Plaudits

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

King Darius of Persia copied orders onto wax-covered tablets and gave them to famously efficient postmen. “Nothing mortal travels so fast as these Persian messengers,” Herodotus marveled. “These men will not be hindered from accomplishing at their best speed the distance which they have to do, either by snow, or rain, or heat, or by darkness of night. The first rider delivers his dispatch to the second, and the second passes it to the third; and so it is borne from hand to hand along the whole line, like the light of the torch-race.”

When New York’s James A. Farley Post Office opened in 1914, architect (and philhellene) William Mitchell Kendall inscribed a modified translation over the door: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

“Many have assumed that this is the motto of the U.S. Postal Service, but the USPS doesn’t have one,” writes Devin Leonard in Neither Snow Nor Rain, his history of the service. “It was just the world’s largest postal service nodding respectfully to one of its most illustrious forbears.”

| History

Unquote

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Felix_Buhot,_Joueurs_de_cricket_dans_le_Kent.jpg

“Cricket is a game which the English, not being a spiritual people, have invented in order to give themselves some conception of Eternity.” — Lord Mancroft

| Quotations

Black and White

neuhaus chess problem

By Eugene Neuhaus Jr. White to mate in two moves.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

The Congreve Clock

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzRf8mznY5E

Sir William Congreve designed this novel clock in 1808. In place of a pendulum, it regulates time using a zigzag track in which a ball oscillates continuously — when the ball reaches either end of the track it trips the escapement, advancing the hands of the clock and reversing the tilt of the tray.

Unfortunately the horizontal tray tends to collect dust, which slows the ball and reduces the clock’s reliability.

| Technology

The Name-Letter Effect

Driving on a highway in 1977, Belgian experimental psychologist Jozef Nuttin noticed that he preferred license plates containing letters from his own name. In testing this idea, he found that it’s generally so: People prefer letters belonging to their own first and last names over other letters, and this seems to be true across letters and languages.

Nuttin found this so surprising that he withheld his results for seven years before going public. (A colleague at his own university called it “so strange that a down-to-earth researcher will spontaneously think of an artifact.”) But it’s since been replicated in dozens of studies in 15 countries and using four different alphabets. When subjects are asked to name a preference among letters, on average they consistently like the letters in their own name best.

(The reason seems to be related to self-esteem. People prefer things associated with the self — for example, they tend to favor the number reflecting the day of the month on which they were born. People who don’t like themselves tend not to exhibit the name-letter effect.)

(Jozef M. Nuttin Jr., “Narcissism Beyond Gestalt and Awareness: The Name Letter Effect,” European Journal of Social Psychology 15:3 [September 1985], 353-361. See Initial Velocity.)

| Language · Science & Math

The Sincerest Form

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:James_Abbott_McNeill_Whistler_-_Thames_Nocturne_-_63.196_-_Indianapolis_Museum_of_Art.jpg

A woman told James McNeill Whistler that the view of the Thames she had just seen reminded her exactly of his series of paintings.

He told her, “Yes, madam. Nature is creeping up.”

| Art

The Death Valley Germans

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

In July 1996 a family of four set out from Dresden for a holiday in the American Southwest. Architect Egbert Rimkus, 34, his son Georg, 11, his girlfriend Cornelia Meyer, 27, and her son Max, 4, arrived in Los Angeles and visited Las Vegas, then traveled to Death Valley National Park. Their names appear in the logs of several visitor sites, and it appears they spent their first night camping in a canyon near Telescope Peak.

When they failed to return as planned on July 29, Rimkus’s ex-wife began to make inquiries. When their travel agency learned that the rented van had not been returned, it notified Interpol. Temperatures in the park had topped 120 degrees on the week of the disappearance.

In late October, a helicopter search pilot spotted the van on a closed road in a remote part of the park known as Anvil Canyon. It had been driven at least 200 miles, and the tracks showed that it had run on flat tires and bent wheels for the final two miles. More than 200 search and rescue workers combed the area; under a bush a quarter mile away they found a beer bottle that appeared to have come from a package in the van.

The search was called off on Oct. 26, but 13 years later, in 2009, hikers discovered the skeletal remains of a man and a woman several miles south of that spot, near a photo ID belonging to Cornelia. Authorities said they were fairly sure the bones belonged to Egbert and Cornelia, but the remains of the children have never been found.

(Thanks, Tom.)

| Death · Oddities

Podcast Episode 208: Giving Birth to Rabbits

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mary_Toft_(Tofts)_appearing_to_give_birth_to_rabbits_in_the_Wellcome_V0014994.jpg

In 1726 London was rocked by a bizarre sensation: A local peasant woman began giving birth to rabbits, astounding the city and baffling the medical community. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll review the strange case of Mary Toft, which has been called “history’s most fascinating medical mystery.”

We’ll also ponder some pachyderms and puzzle over some medical misinformation.

See full show notes …

| Hoaxes · Oddities · Podcast