An amorous M.A.
Says that Cupid, the C.D.,
Doesn’t cast for his health
But is rolling in wealth —
He’s the John Jaco-B.H.
— Anonymous
Author: Greg Ross
Give and Take
The rocky island of Märket lies in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland. When the Finns put a lighthouse on it in 1885, they unwittingly put it on Swedish territory.
This created a problem: Without moving the lighthouse or altering the coastline, the parties had to find a way to reapportion the island equitably according to their agreement.
The solution was to draw a reverse S on the map: Sweden grants Finland the lighthouse, but it gains a corresponding incursion into Finnish territory, so the island’s balance is restored.
It must be tricky to play croquet, though.
Somewhat related: The Tehachapi Loop.
The Ghost Plane
On Dec. 8, 1942, American forces in Kienow, China, spotted an unidentified plane heading toward them on a beeline from Formosa. Pilots Bob Scott and Johnny Hampshire approached it and discovered it was an old American P-40B Tomahawk bearing an insignia that hadn’t been seen since Pearl Harbor. The pilot would not identify himself.
Fearing a trick by the Japanese, Scott and Hampshire fired briefly on the plane, but it sought neither to evade them nor to counterattack. Scott moved to the plane’s farther side and saw that it had been badly damaged before they came upon it — the canopy had been shot away, the right aileron was gone, and part of the wing was missing. The pilot’s head was slumped on his chest. Strangest of all, the P-40B had no landing gear — the wheel wells were empty.
Scott and Hampshire lost the plane in a cloud bank and then saw it crash in a rice paddy below. Who was the pilot, and where had the strange plane come from? No one knows, but after years of research Scott evolved a conjecture that it had been assembled by a small group of Air Corps personnel who had retreated from Bataan to Corregidor and then to Mindanao. If this is true it must have flown more than 1,000 miles through enemy airspace to reach China.
Japanese records confirm that there was an American P-40 over Formosa on Dec. 8, 1942, but where it came from, where it was headed, and indeed how it even got airborne remain a mystery.
In a Word
mancinism
n. the condition of being left-handed
The Hairy Ball Theorem
A hairy ball can’t be combed flat — it must always have a cowlick.
This result arose originally in algebraic topology, but it has intriguing applications elsewhere. For example, it can’t be windy everywhere at once on Earth’s surface — at any given moment, the horizontal wind speed somewhere must be zero.
Bunk?
These have been in my notes for years — I can’t conclusively disprove them, but I have my doubts:
- In 1930 four Germans bailed out of a glider inside a thundercloud over the Rhön Mountains, were carried upward by their parachutes into a region of supercooled vapor, and froze to death.
- The monument to Jose Olmedo in Guyaquil, Ecuador, is actually a secondhand statue of Lord Byron, substituted because the town had no money. (Also: Cuzco, Peru, is rumored to have a statue of Chief Powhatan rather than Atahualpa.)
- A surprising number of sources claim that Mississippi spent a fifth of its revenues on artificial limbs in 1866.
- In 1902 Germany manufactured a “Goethemobile” in honor of the poet. (I really hope this is true.)
Debunk/rebunk/semi-unbunk as you please.
Catching Rays
In 1984, Bob Ellis, managing editor of the Eldorado, Ill., Daily Journal, announced a contest “to recognize and honor the American summer tradition, Daylight Saving Time.”
“The rules are simple,” Ellis wrote. “Beginning with the first day of Daylight Savings Time this year, those entering the contest must begin saving daylight. Whoever saves the most daylight … will be awarded prizes.”
He arranged for the contest to end on April 1, and hoped he had inserted enough absurdities that readers would see the joke. No pre-dawn light or twilight would be accepted, and moonlight was disallowed. Contestants could store their light in any container and deliver it to the Journal’s office. “All entries will be donated to less fortunate nations that do not observe Daylight Saving Time.”
But they didn’t. Ellis was contacted by media in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Dallas, “every section of the nation” seeking more information about the contest.
That was all right with Ellis. He’s written the piece as “change of pace from the usual and often gloomy side of the news,” he said, so that people “could laugh at the world, and me, and perhaps even at themselves, with reckless abandon. And feel good. And therein lies the worth of such a diversion.”
Turkey Drives
George Hanger, an eccentric friend of George IV, once wagered £500 that 20 turkeys could outrace 20 geese over a course of 10 miles. The turkeys held a lead of as much as two miles for the first three hours, but toward evening they wandered off the road and began to roost.
“In the mean time, the geese came waddling on, and in a short time passed the turkey party, who were all busy in the trees dislodging their obstinate birds; but as to any further progress, it was found impossible, and the geese were declared the winners.”
In 1866, desperate for cash after a fire destroyed his hardware store in Placerville, Calif., Henry C. Hooker bought 500 turkeys and drove them over the Sierra Mountains to Carson City, Nev., where he sold them at a great profit to silver miners. (The turkeys took flight while descending a particularly steep precipice: “As I saw them take wing and race away through the air I had the most indescribable feeling of my life. I thought here is good-bye turkeys!”) He used the money to establish a new life as an Arizona stockman.
“Fifty Years Hence”
In 1932, Winston Churchill wrote an article for Popular Mechanics examining the technological promise of the coming half-century:
- “Wireless and television would enable their owner to connect up to any room similarly equipped and hear and take part in the conversation as well as if he put his head in through the window.”
- “Vast cellars, in which artificial radiation is generated, may replace the cornfields and potato patches. Parks and gardens will cover our plowed fields.”
- “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or the wing, by growing these parts separately.”
- “A few years ago London was surprised by a play called Rossum’s Universal Robots. The production of such beings may well be possible within fifty years. They will not be made, but grown under glass.”
- “There seems little doubt that it will be possible to carry out the entire cycle which now leads to the birth of a child, in artificial surroundings. Interference with the mental development of such beings, expert suggestion and treatment in the earlier years, would produce beings specialized to thought or toil.”
- If the potential of nuclear power were realized, “we could make an engine of six hundred horsepower weighing twenty pounds and carrying fuel for a thousand hours in a tank the size of a fountain pen.”
“Mankind has sometimes traveled forward and sometimes backward, or has stood still for hundreds of years,” he wrote. “Now it is moving very fast.”
Furry Testimony
As the lower animals were anciently amenable to law in Switzerland, so, in peculiar circumstances, they could be received as witnesses. A similar law, it appears, is still, or was to a very late period, recognised in Savoy. If a man’s house was broken into between sunset and sunrise, and the owner of the house killed the intruder, the act was considered a justifiable homicide. But it was considered just possible that a man, who lived all alone by himself, might invite or entice a person, whom he wished to kill, to spend the evening with him, and after murdering his victim, assert that he did it in defence of his person and property, the slain man having been a burglar. So when a person was killed under such circumstances, the solitary householder was not held innocent unless he produced a dog, a cat, or a cock that had been an inmate of the house, and witnessed the death of the person killed. The owner of the house was compelled to make his declaration of innocence on oath before one of these animals, and if it did not contradict him, he was considered guiltless, the law taking for granted the Deity would cause a miraculous manifestation by a dumb animal rather than allow a murderer to escape from justice.
— William Jones, Credulities Past and Present, 1880