All the News …

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9D04E2DE163CE633A25754C2A96E9C946096D6CF

How’s that for a headline? It ran in the New York Times Sunday magazine on Aug. 27, 1911:

Canals a thousand miles long and twenty miles wide are simply beyond our comprehension. Even though we are aware of the fact that … a rock which here weighs one hundred pounds would there only weigh thirty-eight pounds, engineering operations being in consequence less arduous than here, yet we can scarcely imagine the inhabitants of Mars capable of accomplishing this Herculean task within the short interval of two years.

The Times was relying on Percival Lowell, who was convinced that a dying Martian civilization was struggling to reach the planet’s ice caps. “The whole thing is wonderfully clear-cut,” he’d told the newspaper — but he was already largely ostracized by skeptical colleagues who couldn’t duplicate his findings. The “spokes” he later saw on Venus may have been blood vessels in his own eye.

Whatever his shortcomings, Lowell’s passions led to some significant accomplishments, including Lowell Observatory and the discovery of Pluto 14 years after his death. “Science,” wrote Emerson, “does not know its debt to imagination.”

| Oddities · Science & Math

Sign Here

http://www.postalmuseum.si.edu/exhibits/2b2f_5_parcel.html

W.H. Coltharp had a problem. He’d been asked to build a bank in Vernal, Utah, but the bricks he needed were in Salt Lake City, 127 miles away. Wagon freight would have been too expensive, so in 1916 he sent 15,000 bricks by parcel post, essentially mailing the bank to Vernal.

The post office was not delighted with Coltharp’s ingenuity. Postmaster General Albert Sidney Burleson wrote that “it is not the intent of the United States Postal Service that buildings be shipped through the mail” — and he set a new limit of 200 pounds per day per receiver.

| Oddities

The Clown Egg Register

https://www.flickr.com/photos/lukestephenson/sets/72157606703952187/#

A clown’s face is his livelihood; it’s an unwritten rule among clowns that one must not copy the face of another. Accordingly, in 1946 London clown Stan Bult began painting the faces of his colleagues onto eggshells, effectively trademarking their identities. Bult’s collection was largely destroyed in an accident in 1965, but London’s Circus Clowns Club resurrected the practice in 1984 and added samples of its members’ costumes and wig hair, making each into a peculiar sort of portrait.

In 1979, Leon “Buttons” McBryde, a clown with the Ringling Bros & Barnum and Bailey Circus, heard about the British practice and established his own egg registry, which now includes hundreds of portraits of clowns hand-painted by his wife, Linda. The U.S. registry has been used in at least one court case in which one clown charged another with infringing his design.

The images above, of the British collection, are by photographer Luke Stephenson; more can be seen on his website.

| Oddities

Palingram

A self-reproducing sentence by Lee Sallows — “Doing what it tells you to do yields a replica of itself”:

sallows palingram

This reminds me of a short short story by Fredric Brown:

THE END

Professor Jones had been working on time theory for many years.

“And I have found the key equation,” he told his daughter one day. “Time is a field. This machine I have made can manipulate, even reverse, that field.”

Pushing a button as he spoke, he said, “This should make time run backward run time make should this,” said he, spoke he as button a pushing.

“Field that, reverse even, manipulate can made have I machine this. Field a is time.” Day one daughter his told he, “Equation key the found have I and.”

Years many for theory time on working been had Jones Professor.

END THE

| Science & Math

In a Word

juise
n. judgment; a judicial sentence; penalty

William Vodden had a particularly bad day in 1853. He was on trial in Wales for larceny, and the jury foreman delivered a verdict of not guilty. The chairman discharged Vodden, but then there was a stir among the jurors, who said they had intended a verdict of guilty.

