Oh

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Image: Fir0002/Flagstaffotos

This is a floodlight photographed at night. What are the segmented stalks that seem to surround it? The phenomenon is seen regularly in photographs and videos; cryptozoologists and students of UFOs call the entities rods.

In 2003 author Robert Todd Carroll consulted entomologist Doug Yanega, who explained that they’re flying insects (in this case moths).

“Essentially what you see is several wingbeat cycles of the insect on each frame of the video, creating the illusion of a ‘rod’ with bulges along its length,” Yanega wrote. “The blurred body of the insect as it moves forward forms the ‘rod,’ and the oscillation of the wings up and down form the bulges.”

“Some hilarious photographs of ‘rods’ have been posted on the Internet,” Carroll noted. “My favorite is ‘the swallow chases a rod’ which looks just like a bird going after an insect.”

| Oddities · Science & Math

Concise

Two hundred kilometers west of Pretoria is a farm called Tweebuffelsmeteenskootmorsdoodgeskietfontein. The name, the longest place name in South Africa, means “the spring where two buffaloes were shot stone dead with one shot.”

As a daughter language of Dutch, Afrikaans is capable of almost endless compounding, at least in principle. In his 1982 Total Book of South African Records, Eric Rosenthal claims that the longest word in the language is Tweedehandse­motor­verkoops­manne­vakbond­stakings­vergadering­sameroepers­toespraak­skrywers­pers­verklaring­uitreikings­media­konferensie­aankondiging, “issuable media conference’s announcement at a press release regarding the convener’s speech at a secondhand car dealership union’s strike meeting.” But, as with many such records, the word was contrived expressly and is not in common use.

| Language

Line of Thought

At Mr Currie’s table I met several ingenious persons, who entertained me with curious and interesting reminiscences. Dr Adam Smith, author of ‘The Wealth of Nations,’ was a native of Kirkcaldy, and in the place composed his great work. While engaged in composition he frequently fell into a condition of reverie, so as to be entirely unconscious of his relations with the external world. Early on a Sunday morning he walked into his garden, his mind occupied with a train of ideas; he unconsciously travelled into the turnpike road, along which he proceeded in a state of abstraction, till he reached Dunfermline, at a distance of fifteen miles. The people were going to church, and the sound of the bells awakened the philosopher from his dream. Arrayed in an old dressing-gown, he was regarded as an oddity.

— Charles Rogers, Leaves From My Autobiography, 1876

| Literature · Oddities

Object Lesson

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When alchemist Georg Honauer (1572-1597) claimed he could convert iron into gold, Duke Friedrich I of Württemberg ordered all the iron in his Mömpelgard armory conveyed to Stuttgart for a demonstration. Honauer panicked and fled but was extradited back to town, where, according to this contemporary woodcut, he was dressed in a gilded garment and hanged on a gilded gallows.

The anonymous printer concludes, er soll besser lernen Gold machen — “he should learn how to make gold better.”

(Thanks, Charlie.)

| History

In a Word

aegritude
n. an instance of sickness

Utah senator Jake Garn got so comprehensively ill on the space shuttle Discovery in 1985 that he’s remembered in the Garn scale, an informal measure of space sickness. Astronaut Robert Stevenson recalled:

Jake Garn was sick, was pretty sick. I don’t know whether we should tell stories like that. But anyway, Jake Garn, he has made a mark in the Astronaut Corps because he represents the maximum level of space sickness that anyone can ever attain, and so the mark of being totally sick and totally incompetent is one Garn. Most guys will get maybe to a tenth Garn if that high. And within the Astronaut Corps, he forever will be remembered by that.

Garn said, “I’ve been very proud of the fact that they named something after me after all these years, even if it was unofficial.”

| Language · Science & Math

Beyond the Call

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Dubious but entertaining: After the Battle of Wauhatchie on the night of October 29, 1863, rumors circulated that Confederate troops had retreated in the darkness because they’d mistaken a stampede of mules for a cavalry charge. Someone wrote a “Charge of the Mule Brigade,” and the Union quartermaster reportedly asked that the gallant mules “have conferred upon them the brevet rank of horses.”

But there are no Southern reports of a mule attack at Wauhatchie, and one Confederate combatant categorically denied the story when it appeared in Grant’s memoir. At best, it appears, some mules broke loose and caused enough confusion to permit the 137th New York Infantry to arrive and oppose the rebels.

“The exact details of whatever the mules did at Wauhatchie will never be precisely known,” writes historian Gene C. Armistead in Horses and Mules in the Civil War (2013), “but the story is too humorous and too good to abandon.”

| History · Oddities

An Odd Request

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A puzzle by Polish mathematician Paul Vaderlind:

Is it possible to arrange 25 whole numbers (not necessarily all different) so that the sum of any three successive terms is even but the sum of all 25 is odd?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Turnabout

Vladimir Nabokov’s 1962 novel Pale Fire includes a character named John Shade, a poet who writes the lines

Space is a swarming in the eyes; and time,
A singing in the ears.

In the first edition of his 1964 book The Ambidextrous Universe, Martin Gardner quoted these lines and, as a joke, credited them to Shade rather than Nabokov, listing Shade in the index.

Nabokov, in turn, in his 1969 novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle had a character quote Gardner’s book and the same two lines of verse:

‘Space is a swarming in the eyes, and Time a singing in the ears,” says John Shade, a modern poet, as quoted by an invented philosopher (‘Martin Gardiner’) in The Ambidextrous Universe, page 165.

Gardner’s book concerns symmetry, and Ada is a palindrome; further, the action in that novel takes place on Anti-Terra, a sort of mirror image of Earth. Nabokov’s 1974 novel Look at the Harlequins!, also influenced by Gardner’s book, concerns a man who can’t distinguish left from right.

(Thanks, Jeff.)

| Literature

Matter

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A great portrait is always more a portrait of the painter than of the painted. When we look at a portrait by Holbein or Rembrandt it is of Holbein or Rembrandt that we think more than of the subject of their picture. Even a portrait of Shakespeare by Holbein or Rembrandt could tell us very little about Shakespeare. It would, however, tell us a great deal about Holbein or Rembrandt.

— Samuel Butler, Notebooks, 1912

| Art