A man walks round a pole on the top of which is a monkey. As the man moves, the monkey turns on the top of the pole, so as still to keep face to face with the man. Now, when the man has gone round the pole, has he or has he not gone round the monkey?
— John Scott, The Puzzle King, 1899
Visiting England’s Wirral Peninsula in 1853, Nathaniel Hawthorne came upon a queer battlemented house in the town of Bebington, “quite a novel symbol of decay and neglect,” “probably the whim of some half-crazy person.” “On the wall, close to the street, there were certain eccentric inscriptions cut into slabs of stone, but I could make no sense of them.”
The crazy person was resident Thomas Francis, and the inscriptions had apparently been commissioned to bemuse and entertain passersby. They offer three puzzles. The first presents the image of an inn, The Two Crowns, and the following riddle:
“My name And sign is thirty Shillings just, and he that will tell My Name Shall have a Quart on trust, for why is not Five the Fourth Part of Twenty the Same in All Cases?”
This was easier to guess at the time of its inscription. The landlord of the Two Crowns was Mark Noble, the old English coin known as the noble was worth 6 shillings and eightpence, the mark was worth 13 shillings and fourpence, and two crowns were worth 10 shillings. Together these values total 30 shillings.
The second puzzle is more straightforward: “Subtract 45 From 45 That 45 May Remain.” This seems to refer to the following mathematical curiosity:
987654321 - 123456789 ----------- 864197532
Each of these figures comprises the digits 1 to 9, so all have the same digit sum: 45.
The last puzzle is the easiest:
AR
UBB
I
NGS
TONEF
ORAS
SE
S
Read this straight through and you get A RUBBING STONE FOR ASSES — possibly a comment by Francis on the loiterers who would gather outside his home.
The house was demolished in the 1960s, but the stones can be seen today in the foyer of the library at the Bebington civic center.
At Cambodia’s Ta Prohm temple, near Angkor Wat, visitors have noticed an unusual carving on a crumbling wall — it appears to resemble a stegosaur. Well, viewed from the right angle it does, and allowing for the large head, large ears, and horn. In fact, it better resembles a boar, a rhino, or a chameleon viewed against a leafy background.
Because the temple was built in the 12th century, some creationists have cited the carving as evidence that humans and dinosaurs once coexisted in the region. But it’s not even clear when the carving was made — the temple is a favorite spot for filmmakers, one of whom may have added it, or it may even be a deliberate hoax.
In any case, writes Smithsonian‘s Riley Black, “the temple carving can in no way be used as evidence that humans and non-avian dinosaurs coexisted. Fossils have inspired some myths, but close scrutiny of geological layers, reliable radiometric dating techniques, the lack of dinosaur fossils in strata younger than the Cretaceous, and other lines of evidence all confirm that non-avian dinosaurs became extinct tens of millions of years before there was any type of culture that could have recorded what they looked like.”
My neighbor has been stealing my newspaper. And when I confront him, he apologizes with a sarcastic, condescending air, as if to say that he’s surprised I can read at all. I find it impossible to forgive him, but then I learn that he’s about to lose his job. He’s an aging executive with a large family to support, and I’m sure that this misfortune will soften his scorn and make him more sincerely apologetic. I decide to forgive him when all this happens.
This seems odd — if I’m sure that he’ll lose his job and express real contrition for stealing the paper, why do I have wait for this to happen? Why can’t I forgive him now?
Another twist: I learn that I (and only I) can save his job. This would amount to doing him a large favor, so I feel justified in withholding my help until I’ve forgiven him. But is this fair? Can I refuse to help him until I get a sincere apology, knowing that this will happen only after he loses his job?
Xanthippe is angry that Socrates is late, but she knows that he’ll apologize when she starts making dinner. Knowing this, can’t she skip the dinner and just forgive him? “In other words,” asks Tennessee State University philosopher James Montmarquet, “knowing that he would apologize, may she not still forgive him — having elected, for quite good reasons, not to allow conditions apt for his apology even to take place?”
(James Montmarquet, “Planned Forgiveness,” American Philosophical Quarterly 44:3 [July 2007], 285-296.)
This is fascinating if it’s true: Ten municipalities meet at the summit of Mount Etna, producing a “decipoint” and one of the most complex arrangements of political boundaries outside Antarctica.
I say “if it’s true” because, for such a striking fact, it’s surprisingly hard to confirm. Many sources point to a blog post at Condé Nast Traveler by Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings, but that cites no source.
On the other hand, no one else seems to doubt it, and this map by Patrick McGranaghan won the American Geographical Society’s monthly map contest in November 2017. Maybe I’m too skeptical?