Vodden objected and appealed the case, but Chief Baron Pollock decided that “What happened was a daily occurrence in the ordinary transactions of life, namely that a mistake was made but then corrected within a reasonable time, and on the very spot on which it was made.” Vodden got two months’ hard labor.

| Language

Franklin’s Mint

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chamberlin_-_Benjamin_Franklin_(1762).jpg

More wisdom from Poor Richard’s Almanack:

  • Anger is never without a Reason, but seldom with a good One.
  • The absent are never without fault, nor the present without excuse.
  • The worst wheel of the cart makes the most noise.
  • Prosperity discovers Vice, Adversity, Virtue.
  • God heals, and the doctor takes the fees.
  • The same man cannot be both Friend and Flatterer.
  • Beauty and folly are old companions.
  • Eat to please thyself, but dress to please others.
  • Hear Reason, or she’ll make you feel her.
  • What’s given shines, what’s receiv’d is rusty.
  • Sally laughs at everything you say. Why? Because she has fine teeth.
  • Words may shew a man’s Wit, but Actions his Meaning.
  • It’s common for men to give pretended reasons instead of one real one.
  • Fear to do ill, and you need fear nought else.
  • Success has ruin’d many a Man.

Altho’ thy teacher act not as he preaches,
Yet ne’ertheless, if good, do what he teaches;
Good counsel, failing men may give, for why,
He that’s aground knows where the shoal doth lie.

| Literature

A Change of Heart

Harry Mathews devised this Möbius equivoque. Write this stanza on one side of a strip of paper:

I’d just as soon lose my mind
If your fondness for me lasts
I’d abandon all female charms
As long as I stay dear to you
One could seed one’s petunias
Among humdrum city flowerbeds
Igniting ice is likelier than
Our remaining snugly together

Turn the strip over lengthwise and write this stanza on the other side:

if your desire turns elsewhere
my dream of love might come true,
if you say I’m past caring for,
my deepest wish will be granted.
in distant regions of the skies,
the stars could make their way —
separating, whatever the pretext,
alone can keep my world intact.

Give the strip a half twist and glue the ends together. Now the poem reads:

I’d just as soon lose my mind if your desire turns elsewhere
If your fondness for me lasts my dream of love might come true,
I’d abandon all female charms if you say I’m past caring for,
As long as I stay dear to you my deepest wish will be granted.
One could seed one’s petunias in distant regions of the skies,
Among humdrum city flowerbeds the stars could make their way–
Igniting ice is likelier than separating, whatever the pretext,
Our remaining snugly together alone can keep my world intact.

See Another Equivoque.

| Poems

Second Chances

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sagan_Viking.jpg

In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know, that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.

— Carl Sagan, in a 1987 address, quoted in Jon Fripp et al., Speaking of Science, 2000

| Science & Math

To Whom It May Concern

On Jan. 9, 1793, two astonished farmers in Woodbury, N.J., watched a strange craft descend from the sky into their field. An excited Frenchman greeted them in broken English and gave them swigs of wine from a bottle. Unable to make himself understood, he finally presented a document:

http://books.google.com/books?id=Lb88AAAAIAAJ

The farmers helped the man fold his craft and load it onto a wagon for the trip back to Philadelphia. Before leaving, the Frenchman asked them to certify the time and place of his arrival. These details were important — he was Jean-Pierre Blanchard, and he had just completed the first balloon flight in North America.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Glenn_With_T.J._O%27Malley_and_Paul_Donnelly_in_Front_of_-_GPN-2002-000049.jpg

One hundred sixty-nine years later, when John Glenn went into orbit aboard Friendship 7 in 1962, mission planners weren’t certain where he’d come down. The most likely sites were Australia, the Atlantic Ocean, and New Guinea, but it might be 72 hours before he could be picked up.

Glenn worried about spending three days among aborigines who had seen a silver man emerge from “a big parachute with a little capsule on the end,” so he took with him a short speech rendered phonetically in several languages. It read:

“I am a stranger. I come in peace. Take me to your leader, and there will be a massive reward for you in eternity.”

| Science & Math