The peculiar architecture of Echo Bridge, in Newton, Massachusetts, will re-echo a human voice 18 times and a pistol shot (reportedly) 25 times.
In 1889 author Moses King wrote, “The favorite word to hurl at the arch is JULY, and the serious charge of lie — lie — lie is thrown back as vigorously and almost as frequently as if the bridge were a political newspaper in campaign time.”
In Riddles in Mathematics (1961), Eugene Northrop proposes that two men can simultaneously be each other’s uncle and nephew:
Mr. and Mrs. Allen … had a son Tom, and Mr. and Mrs. Black … had a son Dick. Mr. Allen and Mr. Black both died. And Tom and Dick, after they were grown men, each married the other’s mother. Dick and Mrs. Allen then had a son Harry, and Tom and Mrs. Black a son George. Now consider the relationship between Harry and George. Since Harry is the brother of Tom, George’s father, Harry must be George’s uncle. On the other hand George is the brother of Harry’s father, Dick, so Harry must be George’s nephew. In exactly the same way George is Harry’s uncle and nephew.
In Fun for the Family (1939), Jerome S. Meyer observes that if you father a son with the mother of your father’s second wife, and if your stepmother also has a son, then you can dine alone and still enjoy the company of your stepbrother’s nephew’s father, your father’s mother-in-law’s husband, and your stepmother’s father-in-law. Lewis Carroll considered a similar dinner.
Robert Heinlein’s 1959 short story “–All You Zombies–“ accomplishes a kind of narrative hat trick: All the major characters turn out to be the same person, who takes on different roles through time travel and sex reassignment. The main character is his own partner, mother, father, and child.
Though it contains a number of paradoxes, Princeton philosopher David Lewis judged it to be a “perfectly consistent” time travel story. Ironically, Heinlein had written it in a single day.
Visiting a London bookshop in 1995 or 1996, British musician DJ Cylob noticed a pile of booklets near the entrance, with a note indicating that they were free. He asked an assistant about them, and she said that she knew nothing, only that a mysterious person was leaving them.
Each booklet consists of 20 pages of rectangular symbols. There are no letters or numbers, not even page numbers. Analysis shows that 24 different symbols make an appearance in the collection, which is consistent with encrypted English text, though some appear only at the beginning of the booklet and other very similar symbols only at the end.
The meaning of all this has never been discovered. One possibility is that the booklet is not a message at all but a game accessory. But then why does it contain no text? And why was someone silently offering it in a London bookshop?
In 2011 I wrote about the Flemish municipality of Baarle-Hertog, a complex of Belgian exclaves surrounded by the Netherlands.
Reader Serge De Man tells me that residents have now installed a swing on the border, so it’s possible to swing between countries.
There’s a pun here, but I can’t find it.
‘I’ll bet you a dollar you won’t give me a dollar to keep,’ Bob says to Sue. She accepts the bet and gives him a dollar. Thus he loses the bet and returns the dollar. But that means he wins the bet, and she has to give him the dollar again. And so Bob and Sue pass the buck back and forth for the rest of their lives.
— Dave Morice, Alphabet Avenue, 1997
I send you a photograph of the empty shell of an ostrich’s egg, with the necessary Customs declaration attached by means of a string tied to a match, and inserted in one of the holes. The shell bears the addresses of the sender and receiver written in ink, and also has the postage-stamps affixed. The novelty lies in the fact that it came by the ordinary post from Port Elizabeth (S. Africa) to Whitstable, nearly seven thousand miles, exactly as seen in the photo — that is to say, with no packing whatever — and arrived in a perfectly undamaged condition.
— W.H. Reeves, in the Strand, November 1903
When you view a pendulum swinging laterally before your eyes, your brain understands correctly that the bob is moving in a straight line perpendicular to your line of sight. But if you put a dark filter over one eye, the bob seems to move in an ellipse, swinging somewhat closer to the screened eye.
Apparently the visual system responds more quickly to bright objects than to dim ones, so when the clear eye correctly sees the bob’s position at A, B, and C, the obscured eye sees it at A’, B’, and C’, and the brain reconciles these reports by supposing it’s at A*, B*, and C*. German physicist Carl Pulfrich first described the effect in 1922.
Death Valley contains an enormous jagged salt flat produced by the evaporation of an ancient lake.
It takes its name from a 1934 National Park Service guidebook, which declares that “only the devil could play golf on such rough links.”
On April 8, 1959, when keepers arrived at the Spectacle Reef lighthouse in Lake Huron to prepare it for a new season, they discovered a note:
To Whom It May Concern:
At 1705 hours my plane went down 400 kilometers out at 035 to 050 degrees. I was one mile northeast of here at 5000 feet when my engine went quite dead. I tried to make it in but landed in the water. At that time there were large open areas of water. I did not try to land on the ice as it did not look thick enough. Also I wanted to get as close to this light as possible.
The plane went down in about two minutes after it landed. Before it did it floated close enough to a floe for me to jump. The ice was not over two inches thick. Another large body of water separated me from the light so I waited.
Suddenly the wind shifted to the northeast. The ice I was on started to move. At the very last moment one quarter of the ice ground against the ice packed around the light. My ice floe broke up fast so I ran for the light. I got ashore but was wet from falling in. My clothes froze before I could get the door open.
Once inside I used your towels and overshoes to keep from freezing.
About 2100 I got your stove lit. I hooked up the batteries and lit your warning lamp. The radio receiver worked but the transmitter was dead. I didn’t know enough about it to make it work. I have used the batteries until they are going dead. I sat up last night sending out SOS calls by blinking the main light.
Right now I am deliberating whether to stay here or cross the ice. From the chart I will have eleven miles to travel. There are large water holes, thin ice which had been broken into pieces by the wind yesterday. There is hardly any wind today. We have had two freezing nights, so I ought to make it in about four hours. I want to go now because it is nice weather.
Also I did not file a flight plan so no one will look for me another two or three days. The weather may be bad again.
I have made a mess of your building. I hope you will forgive me. I am going to take some equipment with me, binoculars, coat, hat, blankets, etc. I will turn them into the United States Coast Guard as soon as I get ashore.
Signed,
M.Sgt. William J. Wyman
USAF
The note bore no date. Wyman had departed Saginaw in a Piper Super Cruiser on Feb. 22, headed for the former Kinross Air Force Base near Sault Ste. Marie. He had never arrived. No trace of him was ever found.
(Thanks, Charles.)
