This 1904 comic by Gustave Verbeek (click to enlarge) is a sort of visual palindrome — the first six panels are presented conventionally, and then they’re displayed again in reverse order and upside down to compose the story’s second half. Even the written messages change their meaning: why big buns am mad u! becomes in pew we sung big hym, and so on. Only the captions beneath the first panels are discarded in the second half.
vatic
adj. relating to a prophet
futurition
n. future existence
natalitial
adj. of or relating to a person’s birth
aporetic
adj. inclined to raise objections
In 2000, three sisters from Inverness bought a £1 million insurance policy to cover the cost of bringing up the infant Jesus Christ if one of them had a virgin birth.
Simon Burgess, managing director of britishinsurance.com, told the BBC, “The people were concerned about having sufficient funds if they immaculately conceived. It was for caring and bringing up the Christ. We sometimes get weird requests and this is the weirdest we have had.”
The company withdrew the policy in 2006 after objections by the Catholic Church. “The burden of proof that it was Christ had rested with the women and any premium on the insurance was donated to charity, said Mr Burgess.”
An illusion by University of Texas engineer David Novick: All the spheres have the same light-brown base color (RGB 255,188,144). The intervening foreground stripes seem to impart different hues. See this Twitter thread for the same image with the foreground stripes removed.
From the Strand, May 1899:
Our next photograph is a facsimile of an address on a letter that found its way from Spain to the G.P.O., St. Martin’s-le-Grand. Remarkable as it may seem, this specimen of handwriting was deciphered by ‘the blind man of St. Martin’s,’ and the letter safely reached its destination. It is addressed to the ‘Spanish Ambassador (or Embassy), London.’
(The “blind men” were “the decipherers of illegible and imperfect addresses” in the returned letter office of the General Post Office. Further examples.)
In Bologna, the former convent of San Michele in Bosco contains a 162-meter hallway that’s “aimed” at the Asinelli tower 1,407 meters from the window. This produces an odd effect: As you move north along the hallway toward the window, you’re approaching the tower, yet it seems to shrink. This is because the retinal size of the window’s aperture increases enormously as you approach it, while the retinal size of the distant tower remains relatively unchanged.
Similarly, as you back away from the window the tower seems to grow and draw closer, because the “shrinking” window shuts out the panorama, leaving only the tower in view. The illusion was first reported on a 1714 map by Paolo Battista Baldi of the University of Bologna.
The city contains a second “vista paradox” in the hermitage of Ronzano, where another long hallway is oriented toward the Sanctuary of San Luca 1,970 meters away. The Sanctuary seems to shrink as one approaches the frame and to grow as one retreats.
Pat Ashforth and Steve Plummer make knitted illusions. When it’s viewed from the front, each piece presents only a series of unremarkable stripes, but when it’s viewed obliquely, an image emerges.
Here’s an introduction to the technique, and here are some patterns.
Raymond Smullyan presented this oddity in his Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes in 1980. Suppose we come upon this abandoned chess game. Can White mate in two moves? The answer seems to be yes. If Black can’t castle, then White can play 1. Ke6 and then promote his g-pawn, giving mate. If Black can castle, that means that neither his king nor his rook has yet moved, and hence he must just have moved his pawn to e5. That permits White to capture the pawn en passant. Now if Black castles then 2. b7 is mate, and if he plays any other move then the g-pawn promotes. Either way, White mates Black on his second move.
But that’s odd. We’ve decided that a mate in two exists, but we can’t show it — and we don’t even know how White commences!
(F. Alexander Norman, “Classicists and Constructivists: A Dilemma,” Mathematics Magazine 62:5 [December 1989], 340-342. See Donkey Sentences.)
02/17/2025 UPDATE: Reader Eugene Kruglov points out that 1. Ke6 works in Smullyan’s position whether or not Black castles — if he does, then 2. a8=Q is mate. The position below works as Smullyan intended — when Black castles, only the en passant capture leads to mate in two. (Thanks, Eugene.)
Reader J. William Hook submitted this curiosity to the Strand in August 1899. Holding the page level with the eyes foreshortens the characters and reveals a love poem:
Art thou not dear unto my heart?
Oh, I search that heart and see
And from my bosom tear the part
That beats not true to thee.
But to my bosom thou art dear,
More dear than words can tell,
And if a fault be cherished there,
‘Tis loving thee too well.
There seems to have been a little vogue for this kind of thing — C. Field submitted a similar image three months later.
In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), Giorgio Vasari notes that in January 1494, while Michelangelo was working on his first full-scale stone figure, “there was a heavy snowfall in Florence and Piero de’ Medici, Lorenzo’s eldest son … wanting, in his youthfulness, to have a statue made of snow in the middle of his courtyard, remembered and sent for Michelangelo and had him make the statue.”
A heavy snowfall did occur that month: One chronicler wrote, “There was the severest snowstorm in Florence that the oldest people living could remember.” And it was a tradition on such occasions for outstanding artists to sculpt large snow figures, including the Marzocco, the heraldic lion that is the city’s symbol. But “What snow figure Michelangelo fashioned is not known,” writes critic Georg Brandes, “only that it stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Medici.”
Seventeen years later, Brussels residents protested the wealthy Habsburgs by building 110 satirical snowmen, more than half of which were said to be pornographic. There’s no visual record of that, either. It’s known as the Miracle of 1511.
