Elsewhere

Three anecdotes of Newton’s absent-mindedness:

  • His maid one day found him in his kitchen, holding an egg and boiling his watch.
  • His nephew noted, “At some seldom times when he designed to dine in the hall, would turn to the left hand [rather than going straight], and go out into the street, where making a stop, when he found his mistake, he would hastily turn back & and then sometimes instead of going into hall, return to his chamber again.”
  • From Thomas Moore’s diary: “Anecdote of Newton, showing his extreme absence–inviting a friend to dinner, & forgetting it–the friend arriving, & finding the philosopher in a fit of abstraction–Dinner brought up for one–the friend (without disturbing Newton) sitting down & dispatching it, and Newton, after recovering from his reverie, looking at the empty dishes & saying, ‘Well really, if it wasn’t for the proof before my eyes, I could have sworn that I had not yet dined.'”

English minister George Harvest was notoriously inattentive. On one occasion he accompanied Lord Onslow to Calais, awoke from an abstraction, and found that the two had become separated.

He could not speak a word of French, but recollecting that Lord Onslow was at the Silver Lion, he put a shilling in his mouth, and set himself in the attitude of a lion rampant. After exciting much wonder among the town’s people, a soldier guessing what he meant by this curious hieroglyphical exhibition, led him back to the Silver Lion, not sure at the same time whether he was restoring a maniac to his keepers, or a droll to his friends.

— The Percy Anecdotes, 1823

| Oddities

Red Menace

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

Driving habits of communists, according to J. Edgar Hoover:

  • Driving alternately at high and low rates of speed.
  • Entering a heavily traveled intersection on a yellow light, hoping to lose any follower or cause an accident.
  • Turning corners at high rates of speed and stopping abruptly.
  • Suddenly leaving a car and walking hurriedly down a one-way street in the direction in which vehicle traffic is prohibited.
  • Entering a dark street in a residential area at night, making a sharp U-turn, cutting into a side alley, and extinguishing the car’s lights.
  • Driving to a rural area, taking a long walk in a field, then having another car meet them.
  • Waiting until the last minute, then making a sharp left turn in front of oncoming traffic.
  • Stopping at every filling station on the highway, walking around the car, always looking, then going on.

“Always there is the fear of being followed,” he wrote in Masters of Deceit (1958). “One Party couple registered at a motel, then the husband parked the car several miles away. He walked back and climbed through a side window. Maybe in this way he would conceal his next night’s lodging!”

| Society

“Plane Geometry”

‘Twas Euclid, and the theorem pi
Did plane and solid in the text,
All parallel were the radii,
And the ang-gulls convex’d.

“Beware the Wentworth-Smith, my son,
And the Loci that vacillate;
Beware the Axiom, and shun
The faithless Postulate.”

He took his Waterman in hand;
Long time the proper proof he sought;
Then rested he by the XYZ
And sat awhile in thought.

And as in inverse thought he sat
A brilliant proof, in lines of flame,
All neat and trim, it came to him,
Tangenting as it came.

“AB, CD,” reflected he–
The Waterman went snicker-snack–
He Q.E.D.-ed, and, proud indeed,
He trapezoided back.

“And hast thou proved the 29th?
Come to my arms, my radius boy!
O good for you! O one point two!”
He rhombused in his joy.

‘Twas Euclid, and the theorem pi
Did plane and solid in the text;
All parallel were the radii,
And the ang-gulls convex’d.

— Emma Rounds

| Poems · Science & Math

Character Study

Story magazine nearly foundered for a lack of Ws. The publishers, Whit Burnett and Martha Foley, lived on Majorca, and their Spanish printer’s character set could not accommodate their English prose.

They bought some supplementary Ws from a Madrid foundry, but the new type was distractingly sharp on the page. So the printer advised them to “make those new letters old.”

“We sandpapered those Ws,” wrote Foley, “we stamped on them, we hammered them and hurled them around to give them in an hour all the wear and tear the printer’s other type had endured for many years. We finally subdued them so that they lost most of their prominence. But I have been W-conscious ever since.”

| Literature

“A Snow Lady”

http://books.google.com/books?id=_-IvAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

The accompanying picture shows what can be done with snow, by those who care to exercise their powers of modelling, and produce something more natural in appearance than the familiar old ‘Snow Man,’ built up after the figure of a Lowther Arcade Noah. During a lull in the severe frosts of last winter, two ladies (amateurs, who had never had a lesson in modelling), with the assistance of only a shovel and pair of scissors, erected and modelled the ‘Snow Lady’ in a garden near Pangbourne. No foundation of any kind was used, and no sticks or wires were concealed under the figure for the purpose of supporting head, body, or arms. An enlargement of the original photograph was shown at the Photographic Exhibition during last autumn, and gave rise to many remarks, sage and otherwise. A large number of those who looked at it pronounced it as ‘No doubt very cleverly got up–but all humbug!’ ‘Real snow? Not a bit of it! Quite impossible!’

— Strand, January 1892

| Oddities

Other Plans

On the evening of Jan. 19, 1931, the Liverpool Chess Club took a telephone message for one of its members. The caller, an R.M. Qualtrough, said he wanted William Wallace to visit him the following evening at 25 Menlove Gardens East to discuss insurance.

Wallace arrived 25 minutes later and took the message. The following evening he made his way into Liverpool by tram, only to discover that no such address existed. He made inquiries with a local policeman and a newsagent, then returned home and found that his wife had been beaten to death in their sitting room.

Had Wallace manufactured an alibi and then killed her himself? The telephone call had been placed from a box only 400 yards from Wallace’s house, but the message taker was certain the caller had not been Wallace. The crime scene was quite bloody, but no traces of blood were found on Wallace’s suit. A milk delivery boy insisted he had spoken to Julia Wallace only minutes before her husband would have had to leave to catch the tram.

Wallace was found guilty and sentenced to death, but an appeals court quashed the verdict on the grounds that it was unsupported by evidence. Wallace went free and died in Wirral in 1933. The crime remains unsolved.

If Wallace killed his wife, how did he manage it? If he didn’t … who did?

| Crime

Click

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=LQ8wAAAAEBAJ

Broke and lazy? With Chris Michaels’ “TV control device,” patented in 1976, you can change the television channel from the comfort of your armchair — and it’s “considerably less expensive than its electrical and electronic counterparts.”

The trouble is that you’ll need to find a TV with knobs.

| Technology

Mr. Right

To the ladies. Any young lady between the age of 18 and 23 of a midling stature; brown hair, regular features and a lively brisk eye: of good morals and not tinctured with anything that may sully so distinguishable a form possessed of £300 or 400 entirely her own disposal and where there will be no necessity of going through the tiresome talk of addressing parents or guardians for their consent: such a one by leaving a line directed for A.W. at the British Coffee House in King Street appointing where an interview may be had will meet with a person who flatters himself he shall not be thought disagreeable by any lady answering the above description. N.B. Profound secrecy will be observ’d. No trifling answers will be regarded.

— Boston Evening Post, Feb. 23, 1759

| Society