Baseball ain’t always pastoral. In 1920, the Yankees’ Carl Mays pitched a dirty ball against Cleveland shortstop Ray Chapman, who apparently didn’t see it coming. The pitch struck Chapman’s head with such a resounding crack that Mays actually fielded the ball to first base. Chapman died 12 hours later, the only major-league player ever to have been killed in a game.
Starstruck
The annual Leonid meteor shower was unusually spectacular in November 1833, raining a hundred thousand meteors per hour over the eastern United States.
“[There were] thousands of luminous bodies shooting across the firmament in every direction,” wrote the Florence, Ala., Gazette. “There was little wind and not a trace of clouds, and the meteors succeeded each other in quick succession.”
That spectacle is remembered in a unique way — it’s the basis of the jazz standard “Stars Fell on Alabama”:
I never planned in my imagination
A situation so heavenly
A fairy land where no one else could enter
And in the center just you and me
We lived our little drama
We kissed in a field of white
And stars fell on Alabama last night.
The McCollough Effect
There’s no color in this image, right? Now scroll down and stare at the colored boxes below. There’s no need to focus on any particular spot, just look at the boxes for a few minutes. Then look at the first image again. The horizontal gratings will look greenish and the vertical gratings pink.
That’s not especially impressive, but come back tomorrow and the effect will still obtain. It’s not a simple afterimage. Print out the grid and carry it around with you. Rotate it 45 and 90 degrees and see what happens. If you invest 10 minutes in looking at the colored boxes, the aftereffect can last up to 24 hours.
No one’s sure what’s behind this phenomenon; its discoverer, Celeste McCollough, thinks the induction temporarily modifies the cells in the visual cortex that respond to color and orientation.
“White to Mate in Less Than a Move”
Composed by Tolosa.
Solution: Lift the king into the air.
The “Miracle Girl”
On July 25, 1956, 14-year-old Linda Morgan was in her cabin on the Andrea Doria when it collided with the Stockholm in the North Atlantic. It was feared she had been killed in the disaster: She did not reach any rescue ship, and the Andrea Doria capsized and sank the next morning.
But then a strange story emerged. Shortly after the collision, a crewman on the Stockholm had heard a young girl calling for her mother from behind a bulwark. “I was on the Andrea Doria,” she told him. “Where am I now?”
Apparently the collision had flung her out of her bed and into the other ship. She suffered only a broken arm.
Witchcraft
Mersenne once wrote to Fermat asking whether 100895598169 were a prime number.
Fermat replied immediately that it’s the product of 898423 and 112303, both of which are prime.
To this day, no one knows how he knew this. Has a powerful factoring technique been lost?
Undefined
The U.S. dime does not state its value. It’s labeled simply “one dime.”
Unquote
“Among those whom I like, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can; all of them make me laugh.” — W.H. Auden
Field Report
The longest item of news ever telegraphed to a newspaper, was the entire New Testament as revised, and all variations of the English and American committees, from New York to Chicago, and the whole published as an item of news in the Sunday morning Chicago Tribune for May 22, 1882. That day’s Tribune comprised 20 pages, 16 of which were required for the New Testament.
— Miscellaneous Notes and Queries, May 1889
Switcheroo
Our eyes tend to assume that light comes from above, so this looks like a mound of earth.
In fact it’s an image of Arizona’s Meteor Crater … shown upside down.
