Playing a trivia game, George S. Kaufman was asked, “What’s the longest river in South America?”
After a lot of stalling, he asked, “Are you sure it’s in South America?”
The Last Banana
A thought experiment in probability by Leonardo Barichello: Two people are stranded on an island with only one banana to eat. To decide who gets it, they agree to play a game. Each of them will roll a fair 6-sided die. If the largest number rolled is a 1, 2, 3, or 4, then Player 1 gets the banana. If the largest number rolled is a 5 or 6, then Player 2 gets it. Which player has the better chance?
Black and White
For What It’s Worth
In a 2009 survey, readers of Stuttgarter Nachrichten, the largest newspaper in Stuttgart, chose Muggeseggele as the most beautiful word in Swabian German.
Muggeseggele means “the scrotum of a housefly.” It’s used ironically to describe a very small length.
Counting Sheep
Shepherds in Northern England used to tally their flocks using a base-20 numbering system. They’d count a score of sheep using the words:
Yan, tan, tether, mether, pip,
Azer, sayzer, acka, konta, dick,
Yanna-dick, tanna-dick, tethera-dick, methera-dick, bumfit,
Yanna-bum, tanna-bum, tethera-bum, methera-bum, jigget
… and then denote the completion of a group by taking up a stone or marking the ground before commencing the next count.
These systems vary by region — Wikipedia has them laid out in pleasing tables.
(Thanks, Brieuc.)
Underground Dining
Early visitors to Kenya’s Kitum Cave found the walls curiously scratched and furrowed: They discovered that elephants frequent the cave each night to scratch rocks from the walls, which they eat for their salt content.
They have done this for centuries, enlarging the cave significantly in the process and effectively converting it into a salt mine, which they now share with other species.
Medieval Music
In 2016, after 20 years of research, Cambridge University medieval music specialist Sam Barrett used the rediscovered leaf of an 11th-century manuscript to reconstruct music as it would have been heard a thousand years ago.
Melodies in those days were not recorded as precise pitches but relied on the memory of musicians and on aural traditions that died out in the 12th century. “We know the contours of the melodies and many details about how they were sung, but not the precise pitches that made up the tunes,” Barrett said. The missing leaf, appropriated by a Germanic scholar in 1840, contained vital neumes, or musical symbols, that allowed him and his colleagues to finish their reconstruction of Boethius’ “Songs of Consolation” as it was performed in the Middle Ages.
“There have been times while I’ve been working on this that I have thought I’m in the 11th century, when the music has been so close it was almost touchable,” Barrett said. “And it’s those moments that make the last 20 years of work so worthwhile.”
Secret Message
Jonathan Swift’s Journal to Stella, a collection of 65 letters written to his friend Esther Johnson, contains some puzzling passages, such as this one:
“He gave me al bsadnuk lboinlpl dfaonr ufainfbtoy dpionufnad, which I sent him again by Mr. Lewis.”
How should the obscured phrase be read?
Wildlife
In painting backdrops for the dioramas at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in the 1970s, artist Kent Pendleton hid eight elves. “It was just kind of my own little private joke,” he said in 2018. “The first one was so small that hardly anyone could see it, but it sort of escalated over time, I guess. Some of the museum volunteers picked up on it and it developed a life of its own.”
The museum’s field guide currently lists nine hidden finds, but there are more — the exact number is not known.
Unquote
“The only way to keep ahead of the procession is to experiment. If you don’t, the other fellow will. When there’s no experimenting there’s no progress. Stop experimenting and you go backward. If anything goes wrong, experiment until you get to the very bottom of the trouble.” — Thomas Edison