From an 1897 Strand feature on odd Bibles:
Perhaps the rarest of all the curious Bibles is the famous ‘Bugge’ Bible, an edition of Matthew’s Bible, published in 1551. In this we read, at Psalms xci., 5, ‘So that thou shalt not nede to be afrayed for anye bugges by nyghte.’
Possibly “bugge” was understood as equivalent to the modern word bogie, or ghost. See Oops.
In 1876 the Belgian Society for the Elevation of the Domestic Cat transported 37 cats from Liège to the surrounding countryside. Released at 2 p.m., the first had found its way home by 6:48, and the rest followed within a day.
“This result has greatly encouraged the society, and it is proposed to establish at an early day a regular system of cat communication between Liège and the neighboring villages,” reported the New York Times.
“Messages are to be fastened in water-proof bags around the necks of the animals, and it is believed that … the messages will be delivered with rapidity and safety.” Somehow the plan wasn’t carried through; it’s hard to imagine why.
Srinivasa Ramanujan devised this magic square to mark his own birthday. He began with a Latin square (upper right) in which the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4 appear in each row, column, and long diagonal as well as in the four corners, the four central squares, the middle squares in the top and bottom rows, and the middle squares in the outermost columns. Note the adjustments that would be necessary to reduce the four top cells to zero, and arrange these adjustments in the diagonally reflected pattern shown in the upper left. Now adding these two squares together produces the square in the lower left, which gives us a formula for creating a magic square based on any date (in the format 1 January 2001). The example at lower right is based on Ramanujan’s own birthday, 22 December 1887 (so D = day = 22, M = month = 12, C = century = 18, and Y = year = 87). In this example all 16 numbers are distinct, but that won’t be the case with every date.
After performing in a revival of George Bernard Shaw’s play Candida, Cornelia Otis Skinner received a telegram from the author: EXCELLENT. GREATEST.
She wired back: UNDESERVING SUCH PRAISE.
He responded: I MEANT THE PLAY.
She replied: SO DID I.
A good example of the effect of misplacing a comma is to be found in the ancient oracle — ‘Thou shalt go thou shalt return never by war shalt thou perish.’ By one way of placing the commas, the consulter of the oracle was forbidden to go upon the purposed expedition; by reading it his own way, he went and perished.
— W.T. Dobson, “Literaria,” Dublin University Magazine, August 1873
You and a friend agree to meet on New Year’s Day at the Mozart Café in Vienna. You fly separately to the city but are dismayed to learn that it contains multiple cafés by that name.
What now? On the first day each of you picks a café at random, but unfortunately you choose different locations. On the second day you could both go out searching cafés, but you might succeed only in “chasing each other’s tails.” On the other hand, if you both stay where you are, you’ll certainly never meet. What is your best course, assuming that you can’t communicate and that you must adopt the same strategy (with independent randomization)?
This distressingly familiar problem remains largely unsolved. If there are 2 cafés then the best course is to choose randomly between them each day. If there are 3 cafés, then it’s best to alternate between searching and staying put (guided by certain specified probabilities). But in cases of 4 or more cafés, the best strategy is unknown.
In 2007 a reader wrote to the Guardian, “I lost my wife in the crowd at Glastonbury. What is the best strategy for finding her?” Another replied, “Start talking to an attractive woman. Your wife will reappear almost immediately.”
diallelous
adj. involving circular reasoning
On my challenging an ingenious friend to define time and space, he answered, ‘Time is the condition of two things existing in the same space. Space is the condition of two things existing in the same time.’ This is clever, pointed, and true, but, as may easily be seen, diallelous.
— Francis Garden, A Dictionary of English Philosophical Terms, 1878
Captured by the North Vietnamese in 1965, Navy pilot Jeremiah Denton was forced to participate in a propaganda interview to be broadcast in the United States. Pretending to be oppressed by the television lights, he blinked the word “T-O-R-T-U-R-E” in Morse code — alerting U.S. Naval Intelligence for the first time that American prisoners were being tortured.
In his Investigator’s Guide to Steganography (2003), Gregory Kipper notes that captured soldiers would sometimes use hand signals to transmit messages during photo ops; “often, these gestures were airbrushed out by the media.”
The members of the Flemish Academy, of Anvers, recently determined to frame a word which would be readily intelligible to all who understand the language of Flanders and who had ever seen a horseless carriage, and the result was that after much deep thought they framed the following word: Snelpaardelooszonderspoorwegpetrolrijtuig. This euphonious word signifies ‘a carriage which is worked by means of petroleum, which travels fast, which has no horses and which is not run on rails.’ This is, from one point of view, a fine example of multum in parvo, but it may be questioned whether one extraordinarily long word is preferable to half a dozen short words.
— Georgetown [Colo.] Herald, May 19, 1899
Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller’s painting The Expected is sometimes claimed as evidence of time travel — how else could a woman get an iPhone in 1860?
It’s a prayer book.
