“An Autograph Inside a Tree”

https://archive.org/details/the-strand/The%20Strand%20v26%201903/page/117/mode/2up

‘The tree from which these pieces were taken was recently cut down and broken up for firewood, when at six and a half inches below the bark the carving was found in the solid timber. About fifty or a hundred years ago the letters and other figures were cut in the bark, with the usual result in the death of a thin layer of the exposed wood, which became surrounded by brown colouring matter. In time the bark grew over this, and finally covered it with fresh wood.’ — Prof. Stewart, of the Royal College of Surgeons, has been good enough to supply us with this interesting photograph.

— Strand, July 1903

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Another Skeleton Pair

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tomba_degli_Amanti_di_Modena,_foto_P._Terzi.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

These remains were discovered in 2009 by archaeologists in Modena, Italy. They’re believed to have been buried between the 4th and 6th century AD. At first they were thought to be a male and a female, but it’s now been confirmed that they’re both male.

They were buried with their hands interlocked. They’re now on display at the Civic Museum of Modena.

Further affectionate skeletons: Iran, Italy, Greece, Romania.

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Drive-Thru

The swans in the moat at the Bishop’s Palace in Wells, Somerset, pull a bell for their lunch. The tradition is believed to have started in the 1850s — in 1908 Helen Pratt wrote:

This bell-ringing call was taught to the bishop’s swans more than fifty years ago, by Miss Eden, the daughter of the Lord Auckland who was then Bishop of Wells and lived at the palace. It needed both ingenuity and patience to teach the lesson, but the young lady persevered until the swans learned it so successfully that they have never forgotten it and show no sign of forgetting so long as swans shall sail this moat.

The current pair of swans, Grace and Gabriel, teach each year’s cygnets how to ring the bell before they leave the moat to begin a life of their own.

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Safety First

What’s the greatest number of times that players have castled in a single chess game? Surprisingly, the answer is three. From the Irish Chess Journal, November-December 1987:

An amusing incident occurred in this year’s Armstrong Cup between W. Heidenfeld and N. Kerins. Heidenfeld first castled Kingside and then, in face of a strong attack, moved his King back to its original square and then inadvertently castled on the Queen’s side. The incident was unnoticed by both players: the game continued and Kerins went on to win. Wolfgang does not lose many games in Irish chess but he has probably created some sort of a record, in Ireland at least if not elsewhere, by castling on both sides and still losing a tournament game!

Via Edward Winter. Here’s the game.

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A Salt Hygrometer

An “easy and curious method of foretelling rainy or fine weather,” from an 1860 book on conjuring, of all places:

“[T]he best instrument of all, is a good pair of scales, in one of which let there be a brass weight of a pound, and in the other a pound of salt, or of saltpetre, well dried; a stand being placed under the scale, so as to hinder it falling too low. When it is inclined to rain, the salt will swell, and sink the scale: when the weather is growing fair, the brass weight will regain its ascendancy.”

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Parfit’s Hitchhiker

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mypubliclands/16358796247
Image: Flickr

Suppose that I am driving at midnight through some desert. My car breaks down. You are a stranger, and the only other driver in this desert. I manage to stop you, and I offer you a great reward if you drive me to my home. I cannot pay you now, but I promise to do so when we reach my home. … If you drive me to my home, it would be worse for me if I pay you the promised reward. Since I know that I never do what will be worse for me, I know that I would break my promise. Given my inability to lie convincingly, you know this too. You do not believe my promise. I am stranded in the desert throughout the night.

— Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, 1984

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Sea Battle

https://archive.org/details/the-strand/The%20Strand%20v26%201903/page/478/mode/2up

This is a tug-of-war on the water at Healy’s Lake, Ontario, Canada. The boat is a punt used for ‘cadging’ baggage in the wilderness; the idea of a tug-of-war on the water was the suggestion of Dr. Joel M. Ingersoll, of Rochester, New York. … The left-enders ‘walked away’ with those on the right.

— T.J. Wilstach of New York, in the Strand, October 1903

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The Theory of Deadly Initials

In 1999, University of California psychologist Nicholas Christenfeld and his colleagues reviewed thousands of state death certificates and found that males with negative initials (D.I.E., P.I.G., R.A.T.) had died 2.80 years younger than matched controls. Males with positive initials (H.U.G., W.I.N., V.I.P.) had lived 4.48 years longer.

Why? “At present, the best available explanation for these findings is that they are due to the symbolic power of one’s name. It seems unlikely that a person with initials like A.S.S. or J.O.Y. could fail to notice the negative or positive connotations.” Suicide and accidents showed the strongest differences between the positive and negative groups.

But a later study by Pomona College economist Gary Smith found no such pattern.

(Nicholas Christenfeld, David P. Phillips, and Laura M. Glynn, “What’s in a Name: Mortality and the Power of Symbols,” Journal of Psychosomatic Research 47:3 [September 1999], 241-254.)

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Afoot

In 2004, the world’s foremost scholar on Sherlock Holmes was found garrotted on his bed. Richard Lancelyn Green had been planning a three-volume biography of Arthur Conan Doyle but had had trouble gaining rights to the author’s private papers and manuscripts, which were scheduled to be auctioned at Christie’s. Lancelyn Green believed that Doyle’s daughter had wanted these to go to the British Library instead, but his efforts to stop the auction had been unsuccessful. In the weeks before his death he told friends that an unidentified American was following him and that he’d come to fear that his contention over the papers might have put his life in danger.

The coroner returned an open verdict. Lancelyn Green’s best friends said it was not in his nature to take his own life, but others wondered whether he might have arranged his death to cast suspicion on a rival, mirroring the Sherlock Holmes story “The Problem of Thor Bridge,” in which a jealous wife contrives her suicide to cast doubt on a woman her husband had been flirting with.

The case remains unsolved. “I think he wanted it to look like murder,” said James Gibson, who had edited a Doyle bibliography with Lancelyn Green in 1983. “He must have been planning it for days, giving us false clues. He created the perfect mystery.”

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