Inside Out

http://www.google.com/patents/US6419111

Erl E. Kepner patented a bewildering object in 2002 — a one-sided coffee mug:

To help us see the unique properties of the beverage vessel, let’s pretend that the vessel is made of astonishingly thin material. This is a ‘thought experiment’, not a real experiment, where you actually physically do anything. Note that the only edge on the vessel is the rim that your lips would touch if you drank coffee from it. The rim of the container would be a very sharp edge while the areas where the container and the hollow handle come together would be smooth curved shapes. Now pretend that you have a very tiny little black ball shaped magnet located on the surface of the vessel somewhere and another little tiny white ball magnet located on the opposite side of the vessel material. If one were to (mentally) move either the black or white ball magnet, it would cause the white or black ball magnet to move also. One could move the black or white ball magnets, one at a time, along the vessel surface so that white ball magnet ended up where the black ball magnet was initially located and the black ball magnet was where the white ball magnet originally was. This can be accomplished without having either of the magnets pass over the vessel rim, which is the only edge of the vessel. Other than the Klein Bottle, no other hollow shape has this property. Another way to envision or demonstrate the unique properties of this shape is to point out the fact that a little bug can crawl from any point on the surface of the vessel to any other point on the surface of the vessel without crossing over an edge. Bugs cannot do this on a normal coffee cup or any other three-dimensional shape that we use in our daily lives.

“The future marketing of the beverage container of this invention will use these sorts of interesting points to stimulate interest among technically well educated people and everyday people with an innate curiosity and appreciation for the wonder and beauty of mathematics and nature.”

See Carry-All and the Klein bottle recycling center.

| Science & Math

A Psychological Tip

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pile_ou_face.png

Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind
And you’re hampered by not having any,
The best way to solve the dilemma, you’ll find,
Is simply by flipping a penny.

No, not so that chance shall decide the affair
While you’re passively standing there moping;
But the moment the penny is up in the air
You suddenly know what you’re hoping.

— Piet Hein

| Poems

Notice

Any person in want of a DEAD PIG may find one, that will probably answer his purpose, in the middle of Broadway, between Broome and Spring Streets. Applicants need not be in any great haste, as it is expected that he will lie there several days; and if the warm weather should last, and the carriages will let him alone, he will grow — bigger and bigger.

— New York Daily Advertiser, 1822

| Oddities

This Earth of Majesty

Letter to the Times, May 2, 1940:

Sir,

In view of the publicity you have accorded to Mrs Barrow’s letter, I hope that you will spare me space to say, as an advocate for the consumption of grass-mowings, that I have eaten them regularly for over three years, and off many lawns. The sample I am eating at present comes off a golf green on Mitcham Common. I have never suffered from urticaria or any of the symptoms Mrs Barrow mentions. Nor did any of the many of my horses to which I have fed grass-mowings, freshly cut and cleaned from stones, &c. For my own consumption I also wash them well.

Yours faithfully,

J.R.B. Branson

| Oddities

The Earthquake Rose

http://www.earthquakerose.com/

When a magnitude 6.8 earthquake shook Olympia, Wash., in 2001, shop owner Jason Ward discovered that a sand-tracing pendulum had recorded the vibrations in the image above.

Seismologists say that the “flower” at the center reflects the higher-frequency waves that arrived first; the outer, larger-amplitude oscillations record the lower-frequency waves that arrived later.

“You never think about an earthquake as being artistic — it’s violent and destructive,” Norman MacLeod, president of Gaelic Wolf Consulting in Port Townsend, told ABC News. “But in the middle of all that chaos, this fine, delicate artwork was created.”

| Oddities

Good Company

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Benjamin_Heinrich_Orth_Drei_Freunde_1835.jpg

“Lamb says somewhere that if, of three friends (A, B, and C), A should die, then B loses not only A but ‘A’s part in C,’ while C loses not only A but ‘A’s part in B.’ In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out.” — C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 1960

| Society

In a Word

drogulus
n. an entity whose presence is unverifiable because it has no physical effects

A.J. Ayer coined this word spontaneously while describing his “principle of verification” during a 1949 broadcast:

Suppose I say, ‘There’s a drogulus over there’ and you say … ‘What’s a drogulus?’ ‘Well,’ I say, ‘I can’t describe what a drogulus is, because it is not the sort of thing you can see or touch. It has no physical effects of any kind, but it’s a disembodied being.’ And you say, ‘Well, how am I to tell if it’s there or not?’ and I say, ‘There’s no way of telling. Everything’s just the same if it’s there or it’s not there. But the fact is it’s there. There’s a drogulus there standing just behind you.’ Does that make sense?

“Talk about obscure words!” writes lexicographer Norman Schur. “Have we finally met the man who wasn’t there?”

As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
I wish, I wish he’d stay away.

— Hughes Mearns

Curiously, Ayer himself seems to have confirmed at least one sighting. In 1959, Lionel Penrose wrote in New Biology, “I had difficulty in finding a suitable name for the activated complexes produced in [certain] experiments. On showing one of them to Professor A. J. Ayer, I inquired whether it perhaps might be a ‘drogulus’ … He replied that it was undoubtedly a ‘drogulus’.”

| Language