In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll look at the strange phenomenon of poet doppelgängers — at least five notable poets have been seen by witnesses when their physical bodies were elsewhere.
We’ll also share our readers’ research on Cervino, the Matterhorn-climbing pussycat, and puzzle over why a man traveling internationally would not be asked for his passport.
In May 1905 British MP Sir Gilbert Parker insisted that he had seen the astral body of Sir Crane Rasch in the House of Commons while Rasch was ill at home.
Sir Arthur Hayter supported him: “I beg to say that I not only saw Sir Carne Rasch myself sitting below the gangway but I called him to the attention of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, with whom I was talking on the front opposition bench, saying I wondered why all the papers had inserted notices of Sir Carne’s illness while he was sitting opposite, apparently quite well. Sir Henry replied that he hoped his illness was not catching.”
Rasch declared later that he had never left his room.
“It seems that this is not the first instance of the sort that has occurred in the House,” noted the New York Sun. “In 1897 Mr. O’Connor, an Irish member, went to Ireland to be present at the deathbed of one of his parents. Swift McNeill saw his wraith in his usual seat on the third opposition bench. It was also seen from the press gallery.”
Football fans found an unlikely oracle during the 2008 European championship: an octopus named Paul. Before each match his keepers at the Sea Life Centre in Oberhausen, Germany, would lower two boxes of food into his tank, each bearing the flag of an upcoming competitor. Surprisingly, Paul correctly chose the winner in four of Germany’s six games.
When some observers expressed skepticism, Paul went on to pick the winners of all seven of Germany’s World Cup games in 2010, as well as the final between Spain and the Netherlands, giving him an overall success rate of 85 percent.
Competitors sprang up around the world, including a Singaporean parakeet, a German parrot, and a saltwater crocodile named Dirty Harry, who predicted the result of Australia’s general election by snatching a chicken carcass dangling beneath a caricature of Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Maybe we should quit while we’re ahead.
(Thanks, Lauren.)
During China’s Han dynasty, artisans began casting solid bronze mirrors with a perplexing property. The front of each mirror was a polished, reflective surface, and the back featured a design that had been cast into the bronze. But if light were cast from the mirrored side onto a wall, the design would appear there as if by magic.
The mirrors first came to the attention of the West in the early 19th century, and their secret eluded investigators for 100 years until British physicist William Bragg worked it out in 1932. Each mirror had been cast flat with the design on the reverse side, giving the disk a varying thickness. As the front was polished to produce a convex mirror, the thinner parts of the disk bulged outward slightly. These imperfections are invisible to direct inspection; as Bragg wrote, “Only the magnifying effect of reflection makes them plain.”
Joseph Needham, the historian of ancient Chinese science, calls this “the first step on the road to knowledge about the minute structure of metal surfaces.”
In 1950 newspapers around the world reported that a 10-month-old kitten had climbed the Matterhorn, one of the highest peaks in Europe. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll wonder whether even a very determined kitty could accomplish such a feat.
We’ll also marvel at a striking demonstration of dolphin intelligence and puzzle over a perplexed mechanic.
John Cage indicated that his 1987 piece Organ2/ASLSP should be played “as slow as possible,” but he declined to say how slow that is. Because a pipe organ can be rebuilt piecemeal as it plays, in principle there’s no limit to how long a performance can last.
In 1997 a conference of musicians and philosophers decided to take Cage’s instruction seriously and arranged a performance that would last 639 years. Fed by a bellows, a custom-built organ in the St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany, has been playing the piece since Sept. 5, 2001; it began with a contemplative 17-month pause, then played the first chord (A4-C5-F#5) for two years. Since then it’s got through only 12 changes; the next won’t occur until Sept. 5, 2020.
This will go on for another 620 years, ending on September 5, 2640. By that time someone somewhere will probably be playing it even more slowly.
Here’s a subtly impossible figure devised by UC-Santa Cruz computer scientist David Huffman. If it’s a three-sided pyramid, then its edges define the intersections of three planes and should meet in a single point. But they don’t:
This is intriguing because the figure doesn’t immediately look impossible. In Vagueness and Contradiction, philosopher Roy Sorensen writes, “The impossibility of an appearance is sometimes concealed without overloading our critical capacities.”
Possibly this is because we sense that other solutions are possible that can reconcile the error. Zenon Kulpa points out that the pyramid becomes intelligible if we imagine that the farther side hides a fourth edge, giving the figure four sides rather than three. He describes two families of such solutions in “Are Impossible Figures Possible?”, Signal Processing, May 1983.
In 1935 a shark in an Australian aquarium vomited up a human forearm, a bizarre turn of events that sparked a confused murder investigation. This week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast presents two cases in which a shark supplied key evidence of a human crime.
We’ll also learn about the Paris Herald’s obsession with centigrade temperature, revisit the scary travel writings of Victorian children’s author Favell Lee Mortimer, and puzzle over an unavenged killing at a sporting event.
Avon, Colorado, has a bridge called Bob. The four-lane, 150-foot span, built in 1992, connects Avon with the Beaver Creek ski resort across the Eagle River. The town council held a naming contest and received 85 suggestions, including Avon Crossing and Del Mayre Bridge. It was 32-year-old construction worker Louie Sullivan who said, “Oh, heck, just name it Bob,” a suggestion that set city manager Bill James “laughing so hard he had to leave the room.”
Sullivan said he was surprised at the town’s vote; previously he had considered Avon a bit stuffy. “It raises my faith in their sense of humor,” he said.
Sons of Jack “Catch-‘Em-Alive” Abernathy, the youngest U.S. Marshal in history, Louis and Temple Abernathy inherited their father’s self-reliance: In 1910, when they were 10 and 6 years old, they rode on horseback from their Oklahoma ranch to Manhattan to greet Theodore Roosevelt as he returned from Africa. After riding behind Roosevelt’s car in a ticker-tape parade, they drove home in a new car.
The following year, apparently bored, they accepted a $10,000 challenge to ride on horseback from New York to San Francisco in 60 days or less, never eating or sleeping indoors. They missed the deadline by two days but still established a speed record. And in 1913 they rode by motorcycle from Oklahoma to New York City.
The two went on to successful careers in law and oil. “Teach a boy self-reliance from the moment he tumbles out of the cradle, make him keep his traces taut and work well forward in his collar, and 99 times out of a hundred his independence will assert itself before he is 2 years old,” their father told a newspaper after their first trip. “That’s my rule, and if you don’t think I’ve taken the right tack talk to my boys for five minutes and they’ll convince you that they are men in principles even if they are babies in years. God bless ’em.”
