In 1990, two thieves dressed as policemen walked into Boston’s Gardner museum and walked out with 13 artworks worth half a billion dollars. After 28 years the lost masterpieces have never been recovered. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe the largest art theft in history and the ongoing search for its solution.
We’ll also discover the benefits of mustard gas and puzzle over a surprisingly effective fighter pilot.
This staircase near the library at Lebanon’s University of Balamand is painted to resemble a stack of classic texts:
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Republic of Plato
Diwān Abū al-Tayyib al-Mutanbbī
Risālat al-ghufrān / Abī al-Alā al-Ma’arrī
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
Muqaddimah-i ibn Khaldūn
The Prince and the Discourses by Niccolò Machiavelli
Discourse on Method by René Descartes
The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
Faust by Goethe
The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
The Meaning of Relativity by Albert Einstein
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
al-Ayyām / Tāhā Husayn
A Study of History by Arnold Toynbee
Cosmos by Carl Sagan
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
Les Désorientés by Amin Maalouf
The Road Ahead by Bill Gates
This puts them (almost) in chronological order.
In the afternoon I went upon the river to look after some tarr I am sending down and some coles, and so home again; it raining hard upon the water, I put ashore and sheltered myself, while the King came by in his barge, going down towards the Downs to meet the Queen; the Duke being gone yesterday. But methought it lessened my esteem of a king, that he should not be able to command the rain.
— Samuel Pepys, diary, July 19, 1662
English cricketer C.B. Fry had a curious party trick: He would stand on the floor facing a mantelpiece, crouch, and leap upward, turning in midair and landing with his feet planted on the shelf, from which he would bow to onlookers. He claimed to be able to do this into his 70s.
On July 17, 1933, John Dillinger walked into the Daleville Commercial Bank in Indiana and told the teller, “Well, honey, this is a holdup. Get me the money.” Told there was no key to the teller’s cage, Dillinger vaulted over the counter himself to investigate. “This would become another of his well-known trademarks,” writes John Beineke in Hoosier Public Enemy, “the quick and graceful vaults over counters that were often several feet high. The feat earned him the nickname ‘Jackrabbit’ in some newspapers.”
In a letter to the Times on March 16, 1944, G.M. Trevelyan, the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, remarks on the tradition of trying to leap up the eight semicircular steps of the college hall at one bound. “The only person to succeed of whom I know was the gigantic [William] Whewell, when he was Master of the college; he clapped his mortar-board firmly on his head, picked up his gown with one hand, and leapt.”
Trevelyan had recently learned that Henry Hutchinson Montgomery, later a bishop, had made the jump during his undergraduate career at Trinity, between 1866 and 1870, and “I have heard that the feat was accomplished once or twice in this century; once, I was told, an American succeeded, but I have not the facts or names. It has certainly been done very seldom.”
(Thanks, Chris.)
Georgia’s Savannah airport hit a delicate snag in the 1980s — a planned extension to Runway 10 was delayed because a local family refused to move the graves of Richard and Catherine Dotson, a farming couple who had been laid to rest in the land they’d cultivated for decades.
The solution was to pave over the graves but lay the two headstones in its surface. They read “At rest” and “Gone home to rest” — but there’s a legend among pilots that if you land just after sundown you’ll see two uneasy figures on the runway’s north side.
South Carolina’s newspaper The State notes, “Family members are still escorted to visit them safely, though they cannot leave flowers.”
Mathematician John Rainwater has published 10 research papers in functional analysis, notably in the geometric theory of Banach spaces and in convex functions. The University of Washington has named a regular seminar after him, and Rainwater’s Theorem is an important result in summability theory.
This is most impressive because he doesn’t exist. In 1952 UW grad student Nick Massey received a blank registration card by mistake, and he invented a fictional student, naming him John Rainwater because it was raining at the time. “Rainwater” was adopted by the other students and began to submit solutions to problems posed in the American Mathematical Monthly, and he’s gone on to a 60-year (so far) career of considerable distinction — his top paper has 19 citations.
Asked why he’d published that paper under Rainwater’s name, John Isbell quoted Friedrich Schiller: “Man is only fully human when he plays.”
From Lee Sallows, “A novel geometric proof that 16 is a square number.” :)
(Thanks, Lee!)
Biochemist Roger Tsien won the 2008 Nobel prize in chemistry for his contributions to knowledge of green fluorescent protein, a complex of amino acid residues that glow vividly when exposed to ultraviolet light.
Inspired, Nathan Shaner, a researcher in Tsien’s lab, painted this San Diego beach scene using an eight-color palette of bacterial colonies expressing fluorescent proteins.
Alexander Fleming was drawing “germ paintings” in the 1930s.
When Gabe McCubbins’ daughter needed a project for her seventh grade science fair, they decided to mount a GoPro video camera in a bowling ball and fire it out of a cannon.
Launch starts at 1:50.
In 2013, Georgia Institute of Technology mechanical engineer David Hu and his colleagues discovered a “law of urination”: All mammals weighing more than 1 kilogram empty their full bladders in about 21 seconds (standard deviation 13 seconds).
Last year Hu followed that up with a law of defecation: Despite a rectum length varying from 4 to 40 centimeters, mammals from cats to elephants defecate within a nearly constant duration of 12 ± 7 seconds. A layer of mucus helps feces slide through the large intestine; larger animals have more feces but also thicker layers of mucus, which aids their ejection.
From the journal Soft Matter, whose cover artist deserves some kind of award.
(David L. Hu et al., “Hydrodynamics of Defecation,” Soft Matter 13:29 [August 2017], 4960-4970.) (Thanks, Colin.)
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