In 1799 two Royal Navy ships met on the Caribbean Sea, and their captains discovered they were parties to a mind-boggling coincidence that would expose a crime and make headlines around the world. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the story of the shark papers, one of the strangest coincidences in maritime history.
We’ll also meet some Victorian kangaroos and puzzle over an expedient fire.
There are almost exactly as many inches in a mile (63,360) as there are astronomical units in a light-year (63,241.1).
“He who falls in love meets a worse fate than he who leaps from a rock.” — Plautus
(The painting is by Edmund Leighton, 1852–1922. He called it simply Off.)
What is the shape of the moon’s path around the sun? The moon orbits the earth, and the earth orbits the sun, so many of us imagine it looks something like the image on the left, a looping motion in which the moon periodically slides “backward” during its progress around the larger body.
But it’s not! The shape is closer to a 13-gon with rounded corners; there are no loops. Helmer Aslaksen, a mathematician at the National University of Singapore, writes, “I like to visualize this as follows. Imagine you’re driving on a circular race track. You overtake a car on the right, and immediately slow down and go into the left lane. When the other car passes you, you speed up and overtake on the right again. You will then be making circles around the other car, but when seen from above, both of you are driving forward all the time and your path will be convex.”
(Thanks, Drake.)
Rudyard Kipling described the car as a ‘petrol-piddling monster.’ Queen Victoria called it a ‘very shaky and disagreeable conveyance altogether.’ … As had the cycle before it, the car had a tendency to frighten horses and thus cause great antagonism in other travelers and bystanders. A frequent, joking explanation of the horses’ reactions was, ‘How would you act if you saw a pair of pants coming down the street with no one in them?’
— M.G. Lay, Ways of the World: A History of the World’s Roads and of the Vehicles That Used Them, 1992
The title of this painting is electrifying: Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare Playing at Chess. Unfortunately, its authenticity has been subject to debate for more than a century. It came to light only in 1878, when it was purchased for $18,000 by Colonel Ezra Miller, and the authenticating documents were lost in a fire 17 years later.
Supporters claim that it was painted by Karel van Mander (1548-1606), and in the best possible case it would give us new likenesses of Jonson and Shakespeare painted by a contemporary. But a biography of van Mander, probably written by his brother, makes no mention of this painting, nor of the artist ever visiting London, and while Shakespeare here appears younger than Jonson, in fact he was eight or nine years older.
“It is understandable that there is still curiosity about Shakespeare’s life, physical features, and reputation,” wrote Roehampton Institute scholars Bryan Loughrey and Neil Taylor in 1983. “If the chess portrait were genuinely a portrait of Shakespeare and Jonson, the painting would be of unique interest. Unfortunately, most of the arguments that have been advanced in its favor are untenable.”
Real or fake, Shakespeare has the better of Jonson in this game — he can mate on the move:
(Bryan Loughrey and Neil Taylor, “Jonson and Shakespeare at Chess?” Shakespeare Quarterly 34:4 [Winter 1983], 440-448.)
From the New Ulm [Minn.] Weekly Review, 1886, on a recent surge in U.S. suicides:
The reasons assigned for some of the suicides are silly in the extreme, and some of the methods employed uniquely horrible. One woman killed herself because her mother did, and another because she had a pimple on her nose. … One young woman killed herself because her parents would not allow her to become a Mormon, and a New Yorker shot himself because he hadn’t a nickel to put in the collection box at church. … Several persons died in incalculable agony by jumping into fiery furnaces, and others saturated their clothing with kerosene oil and set it on fire. Still others clumsily sought death by crawling back and forth through barbed-wire fences, entailing great suffering, until they died from exhaustion, and others drove spikes through their brains. Shooting was the most popular method employed, with poison a good second. The most unique example was that of a man who impaled himself on his wooden leg.
At 6 p.m. on Sept. 20, 1930, a 12-year-old Ramsgate girl was sent across the street to buy a blancmange powder from the neighborhood sweetshop. When the owner, 82-year-old Margery Wren, came to the door, the girl was shocked to see blood streaming down her face.
Wren was taken to the hospital, where she survived for five days. Her face bore eight wounds and bruises, the top of her head seven more. She said successively that she had fallen over the fire tongs, that a man had attacked her with the tongs, that he had a white bag, that it was another man with a red face, that it had been two men, and that it had been an accident. At one point she said she knew her attacker but that “I don’t wish him to suffer. He must bear his sins.” Just before she died she said, “He tried to borrow 10 pounds.”
Wren had been seen alive and well at 5:30. It seems likely that her attacker had locked the front door and escaped through the back. The case was never solved.
From Raymond Smullyan: Every inhabitant of this island either a knight or a knave. Knights always tell the truth, and knaves always lie. Further, every inhabitant is either mad or sane. Sane inhabitants always answer questions correctly, and mad ones always answer incorrectly. You meet an inhabitant of the island and want to know whether he’s sane or mad. How can you determine this with a single yes-or-no question?
SPRING SUMMER AUTUMN WINTER SUNDAY MONDAY TUESDAY WEDNESDAY THURSDAY FRIDAY SATURDAY JANUARY FEBRUARY MARCH APRIL MAY JUNE JULY AUGUST SEPTEMBER OCTOBER NOVEMBER DECEMBER ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX SEVEN EIGHT NINE TEN ELEVEN TWELVE THIRTEEN FOURTEEN FIFTEEN SIXTEEN SEVENTEEN EIGHTEEN NINETEEN TWENTY TWENTY-ONE TWENTY-TWO TWENTY-THREE TWENTY-FOUR TWENTY-FIVE TWENTY-SIX TWENTY-SEVEN TWENTY-EIGHT TWENTY-NINE THIRTY THIRTY-ONE contains 365 letters.
(Dave Morice, “Kickshaws,” Word Ways 33:2 [May 2000], 133-145.)
03/06/2019 UPDATE: Reader Jean-Claude Georges finds that this works in French too if you label the categories (year, seasons, months, days, numbers):
“And as in Dave Morice’s text, just add a ‘B’ (for bissextile = leap) after ‘AN’ to get 366 for leap years.” (Thanks, Jean-Claude.)
