Gunner

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gunner_(dog).jpg

After the first Japanese air raid on Darwin in February 1942, Australian aircraftman Percy Westcott heard whimpering under the ruins of a mess hut and discovered a stray six-month-old Kelpie with a broken leg.

Westcott had the leg set and the two became friends. About a week later, “Gunner” revealed a special talent. As the RAAF personnel went about their normal routines at the airfield, the dog began to show signs of agitation, whining and jumping, and a few minutes later a group of Japanese aircraft appeared over Darwin, bombing and strafing the city. This happened again two days later, and successively throughout the weeks that followed.

It turned out that Gunner could hear approaching Japanese aircraft up to 20 minutes before they arrived, long before warning sirens sounded and before the planes had been detected by radar. He could even distinguish Japanese from Allied engines. He proved so reliable that the squadron’s commanding officer allowed Westcott to sound a portable air raid siren when Gunner alerted him to approaching attackers.

The dog became an inseparable member of the squadron, sleeping under Westcott’s bunk, showering with the men, sitting with them on outdoor movie nights, and even flying with them as they practiced takeoffs and landings. When Westcott was posted to Melbourne 18 months later, he left Gunner with a local merchant. What ultimately became of him is unknown.

| History · Oddities

For Short

The man with the longest surname in Fiji is Levani Mavoaiuluivitimaitaveunienanodralakicakacakatakanavalenilotunagon
enivadravadraenaesitetimaiuraqaicuruvularuaenavaleniveivakabulaimaiwaiyevoenayasanakocakaudrove.

It means “injured (mavoa) while on Taveuni when the people of Vadravadra went to work at Ura Estate where he got injured and was later admitted for two months at the Waiyevo Hospital in the province of Cakaudrove.” It was given to him deliberately to set the record.

He goes by Levani Mavoa. “I can remember my date of birth,” he told the Fiji Times, “but I cannot remember my full name.”

| Oddities

Bhartrhari’s Paradox

There are some things that are unnameable. But it seems impossible to verify this by giving positive instances, because this would require us to name that which we have declared to be unnameable.

From an observation by the fifth-century Indian grammarian and philosopher Bhartrhari. “[E]very argument advanced to support any instance of the unnameability thesis drives one still more firmly into the paradox,” note philosophers Hans and Radhika Herzberger, “for they naturally tend to involve repeated reference to the very things whose unnameability they undertake to establish.”

(Hans G. Herzberger and Radhika Herzberger, “Bhartrhari’s Paradox,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 9:1 [March 1981], 1-17.)

| Oddities

Taking Pause

‘Theft’ is a concept that logically and genetically depends on the antecedent concept of ‘rightfully owned property’ — and refers to the act of taking that property without the owner’s consent. If no property is rightfully owned, that is, if nothing is property, there can be no such concept as ‘theft.’ Thus, the statement ‘All property is theft’ has an internal contradiction: to use the concept ‘theft’ while denying the validity of the concept of ‘property,’ is to use ‘theft’ as a concept to which one has no logical right — that is, as a stolen concept.

— Nathaniel Branden, “The Stolen Concept,” The Objectivist Newsletter, January 1963

| Oddities · Society

Polchinski’s Paradox

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Grandfather_paradox_billiard_ball.svg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 1990, physicist Joseph Polchinski described a puzzling situation: Suppose a billiard ball were sent through a traversable wormhole into the past, where it knocked its earlier self off course, away from the wormhole. This is a version of the famous grandfather paradox: How can we explain the ball’s presence where it seems to have prevented its own arrival?

Fortunately, Caltech students Fernando Echeverria and Gunnar Klinkhammer found that self-consistent solutions exist in which the older ball imparts only a glancing blow to its younger self, one that sends it through the hole at just the right angle to deliver a similarly glancing blow to its own forebear, and so on, sparing us from the paradox. (In 1991 the students and Kip Thorne reported that they’d failed to find any initial conditions in which such self-consistent solutions were unavailable, so it’s plausible that they exist for every possible initial trajectory. But this hasn’t been proven.)

Another pleasing possibility is that the older ball knocks the younger out of the way and itself enters the wormhole again. This creates an infinite loop, and some existential bewilderment, but no paradox.

| Oddities · Science & Math

Postal Inspector

In 1897, to help inaugurate New York City’s new pneumatic mail system, officials sent a live black cat in a canister from the Produce Exchange Post Office on Bowling Green to the General Post Office on Park Row, a distance of 3,750 feet.

“How it could live after being shot at terrific speed from Station P in the Produce Exchange Building, making several turns before reaching Broadway and Park Row, I cannot conceive, but it did,” recalled postal supervisor Howard Wallace Connelly. “It seemed to be dazed for a minute or two but started to run and was quickly secured and placed in a basket that had been provided for that purpose.”

At its peak the system would carry 95,000 letters a day through 27 miles of tubes connecting 23 post offices. It was discontinued in 1953, outmoded by the growing volume of mail and the advent of the automobile.

| Oddities · Technology

Nothing Doing

Recess, County Galway, Ireland:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monument_to_nothing,_Recess_-_geograph.org.uk_-_381638.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Aspelt, Luxembourg:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aspelt_Plaque_Nothing_happened.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Bechyne, Czech Republic:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bechyn%C4%9B,_Z%C3%A1%C5%99e%C4%8D%C3%AD_481,_zde_v_tomto_dom%C4%9B.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

(“In this house, no important person was born, lived, and most importantly did not die, and that is why we live well here.”)

Záblatí-Hlásná Lhota, Czech Republic:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hl%C3%A1sn%C3%A1_Lhota_(Z%C3%A1blat%C3%AD)_07.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

(“Hlásná Lhota – a stone in whose surroundings nothing significant has demonstrably happened for several hundred years”)

Míšov, Czech Republic:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M%C3%AD%C5%A1ov_-_Cimrman.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

(“On 8 May 1915 in Míšov, the great Czech genius Jára Cimrman just barely missed being involved in something historically important.”)

O’Hungry’s Café, Old Town San Diego State Historic Park:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:On_This_Site_in_1897_Nothing_Happened_-_Sign_in_O%27Hungry%27s_Cafe_-_San_Diego_State_Historic_Park_-_San_Diego,_CA_-_USA_(6930668317).jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

York, Western Australia:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:On_this_site_in_1897_nothing_happened_(4525842700).jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Villa de Leyva, Boyacá Department, Colombia:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Villa_de_Leyva,_Colombia_02.jpg

(“On October 13, 1825, nothing happened in this house, nor was anyone important born.”)

| Humor · Oddities

Changed Men

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Amou_Haji_in_2014_or_earlier.png

Iranian hermit Amou Haji ate carrion, drank from puddles, lived in a hole, smoked dung, and died at 94, a few months after bathing for the first time in 60 years. He said he became a hermit due to “emotional setbacks” after a heartbreak.

English merchant Nathaniel Bentley became known as Dirty Dick when he stopped washing in his late 30s. His filthy shop became a tourist attraction. Interestingly, he too was said to have changed after a ruined love affair, allegedly after his fiancée died on the eve of their wedding. Charles Dickens knew of the story, which may have inspired that of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nathaniel_Bentley_Sketch.png

| Literature · Oddities