In 2005, as the Art League of Houston planned to demolish two houses it owned, it invited sculptors Dan Havel and Dean Ruck to transform them first. So they peeled off the buildings’ skins and arranged them into a vortex to another dimension.
Six years later they extended the same treatment to other dilapidated houses in Houston:
In natural language, the most frequent word occurs about twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, and so on.
In the Brown Corpus, a text collection of a million words, the most frequent word, the, accounts for 7.5% of all word occurrences, and the second most frequent, of, accounts for 3.5%. A mere 135 vocabulary items account for half the corpus, and about half the total vocabulary of about 50,000 words are hapax legomena, words that occur once only.
Similar distributions are found in data throughout the physical and social sciences; the law is named after the American linguist George Kingsley Zipf.
A striking paragraph from A Woman’s Work Is Never Done, Caroline Davidson’s 1982 history of housework in the British Isles:
One woman actually entered the nascent electrical industry in the 1870s. Pretending to be a man (she assumed the name of Charles Torr) she rose to become managing director of a large Birmingham firm called Winfield’s which produced ornamental brass-work, chandeliers and fittings suitable for interior electric lighting. She joined a dining society of electrical engineers called the ‘Dynamicables’ where many of the problems facing the new industry were discussed. She obviously had the vision to see electricity’s brilliant future, as well as a flair for business and exceptional talent for concealing her sex. For, in the early 1880s, she approached Rookes E.B. Crompton with a proposal that their two firms should go into partnership; Compton’s was to carry out lighting installations and Winfield’s was to supply the capital and fitments. Her plans were extremely grand: she wanted to apply for a Parliamentary act to light Birmingham and to sell electrical goods world-wide. However, after the two firms had co-operated for several years, Winfield’s ran into financial difficulties and Charles Torr committed suicide: only then did her colleagues learn her true sex.
I haven’t been able to learn anything more. Davidson cites Crompton’s Reminiscences of 1928, which is unfortunately rare.
The streets of Europe are studded with thousands of brass plates, each marking the last residence of an individual before their extermination or persecution by the Nazis. German artist Gunter Demnig began the project in 1992, installing the first plate before Cologne’s city hall to mark the 50th anniversary of Heinrich Himmler’s “Auschwitz decree” ordering the deportation of Sinti and Roma to extermination camps. In the ensuing 15 years he laid more than 13,000 stolpersteine in more than 280 cities, and last October the 70,000th stolperstein was installed in Frankfurt, Germany, for Willy Zimmerer, who was “euthanized” in 1944 at age 43.
Each plate is engraved with the victim’s name and dates of birth, deportation, and death, as well as the words Hier wohnte … (“Here lived …”) to emphasize the immediacy of the memorial, “tripping up” passersby (stolperstein means “stumbling stone”). “I wanted to bring back the names of the Jews who lived, loved, had children and a normal life, who lived in these houses,” Demnig has said. “It’s my life. We can’t allow this part of history to pass into oblivion.”
(Thanks, Hanno.)
Here’s a forgotten punishment. In the 17th century, in return for a minor offense such as not attending to a sermon, a wrongdoer might be required to place his finger into an L-shaped hole over which a block was fastened to keep the knuckle bent. “[T]he finger was confined, and it will easily be seen that it could not be withdrawn until the pillory was opened,” writes William Andrews in Medieval Punishments (1898). “If the offender were held long in this posture, the punishment must have been extremely painful.”
In his 1686 history of Staffordshire, Robert Plot recalls a “finger-Stocks” “made for punishment of the disorders, that sometimes attend feasting at Christmas time.” Into this “the Lord of misrule, used formerly to put the fingers of all such persons as committed misdemeanors, or broke such rules, as by consent were agreed on for the time of keeping Christmas, among servants and others of promiscuous quality.”
“Comparison is the thief of joy.” — Theodore Roosevelt
The first woman to circumnavigate the world did so dressed as a man. In 1766, 26-year-old Jeanne Baret joined a French expedition hoping to conceal her identity for three years. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the story of her historic journey around the globe.
We’ll also hear Mark Twain’s shark story and puzzle over a foiled con artist.
On Aug. 17, 1896, 44-year-old Bridget Driscoll was crossing Dolphin Terrace on the grounds of London’s Crystal Palace when she was struck and killed by a car belonging to the Anglo-French Motor Carriage Company.
The car had been traveling at 4 mph, “a reckless pace, in fact, like a fire engine,” according to one witness.
After a six-hour inquest, the jury returned a verdict of accidental death. Coroner Percy Morrison said he hoped such a thing “would never happen again.”
In 2005 the Austrian art group Gelitin offered the “Tantamounter,” a sealed wooden box the size of a small house. Visitors could place any object into a hatch, and within an hour a handmade “duplicate” would join it. More examples.
In 2004 they built a roller coaster inside a Milan gallery (below).
