In the 1880s the Prussian state railways built a line to carry coal and iron across the High Fens south of Aachen. The line wanders across the modern border between Germany and Belgium, but according to the Treaty of Versailles the trackbed itself is Belgian territory. This has the effect of creating six German exclaves — regions of Germany that are surrounded entirely by Belgium (Belgium proper to the west, and the technically Belgian railway trackbed to the east).

The smallest of these exclaves, a farm known as the Rückschlag, measures only 150 × 100 meters and has an estimated population of four people.

The Vennbahn track was used by tourist services until 2001 but is now disused and has begun to be dismantled. But the trackbed itself still belongs to Belgium, so the six exclaves remain.

Ordered to blockade Martinique in 1803, Commodore Sir Samuel Hood covered an island with guns and declared it a sloop-of-war. Perched 175 meters above the sea, the guns denied all entrance to Fort-de-France, the island’s main port, for 17 months.

The British Royal Navy still regards “HMS Diamond Rock” as being in commission — when passing the island, personnel on Royal Navy ships stand at attention and salute the rock.

Since that time, a naval establishment on land has been referred to as a “stone frigate.”

Can time exist without change? Aristotle thought not, and David Hume claimed that “’tis impossible to conceive … a time when there was no succession or change in any real existence.” But in 1969 Cornell philosopher Sydney Shoemaker offered a thought experiment that purports to show otherwise.

Consider a universe that consists of three regions, A, B, and C. Periodically a region might experience a “local freeze” in which all processes come to a halt. The inhabitants of a frozen region do not observe the passing of time but resume their awareness at the end of the freeze.

With experience, the inhabitants determine that each freeze lasts exactly one year and that the freezes occur at regular intervals: Region A freezes every third year, Region B every fourth year, and Region C every fifth year. This suggests that all three regions freeze every 60th year.

Shoemaker wrote, “If all of this happened, I submit, the inhabitants of this world would have grounds for believing that there are intervals during which no changes occur anywhere.” It’s true that none of the inhabitants would be able to verify this directly, but given the regularity they observe in the local freezes, the reality of the total freeze seems to be the simplest hypothesis.

Whatever we think of this argument, the example does run into one sticking point: It’s hard to see how a total freeze could end. If nothing in the universe is changing, it seems, then there can be no causes.

(Sydney Shoemaker, “Time Without Change,” Journal of Philosophy 66:12 [June 19, 1969], 363-381.)

Central Hudson Rail Road train No. 9 was roaring from Buffalo to Lockport, New York, with about 200 passengers when lightning prevented a train wreck in 1894. It was a dark rainy night and Engineer Schaffer squinted to see past the limited beam from his locomotive’s headlight. He could only see about 50 yards ahead. Suddenly a flash of lightning, followed by a loud clap of thunder, lit up the track a half mile ahead. Schaffer saw a sight that made him grab the reverse lever and call to the fireman to put on the brakes. The wheels screeched and the train came to a halt with the cowcatcher just one foot from the caboose of a stalled freight train. Railroad men claimed that the flash of lightning was all that saved the lives of the passengers.

— Peter Viemeister, The Lightning Book, 1961

When a party of 13 dines at London’s Savoy Hotel, the management wards off bad luck by setting a place for Kaspar, a two-foot-tall statue of a black cat.

According to legend, when diamond magnate Woolf Joel held a dinner party for 14 guests at the hotel in 1898, one guest dropped out, and another predicted that the first person to leave the table would die. Joel left first and was shot dead a few weeks later.

To allay any further trouble, architect Basil Ionides sculpted Kaspar in 1927. When he joins a dining party, the cat has a napkin tied around his neck and is served like a regular diner, with a full place setting, champagne and wine.

Winston Churchill so admired Kaspar that he called for his attendance at every meeting of the Other Club, the political dining society that he founded with F.E. Smith. Kaspar has attended every fortnightly meeting for the last 88 years. Presumably he has a tell-all memoir in the works.

The Museum of English Rural Life got a surprise on Wednesday — a 155-year-old mousetrap there managed to catch a mouse:

So, this retired rodent had managed to sneak past University of Reading security, exterior doors and Museum staff, and clambered its way up into our Store. Upon finding itself there it would have found the promised land; a mouse paradise laid before it full of straw, wood and textiles. Then, out of thousands of objects, it chose for its home the very thing designed to kill it some 150 years ago: a mouse trap.

The trap was patented in 1861; it bills itself as a “perpetual mouse trap” that “will last a lifetime.” More at the museum’s blog.

(Thanks, Djerrid.)

The Austrian village of Jungholz is connected to the rest of the country by a single point, the summit of the mountain Sorgschrofen. The summit marks a “quadripoint,” a point that touches four distinct territories — here, Austria to the north and south and Germany to the east and west.

This raises some philosophical questions. Suppose a stubborn, infinitely skinny Austrian leaves Schattwald (in the south) to visit Jungholz at the same moment that an equally stubborn, infinitely skinny German leaves Bad Hindelang (in the west) to visit his grandmother in Pfronten (in the east). What happens? They can’t sidle past one another; the countries meet at a single, indivisible point. If neither will stand aside while the other passes, then the only solution I can see is for one to hop briefly onto the other’s shoulders.

Now suppose a border guard accosts them at this moment. The two occupy the same point on the Earth’s surface, yet one claims to be in Austria while the other is in Germany. Are they both right? And suppose that the lower man is killed by being jumped upon (he is very attenuated, after all). Which jurisdiction has authority over the crime scene? Who should judge the crime?

Further confusing borders: the Belgian town of Baarle-Hertog and, until recently, Cooch Behar in the Indian state of West Bengal.

(Thanks, Dan.)