Get three empty matchboxes and put a weight in one of them. Lift the weighted box on its own, then put it down and lift all three boxes together. In tests by Isabel Won and her colleagues at Johns Hopkins University, 90 per cent of subjects who tried this said that the weighted box lifted on its own felt heavier than the three boxes lifted together.

“[T]he experience was so striking that subjects often spontaneously and astoundedly commented on its impossibility to the experimenter, and even requested to lift the objects again after the experiment was over,” the authors report. “Anecdotally, those subjects reported that the illusion persisted even during these repeated lifts, including when subjects placed all three boxes on their palm and then suddenly removed the two lighter boxes — distilling the phenomenon into a single impossible ‘moment’ wherein removing weight caused the sensation of adding weight.”

“We suggest that the space of impossible experiences is larger than has been appreciated, extending into a new sense modality. … Impossibility can not only be seen, but also felt.” See the paper for details.

(Thanks, Sharon.)

The homes around Wisconsin’s Geneva Lake receive their mail by boat, a tradition begun in 1916. While the boat travels at a steady 5 mph, a “jumper” must jump onto each dock, run to the mailbox, swap the outgoing mail with the incoming, and jump back on board before the boat has traveled out of reach.

They can accomplish all this in as little as 10 seconds — but a typical career also includes one fall into the lake.

What constitutes a hole? We recognize and refer to holes as we do ordinary material objects, but a hole doesn’t seem to have a material existence. A hole has a “host” (say, a doughnut), and it may have a “guest” (say, air), but neither of these is itself the hole. Somehow the hole is a something that’s made of nothing.

In a 1969 essay by David and Stephanie Lewis, Argle and Bargle argue over a hole in a piece of Gruyère cheese:

Bargle. How can something utterly devoid of matter be made of matter?

Argle. You’re looking for the matter in the wrong place. (I mean to say, that’s what you would be doing if there were any such things as places, which there aren’t.) The matter isn’t inside the hole. It would be absurd to say it was: nobody wants to say that holes are inside themselves. The matter surrounds the hole. The lining of a hole, you agree, is a material object. For every hole there is a hole-lining; for every hole-lining there is a hole. I say the hole-lining is the hole.

Bargle. Didn’t you say that the hole-lining surrounds the hole? Things don’t surround themselves.

Argle. Holes do. In my language, ‘surrounds’ said of a hole (described as such) means ‘is identical with’. ‘Surrounds’ said of other things means just what you think it means.

Bargle. Doesn’t it bother you that your dictionary must have two entries under ‘surrounds’ where mine has only one?

Also: If I fill in a hole in the ground, have I destroyed it? If I dig again in the same place, am I creating a new hole or restoring the old one?

(David Lewis and Stephanie Lewis, “Holes,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 48:2 [August 1970], 206-212.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QL-6h0dHTRg

In 1985, Levon Arakelyan’s wife asked him to dig a potato cellar in their basement in Arinj, Armenia. He did this, and then continued digging for 23 years. At his death in 2008 he’d produced a network of rooms, steps, and corridors that extended 21 meters beneath the couple’s two-story house. A builder by trade, he did all of this with hand tools. Today his widow runs a small museum and gives tours of her late husband’s strange obsession. More photos here.