The lovely Irish folk tune Port na bPúcaí (“The Music of the Fairies”) had mystical beginnings — it’s said that the people of the Blasket Islands heard ethereal music and wrote an air to match it, hoping to placate unhappy spirits. Seamus Heaney’s poem “The Given Note” tells of a fiddler who took the song “out of wind off mid-Atlantic”:

Strange noises were heard
By others who followed, bits of a tune
Coming in on loud weather
Though nothing like melody.

Recent research suggests that, rather than fairies, the islanders may have been hearing the songs of whales transmitted through the canvas hulls of their fishing boats. Humpback whales pass through Irish waters each winter as they migrate south from the North Atlantic, and their songs seem to resemble the folk tune.

Ronan Browne, who plays the air above on Irish pipes, writes, “In the mid 1990s I went rooting through some cassettes of whale song and there in the middle of the Orca (Killer Whale) section I heard the opening notes of Port na bPúcaí!”

No one can say for certain whether the one inspired the other, of course, but if it didn’t it’s certainly a pleasing coincidence.

(Thanks, James.)

In the top figure, one coin rolls around another coin of equal size.

In the bottom figure, the same coin rolls along a straight line.

In each case the rolling coin has made one complete rotation. But the red arc at the top is half the length of the red line at the bottom. Why?

Army ants are blind; they follow the pheromone tracks left by other ants. This leaves them vulnerable to forming an “ant mill,” in which a group of ants inadvertently form a continuously rotating circle, each ant following the ones ahead and leading the ones behind. Once this happens there’s no way to break the cycle; the ants will march until they die of exhaustion.

American naturalist William Beebe once came upon a mill 365 meters in circumference, a narrow lane looping senselessly through the jungle of British Guiana. “It was a strong column, six lines wide in many places, and the ants fully believed that they were on their way to a new home, for most were carrying eggs or larvae, although many had food, including the larvae of the Painted Nest Wasplets,” he wrote in his 1921 book Edge of the Jungle. “For an hour at noon during heavy rain, the column weakened and almost disappeared, but when the sun returned, the lines rejoined, and the revolution of the vicious circle continued.”

He calculated that each ant would require 2.5 hours to make one circuit. “All the afternoon the insane circle revolved; at midnight the hosts were still moving, the second morning many had weakened and dropped their burdens, and the general pace had very appreciably slackened. But still the blind grip of instinct held them. On, on, on they must go! Always before in their nomadic life there had been a goal — a sanctuary of hollow tree, snug heart of bamboos — surely this terrible grind must end somehow. In this crisis, even the Spirit of the Army was helpless. Along the normal paths of Eciton life he could inspire endless enthusiasm, illimitable energy, but here his material units were bound upon the wheel of their perfection of instinct. Through sun and cloud, day and night, hour after hour there was found no Eciton with individual initiative enough to turn aside an ant’s breadth from the circle which he had traversed perhaps fifteen times: the masters of the jungle had become their own mental prey.”

Three children return home after playing outside, and their father tells them that at least one of them has a muddy face. He repeats the phrase “Step forward if you have a muddy face” until all and only the children with muddy faces have stepped forward.

If there’s only one child with a muddy face, then she’ll step forward immediately — she can see that no other children have muddy faces, so her father must be talking about her. Each of the other children will see her muddy face and stand fast, since they have no way of knowing whether their own faces are muddy.

If there are two children with muddy faces, then no one will step forward after the first request, since each might think the father is addressing the other one. But when no one steps forward after the first request, each will realize that there must be two children with muddy faces, and that she herself must be one of them. So both will step forward after the second request, and the rest will stand fast.

A pattern emerges: If there are n children with muddy faces, then n will step forward after the nth request.

But now imagine a scenario in which more than one of the children has a muddy face, but the father does not tell them that at least one of them has a muddy face. Now no one steps forward after the first request, for the same reason as before. But no one steps forward at the second request either, because the fact that no one stepped forward after the first request no longer means that there is more than one child with a muddy face.

This is perplexing. In the second scenario all the children can see that at least one of them has a muddy face, so it seems needless for the father to tell them so. But without his statement the argument never gets going; despite his repeated requests, no child will ever step forward. What’s missing?

(From Michael Clark, Paradoxes From A to Z, 2007.)

The map of the continental United States contains an elf making chicken.

He’s known as Mimal, after the states that make him up: Minnesota (hat), Iowa (head), Missouri (shirt), Arkansas (pants), and Louisiana (boots).

Fittingly, the chicken is Kentucky and the tin pan is Tennessee.

A study in perspective by University of Hertfordshire psychologist Richard Wiseman:

(Thanks, Paul.)

In early July 1836, three boys searching for rabbits’ burrows near Edinburgh came upon some thin sheets of slate set into the side of a cliff. On removing them, they discovered the entrance to a little cave, where they found 17 tiny coffins containing miniature wooden figures.

According to the Scotsman‘s account later that month, each of the coffins “contained a miniature figure of the human form cut out in wood, the faces in particular being pretty well executed. They were dressed from head to foot in cotton clothes, and decently laid out with a mimic representation of all the funereal trappings which usually form the last habiliments of the dead. The coffins are about three or four inches in length, regularly shaped, and cut out from a single piece of wood, with the exception of the lids, which are nailed down with wire sprigs or common brass pins. The lid and sides of each are profusely studded with ornaments, formed with small pieces of tin, and inserted in the wood with great care and regularity.”

Some accounts say that the coffins had been laid in tiers, the lower appearing decayed and the topmost quite recent, but Edinburgh University historian Allen Simpson believes that all were placed in the niche after 1830, about five years before the boys discovered them.

Who placed them there, and why, remain mysterious. Simpson suggests that they may be an attempt to provide a decent symbolic burial for the victims of murderers William Burke and William Hare, who had sold 17 corpses to local doctor Robert Knox in 1828 for use in anatomy lessons. But 12 of Burke and Hare’s victims were women, and the occupants of the fairy coffins are all dressed as men.

So investigations continue. The eight surviving coffins and their tiny occupants are on display today at the National Museum of Scotland.