. Some personal items were nearby, and two suitcases were later found at the railway station, but all identifying marks had been removed from all of these.
An autopsy showed the woman had been incapacitated by phenobarbital and poisoned by carbon monoxide, and she’d consumed 50 to 70 sleeping pills. A notepad found in one of the suitcases suggested that she’d traveled throughout Europe using at least eight false identities. She’d last been seen alive when she’d checked out of her room at the Hotel Hordaheimen two days earlier; she’d paid in cash and requested a taxi. During her stay she’d appeared guarded and kept to her room.
The woman has never been identified. Her death was attributed to the sleeping pills, and she was interred in a Bergen graveyard. A 2017 analysis of her teeth suggested that she’d been born in Germany around 1930 and had perhaps moved to France as a child. In 2005 a resident of Bergen said he’d seen a woman hiking on a hillside outside town five days before the discovery of the body, dressed lightly and followed by two men. She’d seemed about to speak to him but had not. He’d reported the encounter to the police, but no investigation was made.
But for the next [Maryland] assembly in 1638 the records show that some free men attended in person while others delegated representatives, each of whom was entitled to his own vote and also to all the votes of those who had selected him as their representative. …
The result was a politically bizarre situation: within the assembly some men had only their own vote, while others had the votes of all their proxies in addition to their own. One one occasion an aspiring politician named Giles Brent had enough proxies (seventy-three) to constitute a majority of the assembly all by himself.
— Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America, 1988
(Thanks, Keith.)
habitacle
n. a dwelling-place or habitation
crispation
n. the state of being curled
affabrous
adj. ingeniously made or finished
rhathymia
n. light-heartedness
British artist Alex Chinneck designed this unzipped building facade for Milan Design Week in 2019. The theme is continued inside, where giant zippers create openings in walls and the floor. More at Dezeen.
When a mysterious illness blinded him at age 25, British naval officer James Holman took up a new pursuit: travel. For the next 40 years he roamed the world alone, describing his adventures in a series of popular books. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast, we’ll describe Holman’s remarkable career and his unique perspective on his experiences.
We’ll also remember some separating trains and puzzle over an oddly drawn battle plan.
In October, Mason Zeinali bicycled 101 km through downtown Toronto to draw the shape of a moose on Google Earth.
The waterfront segment runs along Lake Shore Boulevard, and the moose’s entire back is one street, Davenport Road.
More details at Cycling Magazine.
William Friedman, the father of modern American cryptology, was fond of a cipher devised by Francis Bacon — a scheme so flexible that it could hide a message in a drawing, a piece of sheet music, almost any imaginable setting (“anything can be made to signify anything”).
In 1918 he used it to hide a message in the graduation photograph of the codebreakers’ class that he’d taught with his wife Elizebeth (click to enlarge). Some students are looking at the camera, others to the side — they’re encoding the message KNOWLEDGE IS POWER, a quotation of Bacon’s that was a favorite of Friedman’s.
Friedman kept the photo on his desk for the rest of his career, and when he died in 1969 Elizabeth had the phrase engraved on his tombstone, in a design of her own devising:
In 2017, cryptographer Elonka Dunin noticed that the inscription is composed of both serif and sans-serif letters. It turns out that even this is a cipher — Elizabeth had used it to conceal the letters WFF, William’s initials. Dunin calls it “a fitting tribute, in the life of a couple who had been so dedicated to the field of codes and ciphers.”
There’s more on the Friedmans’ legacy in this NSA publication.
