You have nine coins and a balance scale. One of the coins is lighter than the others. Is it possible to identify it in only two weighings?
Author: Greg Ross
The Carisbrooke Donkey
The well at Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight is 200 feet deep, so the residents raise water using an enormous wheel driven by a donkey, a practice that dates to at least 1690.
“While it is not claimed that the same individual donkey has drawn its water all of these years,” wrote a correspondent to American Machinist in 1904, “the claim is made that the duty of drawing water from this famous well descends from father to son, and is never shared outside this one royal family of donkeys.”
“One ass has been known to perform this service at Carisbrooke for fifty years, another for forty, a third for thirty, and a fourth had performed it for ten years at the time of the writer’s last visit,” wrote Caroline Bray in 1876. “The dates are marked down inside the door of the well-house.”
(“The donkey was continuing his labour and looking towards the well when the question was asked, ‘What is he looking at?’ ‘He is looking for the bucket,’ said the man; and, in fact, as soon as the bucket appeared the donkey stopped, and very deliberately walked out of the wheel to the place at which he stood at our entrance, knowing full well that he had done what was desired.”)
Gripping Pages
Mark Twain found it exasperating to compose a scrapbook using mucilage and glue. In order to “economize the profanity of this country,” in 1873 he patented a “self-pasting scrapbook” whose pages are already covered with adhesive — the user simply moistens a portion of the page to paste in each piece.
You know that when the average man wants to put something in his scrap book he can’t find his paste — then he swears; or if he finds it, it is dried so hard that it is only fit to eat — then he swears; if he uses mucilage it mingles with the ink, and next year he can’t read his scrap — the result is barrels and barrels of profanity. This can all be saved and devoted to other irritating things, where it will do more real and lasting good, simply by substituting my self-pasting Scrap Book for the old-fashioned one.
Twain called it “the only rational scrapbook the world has ever seen.” It proved to be his only profitable invention, selling still in 1912. One wag called it “a book to which readers could easily become attached.”
Calamari Ripieni
From the London Times, July 4, 1874, an account of an attack by a giant squid on the schooner Pearl, as told by its master to the rescuing steamer Strathowen:
I was lately the skipper of the ‘Pearl’ schooner, 150 tons, as tight a little craft as ever sailed the seas, with a crew of six men. We were bound from the Mauritius for Rangoon in ballast to return with paddy, and had put in at Galle for water. Three days out we fell becalmed in the bay (lat. 8°50’N., long 84°5′ E.). On the 10th of May, about 5 p.m.,–eight bells I know had gone,–we sighted a two-masted screw on our port quarter, about five or six miles off; very soon after, as we lay motionless, a great mass rose slowly out of the sea about half a mile off on our larboard side, and remained spread out, as it were, and stationary; it looked like the back of a huge whale, but it sloped less, and was of a brownish colour; even at that distance it seemed much longer than our craft, and it seemed to be basking in the sun. ‘What’s that?’ I sung out to the mate. ‘Blest if I knows; barring its size, colour and shape, it might be a whale,’ replied Tom Scott; ‘And it ain’t the sea sarpent,’ said one of the crew, ‘for he’s too round for that ere crittur.’ I went into the cabin for my rifle, and as I was preparing to fire, Bill Darling, a Newfoundlander, came on deck, and, looking at the monster, exclaimed, putting up his hand, ‘Have a care, master; that ere is a squid, and will capsize us if you hurt him.’ Smiling at the idea, I let fly and hit him, and with that he shook; there was a great ripple all round him, and he began to move. ‘Out with all your axes and knives,’ shouted Bill, ‘and cut at any part of him that comes aboard; look alive, and Lord help us!’ Not aware of the danger, and never having seen or heard of such a monster, I gave no orders, and it was no use touching the helm or ropes to get out of the way. By this time three of the crew, Bill included, had found axes, and one a rusty cutlass, and all were looking over the ship’s side at the advancing monster. We could now see a huge oblong mass moving by jerks just under the surface of the water, and an enormous train following; the oblong body was at least half the size of our vessel in length and just as thick; the wake or train might have been one hundred feet long. In the time that I have taken to write this, the brute struck us, and the ship quivered under the thud; in another moment, monstrous arms like trees seized the vessel and she heeled over; in another second the monster was aboard, squeezed in between the two masts, Bill screaming ‘Slash for your lives;’ but all our slashing was of no avail, for the brute, holding on by his arms, slipped his vast body overboard, and pulled the vessel down with him on her beam-ends; we were thrown into the water at once, and just as I went over I caught sight of one of the crew, either Bill or Tom Fielding, squashed up between the masts and one of those awful arms; for a few seconds our ship lay on her beam-ends, then filled and went down; another of the crew must have been sucked down, for you only picked up five; the rest you know. I can’t tell who ran up the ensign.
“This tale has never been confirmed,” notes Bernard Heuvelmans, “and it may well have been an opportune hoax, for the Strathowen is not to be found in Lloyd’s Register for that year.”
Double Teaming
On Aug. 4, 1982, Mets center fielder Joel Youngblood had driven in two runs against Cubs pitcher Ferguson Jenkins in an afternoon game at Wrigley Field when he was traded in mid-game to the Montreal Expos.
He left the game and flew to Philadelphia in time to take up a position in right field at Veterans Stadium at the bottom of the sixth in an evening game against the Philadelphia Phillies.
In the top of the seventh he singled against Steve Carlton. That makes Youngblood the only player in history to get a base hit for two different teams in two different cities on the same day — and he did it against two future Hall of Famers.
Guy Incognito
Suppose [a] man who underwent [a] radical change of character — let us call him Charles — claimed, when he woke up, to remember witnessing certain events and doing certain actions which earlier he did not claim to remember, and that under questioning he could not remember witnessing other events and doing other actions which earlier he did remember. … [Suppose that] all the events he claims to have witnessed and all the actions he claims to have done point unanimously to the life-history of some one person in the past — for instance, Guy Fawkes. Not only do all Charles’ memory-claims that can be checked fit the pattern of Fawkes’ life as known to historians, but others that cannot be checked are plausible, provide explanations of unexplained facts, and so on. Are we to say that Charles is now Guy Fawkes, that Guy Fawkes has come to life again in Charles’ body, or some such thing?
— Bernard Williams, “Personal Identity and Individuation,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1957
“If it is logically possible that Charles should undergo the changes described, then it is logically possible that some other man should simultaneously undergo the same changes: e.g., that both Charles and his brother Robert should be found in this condition. What should we say in that case? They cannot both be Guy Fawkes: if they were, Guy Fawkes would be in two places at once, which is absurd.”
Traffic
On July 9, 1962, a Western Airlines L-188 was flying over central Nevada when the pilot felt a thud. On landing, the crew found a football-sized dent in one of the horizontal stabilizers. Stuck in the dent was a feather, which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service identified as a mallard’s.
The plane had been flying at 21,000 feet.
Changing Teams
A very old Jewish man called his wife to his bed. ‘I am going to die. Please call a priest — I wish to convert to Catholicism.’ His wife responded with shock and disbelief, reminding her husband that they had been devout Jews all their lives. ‘I know, dear,’ he said, ‘but isn’t it better that one of them should die than one of us?’
— Anonymous epigraph to John Martin Fischer, The Metaphysics of Death, 1993
Match Point
Henrietta wants a yacht. Her parents think she’s too young. Like all rich people, they settle disagreements by playing competitive lawn tennis.
Henrietta must play three singles matches against her parents. If she wins two matches in a row she gets the yacht. Her mother is a better player than her father. Should she play mother-father-mother or father-mother-father?
Unquote
“A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.” — Daniel Dennett