The Janken robot created in 2012 at the University of Tokyo’s Ishikawa Watanabe Laboratory has a 100 percent win rate against human opponents in playing rock paper scissors.
How? Using a high-speed camera, it recognizes within a millisecond which shape its opponent’s hand is beginning to form and chooses the appropriate winning shape.
In an 1894 feature on peculiar furniture, the Strand describes a “suffocating bedstead” used to dispatch unwitting inn guests in the days of coach travel:
Nothing whatever of a suspicious character revealed itself to the eye of the wayfarer, yet when the scoundrel who meditated crime had satisfied himself that the man slept, he would quickly lower an interior portion of the canopy of the bedstead, firmly imprisoning him in an air-tight cavity until suffocation ensued. Struggling and shouting would be useless under such circumstances, as the weight of the box would be tremendous.
This recalls Wilkie Collins’ 1852 story “A Terribly Strange Bed,” in which a visitor at a Paris gambling house realizes the canopy over his bed is moving:
It descended — the whole canopy, with the fringe round it, came down — down — close down; so close that there was not room now to squeeze my finger between the bed-top and the bed. I felt at the sides, and discovered that what had appeared to me from beneath to be the ordinary light canopy of a four-post bed was in reality a thick, broad mattress, the substance of which was concealed by the valance and its fringe. I looked up and saw the four posts rising hideously bare. In the middle of the bed-top was a huge wooden screw that had evidently worked it down through a hole in the ceiling, just as ordinary presses are worked down on the substance selected for compression.
In his preface to the collection in which that story appears, Collins claims that it’s “entirely of my own imagining, constructing, and writing” but credits painter W.S. Herrick for “the curious and interesting facts” on which it’s based. The Strand article, published 40 years later, doesn’t mention Collins, but perhaps the idea had entered English folklore by that point. Or maybe it’s true!
The Rainhill trials, held in October 1829 to test the suitability of locomotives to run on the new Liverpool and Manchester Railway, brought a surprising entrant: Mathematician Thomas Shaw Brandreth offered Cycloped, a car powered by a horse on a treadmill.
It was no match for the other competitors, all of which were steam locomotives. Engineer George Stephenson’s Rocket won the day — and an important place in transportation history.
Observations of Samuel Johnson:
Harold Nicolson wrote, “Dr. Johnson is the only conversationalist who triumphs over time.”
In Jewish Bankers and the Holy See (2012), León Poliakov cites a joke current in 12th-century ghettos to justify usury between Jews.
“It consisted, it is said, of reciting Deuteronomy 23:20 in interrogative tones to make it mean the opposite of its obvious sense:
“‘Unto a foreigner thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury?'”
The Clachan Sound, in western Scotland, connects at both ends to the Atlantic Ocean.
So the Clachan Bridge, which crosses it, is known as the Bridge Over the Atlantic.
monoxylous
adj. made out of a single trunk or piece of timber
For this 2011 work, Italian artist Giuseppe Penone carved away the successive growth rings of a fir tree, revealing the sapling of its early days.
“My artwork shows, with the language of sculpture, the essence of matter and tries to reveal with the work, the hidden life within.”
[Wittgenstein] once greeted me with the question: ‘Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?’ I replied: ‘I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.’ ‘Well,’ he asked, ‘what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?’
— G.E.M. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, 1959
Signatures of Charles Dickens from 1825 to 1870, gathered by J. Holt Schooling for a feature in the Strand, January 1894:
At the height of his fame he seems to have been everything to everyone. In her 2011 biography, Claire Tomalin notes that contemporary observers described his eyes as dark brown, dark glittering black, clear blue, “not blue,” distinct clear hazel, “large effeminate eyes,” clear grey, green-grey, dark slaty blue, “and even, by a cautious observer, as ‘nondescript.'”
Francis Galton quantified boredom. At a tedious meeting in 1885, he observed that the distance between neighboring heads in the listless crowd began to vary:
When the audience is intent each person forgets his muscular weariness and skin discomfort, and he holds himself rigidly in the best position for seeing and hearing. As this is practically identical for persons who sit side by side, their bodies are parallel, and again, as they sit at much the same distances apart, their heads are correspondingly equidistant. But when the audience is bored the several individuals cease to forget themselves and they begin to pay much attention to the discomforts attendant on sitting long in the same position. They sway from side to side, each in his own way, and the intervals between their faces, which lie at the free end of the radius formed by their bodies, with their seat as the centre of rotation varies greatly.
He wasn’t able to estimate this numerically, but he did find another measure: He counted about 50 fidgets per minute in each section of 50 people. “The audience was mostly elderly; the young would have been more mobile.” He urged “observant philosophers” at dull meetings to estimate “the frequency, amplitude, and duration of the fidgets of their fellow-sufferers” in hopes that “they may acquire the new art of giving numerical expression to the amount of boredom expressed by the audience generally during the reading of any particular memoir.”
(Francis Galton, “The Measure of Fidget,” Nature 32:817 [June 25, 1885], 174–175.)
