Clockwork

Inspired by his wife’s art studies, physicist David C. Roy turned his training to sculpture and began fashioning moving mechanisms of birch, not clocks themselves but clocklike in that they’re wound by hand and then run unpowered, sustaining their motion through escapements, suspended weights, and constant force springs.

“I saw it as another type of creative problem solving, not all that different from my advanced physics courses, but with a completely different goal,” he writes. “To this day, I find art and science to be closely linked.”

More on his website and YouTube channel.

| Art

The Safety Scoop

Two Sheffield engineers introduced this brainstorm in 1939 — when a motorist realizes he’s about to hit a pedestrian he can pull an emergency lever and the bumper deploys a life-saving “scoop.”

A similar device had appeared in Berlin in 1927 (below). I don’t know whether either was put to practical use.

| Technology

Animation

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Self-portrait,_entitled_The_Silence,_by_Joseph_Ducreux,_Nationalmuseum,_Stockholm.jpg

French painter Joseph Ducreux (1735–1802) was fascinated with physiognomy, the notion that a person’s character is reflected in their outward appearance — and this led to some decidedly unconventional self-portraits.

At the same time, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736-1783) was doing similar work in three dimensions.

| Art

Time Share

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

“Gotham City is Manhattan below 14th Street at eleven minutes past midnight on the coldest night in November, and Metropolis is Manhattan between 14th and 100th Streets on the brightest, sunniest July day of the year.” — Dennis O’Neil

“Metropolis is New York in the daytime; Gotham City is New York at night.” — Frank Miller

| Entertainment

Black and White

immunity chess puzzle

Black is clearly lost. But there are two squares on which his king can never be checkmated, even if White is allowed to make consecutive moves and checks are ignored. What are they?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

The Persian Princess

In October 2000, a mummy was offered for sale on the black antiquities market in Pakistani Baluchistan. Tribal leader Wali Mohammed Reeki claimed that it had been found after an earthquake near Quetta.

At first a Pakistani archaeologist suggested that the mummy had been a princess of ancient Egypt, or perhaps a daughter of Persian king Cyrus II. Iran and Pakistan began to contend for its ownership, but then American archaeologist Oscar White Muscarella came forward to say he’d been offered a similarly uncertified mummy the previous March which had turned out to be a forgery.

On examination, the “Persian Princess” turned out to be substantially younger than her coffin — in fact, the mat under her body was only 5 years old.

In the end, Asma Ibrahim, curator of the National Museum of Pakistan, reported that the woman had in fact died only around 1996, possibly even murdered to provide a corpse. She was eventually interred with proper burial rites, but her identity remains unknown.

| Death · Oddities

Podcast Episode 315: Beryl Markham’s Unconventional Life

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Beryl Markham managed to fit three extraordinary careers into one lifetime: She was a champion racehorse trainer, a pioneering bush pilot, and a best-selling author. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll review her eventful life, including her historic solo flight across the Atlantic in 1936.

We’ll also portray some Canadian snakes and puzzle over a deadly car.

See full show notes …

| History · Literature · Podcast

Watch Your Step

In 2016, Manchester’s Casa Ceramic installed custom tiles in its entry corridor to create the illusion of an uneven surface.

Sales administrator Harry Molyneaux says the effect is most vivid in photographs.

“The floor is completely flat and safe to walk over.”

| Oddities

Miss and Hit

At the commencement of this battle [Gettysburg], as the Regiment was rushing forward toward the enemy, a cannon ball passed between the legs of Captain Robert Story, of Company B, plowing up the earth beyond, yet he rushed on until, half an hour later, he lay mortally wounded, in the enemy’s lines. He was struck in the left thigh by a Minnie ball, which, on reaching and fracturing the bone, divided into three parts.

— Abram P. Smith, History of the Seventy-Sixth Regiment New York Volunteers, 1867

| History · Oddities