A Russian problem from the 1999 Mathematical Olympiad:
In an election, each voter writes the names of n candidates on his ballot. Each ballot is then placed into one of n+1 boxes. After the election, it’s noted that each box contains at least one ballot, and that if one ballot is drawn from each box, these n+1 ballots will always have a name in common. Show that for at least one box, there’s a name that appears on all of its ballots.
In 1862, journalist John Hollingshead accompanied a crew of workers into the sewers under London, “feeling a desire to inspect a main sewer almost from its source to its point of discharge into the Thames.” At one point he asked his guides about the unusual things they had found underground.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘the most awful things we ever find in the sewers is dead children. We’ve found at least four of ’em at different times; one somewhere under Notting Hill; another somewhere under Mary’bone; another at Paddington; and another at the Broadway, Westminster.’
‘We once found a dead seal,’ struck in one of the men pushing the boat.
‘Ah,’ continued Agrippa, ‘so we did. That was in one of the Westminster sewers — the Horseferry Road outlet, I think, and they said it had been shot at Barnes or Mortlake, and had drifted down with the tide. … We sometimes find live cats and dogs that have got down untrapped drains after house-rats; but these animals, when we pick ’em up, are more often dead ones.’
‘They once found a live hedgehog in Westminster,’ said another of the men. ‘I’ve heard tell on it, but I didn’t see it.’
At one point, on being told he was beneath Buckingham Palace, “Of course my loyalty was at once excited, and, taking off my fan-tailed cap, I led the way with the National Anthem, insisting that my guides should join in chorus. Who knows but what, through some untrapped drain, that rude but hearty underground melody found its way into some inner wainscoting of the palace, disturbing some dozing maid of honour with its mysterious sounds, and making her dream of Guy Fawkes and many other subterranean villains?”
In 1952, to “indulge a whim of a peculiar nature,” retired funeral director David H. Brown built a house out of 500,000 empty embalming-fluid bottles.
Situated on the shores of Kootenay Lake in British Columbia, the cloverleaf-shaped house occupies 1,200 square feet, including two bedrooms, a fireplace, a kitchen, and a terrace.
The bottles, together, weigh 250 tons.
“It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.” — Leonardo
Poet Craig Raine started a new school in 1979 — “Martian poetry,” in which the ordinary is “defamiliarized” by seeing it through alien eyes:
In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.
If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep
with sounds. And yet, they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.
Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to a punishment room
with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises
alone. No one is exempt
and everyone’s pain has a different smell.
At night, when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs
and read about themselves —
in colour, with their eyelids shut.
“The task of the artist at any time is uncompromisingly simple,” he said. “To discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.”
One of the famous whitewashed towns of Andalusia is blue.
The little village of Júzcar, population 243, was made up with 4,200 liters of blue paint in 2011 to celebrate the release of the movie The Smurfs.
Afterward, Sony offered to paint the town white again, but the villagers declined — in the six months since the film’s premiere, they had received 80,000 tourists.
Dust devils can grow huge on Mars — judging by its shadow, this one was 800 meters tall, about half a mile, and some have reached 10 times that height.
They’re constantly scrawling striking artwork on the Martian surface (below), picking up red dust to reveal the darker sand beneath.
These creatures may be lonely (spooky animation here), but apparently they’re friendly — both the Spirit and Opportunity rovers have had their solar panels cleaned by encounters with wandering devils.
When the Erie Canal was opened on Oct. 26, 1825, the fact was known in New York City, 425 miles away, within 81 minutes. This was before the advent of radio or telegraph. How was it done?
Cannons were placed along the length of the canal and the Hudson River, each within earshot of the last. When the crew of each cannon heard the boom of its upstream neighbor, it fired its own gun.
As a result, New Yorkers knew within an hour and half that they had a navigable route to the Great Lakes — the fastest news dispatch, to that date, in world history.
10/07/2013 Wait, that last bit ain’t right — Claude Chappe’s semaphore telegraph covered 120 miles in 9 minutes in 1792. (Thanks, Michael and Lorcan.)
Uninspired film titles listed by Patrick Robertson in Film Facts (2001):
Greta Garbo said, “If only those who dream about Hollywood knew how difficult it all is.”
In 1975, artist Richard Haas renewed the building at 112 Prince Street in Manhattan by covering its blank brick side with a five-story mural emulating the cast-iron architecture of its facade. Only two of the windows are real.
