Jack the Snipper

From the United Press, June 18, 1942:

Pascagoula, Miss. — (U.P.) — Everybody in town is just as mystified over the motive of the ‘phantom barber’ as they are about who he might try to clip next.

Without robbing or otherwise disturbing his victims, he breaks into homes at night and snips the hair of heavy sleepers. He has given haircuts to three persons in the past week and not one of them even woke up during the process.

Police chief A. W. Ezell said he didn’t have the slightest idea why a man would want to do such a thing, but because the complaints have been coming hard and heavy, his department has staked a $300 reward for information leading to his capture. He also gave pistol permits to six volunteer officers and ordered the regular police force to be on the alert.

Bloodhounds, given a man’s footprint to start on, have failed miserably. None of the victims could give a description since they slumbered on oblivious of the tonsorial attention they were getting.

| Crime · Oddities

Custom Baking

From a Russian puzzle collection:

Is it possible to bake a cake that can be divided into four parts by a single straight cut?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Stuckie

Loggers with the Georgia Kraft Corp. were cutting down a chestnut oak in southern Georgia in the 1980s when they discovered the mummified remains of a dog inside the hollow trunk. Experts determined that it was most likely a hunting dog that had pursued some quarry up through the hollow tree sometime in the 1960s. The dog had wedged itself into the narrowing trunk and, unable to turn around, eventually perished 28 feet above ground level. But chestnut oak contains tannin, a natural desiccant that stopped microbial activity, and the dog’s position and a natural updraft through the trunk prevented other animals from scenting or reaching it. So it just remained there for 20 years, waiting to be found.

The mummified dog, now known as “Stuckie,” is on display at the Southern Forest World museum in Waycross, Georgia.

| Death · Oddities

Unquote

“I am reminded of the professor who, in his declining hours, was asked by his devoted pupils for his final counsel. He replied, ‘Verify your quotations.'” — Winston Churchill

| Quotations

Swahili Time

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Red_sky_%2B_Giraffe_%2B_Kenya_%3D_A_sunrise_to_remember_(15062623745).jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Kenya and Uganda both lie on the equator, so the sun rises around 6 a.m. and sets around 6 p.m. throughout the year. Given such a reliable natural timekeeper, it’s customary to reckon time by counting hours of light or hours of darkness: 7 a.m. is called 1 o’clock (saa moja, or one hour of light), and 11 a.m. is called 5 o’clock (saa tano) (moja means 1 and tano 5 in Swahili). Similarly, 7 p.m. is called 1 o’clock (one hour of darkness), and 11 p.m. is 5 o’clock.

Confusingly for newcomers, clocks themselves are set to Western time, but they’re read aloud in “Swahili time.” Increasingly, though, Africans are simply conforming to Western conventions.

| Science & Math

Black and White

orbán chess puzzle

Tibor Orbán offered this puzzle in Die Schwalbe in 1976. The position above can be reached in exactly 3 moves in several ways — for example:

1. e4 c6 2. Bb5 e6 3. Bxc6 dxc6
1. e4 e6 2. Bc4 c6 3. Bxe6 dxe6

How can it be reached in exactly 4 moves?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

River of Gold

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlLxUYKldHk

For about two weeks each February, the last rays of the setting sun set Yosemite’s Horsetail Fall glowing orange and red.

The effect is best seen from a clearing close to the picnic area on the north road leading out of the valley east of El Capitan.

| Oddities

Small Town

Shanghai’s Urban Planning Exhibition Center contains a 1:500 scale model of the city, showing all existing and approved buildings according to the city’s master plan for 2020.

The model measures about 5,200 square feet, or 480 square meters, but even at that size it covers only the central part of the city, within the Inner Ring Road, an area about 9 miles by 5 miles. The full city is about 58 miles by 55 miles, with three more expressway rings beyond the inner ring.

Because the exhibition center is itself located within the central district, the model contains a miniature replica of its own building. Ideally that replica would contain its own, doubly tiny scale model of the city, but I guess there’s no way to check.

(Thanks, Jim.)

| Technology

Trip Planning

mouse puzzle

A mouse wants to eat his way through a 3 × 3 × 3 cube of cheese, starting in one of the corners and tunneling through all 27 1 × 1 × 1 sub-cubes, visiting each once. Can he arrange his route so that he finishes at the center of the cube? Assume that he always moves between orthogonally adjacent cubes, traveling through walls but not through edges or corners.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Elementary

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Poe_rue_morgue_byam_shaw.JPG

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is credited with being the first modern detective story — biographer Jeffrey Meyers says it “changed the history of world literature.” The story established the convention of the brilliant investigator who unveils a climactic revelation before explaining the reasoning that led him to it. The lead character, C. Auguste Dupin, served as a prototype for fictional detectives from Sherlock Holmes to Hercule Poirot.

But Poe himself thought the praise was overblown. “These tales of ratiocination owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key,” he wrote. “People think them more ingenious than they are — on account of their method and air of method. In the ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ for instance, where is the ingenuity in unraveling a web which you yourself … have woven for the express purpose of unraveling?” The brilliance of a detective story is transparently contrived, he said: “The reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the suppositious Dupin with that of the writer of the story.”

| Literature