Time Traveler

Juan Soto of the Washington Nationals hit his first major league home run five days before he played his first major league game.

On June 18, 2018, he hit a two-run homer that was logged as occurring on May 15. That’s because the June 18 game was a continuation of a May 15 game that had been suspended due to rain. When such a game is resumed, all the statistics are recorded with the date of the original game.

So Soto is credited with his first major league hit and his first major league home run on May 15, five days before he made his major league debut.

(Thanks, Larry.)

September 23, 2019September 23, 2019 | Oddities

500 Entertaining Words

The 12th edition of The Chambers Dictionary, published in 2011, highlighted about 500 words that the editors considered especially entertaining. For the 13th edition, in 2014, they chose to remove the highlighting but inadvertently removed the entries entirely.

The missing entries have since been reinstated, but in the interval the publishers supplied a list of the missing words. Here it is.

(Thanks, Chris.)

September 23, 2019 | Language

Nobody Home

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Plymouth_Montserrat_Heli.jpg — Image: Wikimedia Commons

For centuries, the town of Plymouth was the only port of entry to the island of Montserrat, an overseas territory of the United Kingdom in the Lesser Antilles.

The town was evacuated in 1995 when the nearby Soufrière Hills volcano began erupting, and the burned and buried remainder was abandoned permanently in 1997.

But the town is still the de jure capital city of Montserrat … which makes Plymouth the only ghost town in the world that serves as the capital of a political territory.

September 22, 2019 | Oddities

In a Word

hippomachy
n. a fight on horseback

September 21, 2019 | Language

Keeping Distance

For which values of n can n points be placed on a sphere so that all of them are equidistant from each other?

	Select Click for Answer
Roy Sinclair posed this question in the November-December 2000 issue of MIT Technology Review. Bruce Layton offered a solution in the May 2001 issue: The values are 1, 2, 3, and 4. For n = 1 there are no distances to be unequal, and for n = 2 there’s only one distance, with nothing to be unequal to. The cases of n = 3 and n = 4 can be shown by choosing two points on the sphere’s surface and centering on each of them a sphere whose radius is the distance between the two points (so that now each of the two points is on the surface of one constructed sphere and at the center of the other). Any point that falls at the intersection of these two spheres and on the surface of the original sphere satisfies the requirement. There can be one or two such points, meaning n can be 3 or 4, but not higher. If it’s 4 then the four points are the vertices of a regular tetrahedron; if it’s 3 then the original two chosen points and one of the intersection points form an equilateral triangle (roughly, on Earth, reader Eugene Sard suggested that three such points fall at the South Pole, on Wake Island, and in southern Saudi Arabia).

Click for Answer

September 20, 2019September 19, 2019 | Puzzles

The Copenhagen Faustparodie

In The Roots of Coincidence, Arthur Koestler mentions that the participants at a 1932 conference on nuclear physics put on a parody of Goethe’s Faust in which Wolfgang Pauli played Mephistopheles. “His Gretchen was the neutrino, whose existence Pauli had predicted, but which had not yet been discovered.”

MEPHISTOPHELES (to Faust):

Beware, beware, of Reason and of Science
Man’s highest powers, unholy in alliance.
You’ll let yourself, through dazzling witchcraft yield
To weird temptations of the quantum field.

Enter Gretchen; she sings to Faust. Melody: ‘Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel’ by Schubert.

GRETCHEN:

My rest-mass is zero
My charge is the same
You are my hero
Neutrino’s my name.

There’s more here, including a link to the original script (in German).

September 20, 2019September 19, 2019 | Literature · Science & Math

A Bird’s-Eye View

In 1548 engraver Conrad Morant rendered the city of Strasbourg — as viewed from the spire of its cathedral.

September 19, 2019 | Art · History · Science & Math

Unquote

“Without art the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.” — George Bernard Shaw

September 19, 2019 | Quotations

Lightning Rod Fashion

In 1778, shortly after Benjamin Franklin introduced the lightning rod, Paris saw a fad for umbrellas and hats that made use of the new technology. A chain ran from the accessory down to the ground and would (in principle) carry the electricity from a lightning strike harmlessly into the ground.

I can’t find any record that such a strike ever happened. Lightning rods didn’t become popular in the United States, even to protect structures, until the 19th century.

(Thanks, Jon.)

September 18, 2019 | Oddities · Science & Math · Society

Near Miss

I just bumbled into this: In 1978 Isaac Asimov judged a limerick contest run by Mohegan Community College in Norwich, Conn. He chose this as the best of 12,000 entries:

The bustard’s an exquisite fowl,
With minimal reason to growl:
He escapes what would be
Illegitimacy
By grace of a fortunate vowel.

It was written by retired Yale official George D. Vaill. Asimov said, “The idea is very clever and made me laugh, and the one-word fourth line is delightful.”

September 18, 2019September 17, 2019 | Literature · Poems