- The sum of the numbers on a roulette wheel is 666.
- ANTITRINITARIANIST contains all 24 arrangements of the letters I, N, R, and T.
- The Empire State Building has its own zip code.
- 63945 = 63 × (-9 + 45)
- “Isn’t it strange that we talk least about the things we think about most!” — Charles Lindbergh
Author: Greg Ross
For Your Consideration
I send you a photograph of a snake made of postage-stamps. It contains, I believe, from fifteen thousand to twenty thousand stamps. The only portion not made of stamps is the head, which is of black velvet, with eyes of white beads, also teeth of beads; the fang is a match stuck into the mouth. The snake was made by Mrs. Membury, of Hyde Corner, Bridport, Dorset, and took about three years to complete. The length is four feet nine inches.
— Strand, March 1907
Happenstance
As the Mayflower was crossing the Atlantic in 1620, passenger John Howland was swept overboard during a storm. He managed to sieze a trailing halyard and was pulled back to safety. His descendants in the New World have included:
- Franklin Roosevelt
- George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- Joseph Smith and Brigham Young
- Humphrey Bogart
- Benjamin Spock
- Sarah Palin
- Chevy Chase
- Christopher Lloyd
- Alec Baldwin
If Howland had lost his life in that storm, none of these people would have existed.
Animal Talk
A newspaper reporter submitted a story about the theft of 2,025 pigs.
His editor, struck at the size of the theft, called the farmer to confirm.
“Is it true that you lost two thousand twenty-five pigs?” he asked.
“Yeth,” said the farmer.
The editor thanked him, hung up, and changed the phrase to “two sows and 25 pigs.”
Shades of Gray
An optical illusion. The gray bars on the left appear lighter than those on the right, but in fact they’re the same color.
Pssst
Can praying improve your reasoning? I once questioned a student about his suspicious behavior during a logic examination. He confessed that he was praying for the correct answer. I felt this was cheating. Even if God did not give him the answer, the student was soliciting the answer from Someone Else.
— Dartmouth philosopher Roy Sorensen, in A Brief History of the Paradox, 2003
Black Widow
In 1902, 42-year-old Norwegian emigrant Belle Gunness bought an Indiana farm with $8,500 in insurance money she’d received when her husband and two children died. A second husband died after only nine months, and over the next six years a succession of prosperous suitors visited her farm and failed to return.
When the brother of one of these men grew suspicious, the farmhouse suddenly burned to the ground in April 1908. Firemen discovered the remains of four people stacked in the cellar: Three were Gunness’ children, but the fourth — an adult woman — was unidentifiable because its head was missing.
Investigation began to turn up butchered corpses buried around the property. Under questioning, farmhand Ray Lamphere said that Gunness would lure her victims to the farmhouse, drug them, kill them with an ax, and bury them in the hog pen or around the grounds.
It’s estimated that Gunness killed more than 40 people, making her one of America’s most prolific serial killers of either sex. Curiously, her own fate is uncertain — officially she was declared dead, but neighbors insisted the headless remains could not have been hers. Lamphere claimed she had staged her own death and absconded with $100,000 in stolen money. He may be right — there’s not enough surviving DNA to decide for certain.
Numbers Game
In 1938, Samuel Isaac Krieger of Chicago claimed he had disproved Fermat’s last theorem. He said he’d found a positive integer greater than 2 for which 1324n + 731n = 1961n was true — but he refused to disclose it.
A New York Times reporter quickly showed that Krieger must be mistaken. How?
Season’s Greetings
Comes Christmas merry? Hungry birds; no bright berries;
Rents high, not paid; long bills; empty barns, no peace and prosperity.
Read this backward and it becomes:
Prosperity and peace; no barns empty; bills long paid;
Not high rents; berries bright; no birds hungry; merry Christmas comes.
J.A. Lindon composed the following verse, in which the first line, the first word of each line, and the nth word of each nth line spell the same message:
A merry Christmas and a happy new year!
Merry, merry carols you’ll have sung us;
Christmas remains Christmas even when you are not here,
And though afar and lonely, you’re among us.
A bond is there, a bond at times near broken.
Happy be Christmas then, when happy, clear,
New heart-warm links are forged, new ties betoken
Year ripe with loving giving birth to year.
Next!
In 1900, evidently tired of initiating pledges by hand, Edmund and Ulysses de Moulin decided to automate the process.
With their “initiating device,” the applicant is blindfolded, placed in position, and told to pull the handles to test his strength. When he does so, the paddle spanks him and an electric shock passes through his arms, “making the sensation rather unique.”
You could turn this into a regular assembly line — or, using multiple machines, humiliate an entire freshman class at once.