Why does the slogan ‘Whatever is, always was to be’ seem to imply that nothing can be helped, where the obverse slogan ‘Whatever is, will always have been’ does not seem to imply this? We are not exercised by the notorious fact that when the horse has already escaped it is too late to shut the stable door. We are sometimes exercised by the idea that as the horse is either going to escape or not going to escape, to shut the stable door beforehand is either unavailing or unnecessary.

— Gilbert Ryle, Dilemmas, 1954

The interior of this map is white, but it appears to be suffused with a pale yellow. In fact the blue and orange coloring is confined to the border.

This “bleeding” effect was discovered by University of Sassari psychologist Baingio Pinna in 1987. It’s still being investigated.

Among the remains of Hattusa, capital of the Hittite Empire in the late Bronze Age, stands a one-ton cube of jade.

Its purpose is unknown.

This photo was taken at the reopening of the South Fork Bridge in Gold Bridge, British Columbia, in 1941. It’s sometimes claimed that the man at the center appears too modern to belong in such a crowd. It’s true that he’s dressed more casually than those around him, but the sunglasses he’s wearing first appeared in the 1920s, and his “T-shirt” appears to be a sweater with an emblem sewn on, possibly that of the Montreal Maroons, a contemporary hockey team. His camera is small for the time, but Kodak had begun offering portable cameras of that size three years earlier.

And no one around him seems to feel he’s out of place.

Each of these buses is proceeding smoothly along the striped street. Yet each seems to be varying its speed dramatically.

When the blue bus encounters a white stripe, it becomes easy to see due to the high contrast, so it appears to move faster. When it encounters a black stripe it becomes harder to see, so its movement seems slower. The reverse is true of the yellow bus. When the stripes are removed, the buses stop staggering.

UCSD psychologist Stuart Anstis first demonstrated the illusion in 2003.

What does this say? It’s an excerpt from a small bound volume given in 1841 by Harvard law professor Theophilus Parsons Jr. to John Davis of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Davis noted, “It was found in his father’s Library after his decease, its origin and contents unknown. I hoped to find some person of sufficient skill in stenography, to decipher the pages. But it is still, to me & those whom I have consulted, a Sealed Book.”

It seems to be a dated record of some kind. The anonymous writer used Arabic numerals, so we can see that the entries are organized by year, month, and day, with long entries on one side of each page and shorter ones on the other.

But no one has ever determined its meaning. It was conjectured that the volume might be the diary of a clergyman, perhaps Theophilus’ father, the Rev. Moses Parsons of Byfield, but the entries extend to 1799, 16 years after Moses’ death.

For now the diary (if that’s what it is) is kept at the Massachusetts Historical Society. MHS reference librarian Jeremy Dibbell writes about it here.

(Via Klaus Schmeh’s Encrypted Book List.)