09/21/2023 UPDATE: Wow, it seems to be true. The official website of the Parco dell’Etna includes a map (PDF) showing the distribution of comuni metropolitani around the peak. And the website of the Italian National Institute of Statistics offers data files on statistical districts that can be opened using the desktop version of Google Earth. Many thanks to readers Rob Miller and Ross Ogilvie for looking into this.
In January 1942, Soviet Air Force lieutenant Ivan Mikhailovich Chisov was serving as navigator on an Ilyushin Il-4 bomber when an attack by Messerschmitt fighters forced him to bail out.
He left the plane at 6,700 meters and decided to forgo opening his parachute until he’d dropped below the level of the battle. But due to the thin atmosphere he passed out before he could pull the ripcord.
At an estimated 200 kph he struck the edge of a ravine whose steep sides were covered in deep snow. He tumbled to the bottom, where cavalrymen found him alive and still wearing his unopened parachute. He spent a month in critical condition with a broken pelvis but was flying again three months later.
Local rules adopted at British golf courses during World War II:
In Curiosities of Golf (1994), Jonathan Rice writes, “At Folkestone GC, the wartime rules included the rather grudging allowance that ‘a ball may be lifted and dropped if in a bomb hole in the rough, but not if the bomb hole is in or part of a recognized hazard.’ So if you sliced your drive and just caught a bunker by the side of the fairway, which then turned out to be fifty feet deep thanks to an overnight bombing raid, you just had to play out of the hazard, however unrecognizable it might have been compared with the day before. They breed tough golfers in Folkestone.”
In July 1941, some American clubs reportedly adopted similar rules in a show of solidarity.
UPDATE: Here are the rules adopted by Richmond GC, southwest of London. (Thanks, Brieuc.)
Pyrrho the philosopher being one day in a boat in a very great tempest, shewed to those he saw the most affrighted about him, and encouraged them, by the example of a hog that was there, nothing at all concerned at the storm. Shall we then dare to say that this advantage of reason, of which we so much boast, and upon the account of which we think ourselves masters and emperors over the rest of all creation, was given us for a torment? To what end serves the knowledge of things if it renders us more unmanly? if we thereby lose the tranquillity and repose we should enjoy without it? and if it put us into a worse condition than Pyrrho’s hog? Shall we employ the understanding that was conferred upon us for our greatest good to our own ruin; setting ourselves against the design of nature and the universal order of things, which intend that every one should make use of the faculties, members, and means he has to his own best advantage?
— Montaigne, “That the Relish for Good and Evil Depends in Great Measure Upon the Opinion We Have of Them,” 1580
During a visit to a club in 1775, Samuel Johnson was observed to put several Seville oranges into his pocket after squeezing their juice into a drink he’d made for himself. The friends who saw this “seemed to think that he had a strange unwillingness to be discovered.” Visiting Johnson the next morning and seeing the orange peels scraped and cut into pieces on a table, James Boswell asked about them:
JOHNSON. ‘I have a great love for them.’
BOSWELL. ‘And pray, Sir, what do you do with them? You scrape them it seems, very neatly, and what next?’
JOHNSON. ‘Let them dry, Sir.’
BOSWELL. ‘And what next?’
JOHNSON. ‘Nay, Sir, you shall know their fate no further.’
BOSWELL. ‘Then the world must be left in the dark. It must be said (assuming a mock solemnity) he scraped them, and let them dry, but what he did with them next he never could be prevailed upon to tell.’
JOHNSON. ‘Nay, Sir, you should say it more emphatically:–he could not be prevailed upon, even by his dearest friends, to tell.’
I don’t think this has ever been fully explained, but Boswell notes that, in a letter to Mrs. Piozzi, Johnson had once recommended “‘dried orange-peel, finely powdered,’ as a medicine.”
Lewis Carroll and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, became improbable acquaintances in the 1850s, a few years before Carroll published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The young author sent a letter to his cousin, May 11, 1859, after one memorable visit to the laureate:
Tennyson told us that often on going to bed after being engaged on composition he had dreamed long passages of poetry (‘You, I suppose,’ turning to me, ‘dream photographs?’) which he liked very much at the time, but forgot entirely when he woke. One was an enormously long one on fairies, where the lines from being very long at first gradually got shorter and shorter, till it ended with fifty or sixty lines of two syllables each! The only bit he ever remembered enough to write down was one he dreamed at ten years old, which you may like to possess as a genuine unpublished fragment of the Laureate, though I think you will agree with me that it gives very little indication of his future poetic powers:—
May a cock-sparrow
Write to a barrow?
I hope you’ll excuse
My infantine muse.
(Lewis Carroll, “A Visit to Tennyson,” Strand, June 1901. See Pillow Verse and Night Work.)
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