“Doppelgänger”

Entering the lonely house with my wife
I saw him for the first time
Peering furtively from behind a bush –
Blackness that moved,
A shape amid the shadows,
A momentary glimpse of gleaming eyes
Revealed in the ragged moon.
A closer look (he seemed to turn) might have
Put him to flight forever –
I dared not
(For reasons that I failed to understand),
Though I knew I should act at once.

I puzzled over it, hiding alone,
Watching the woman as she neared the gate.
He came, and I saw him crouching
Night after night.
Night after night
He came, and I saw him crouching,
Watching the woman as she neared the gate.

I puzzled over it, hiding alone –
Though I knew I should act at once,
For reasons that I failed to understand
I dared not
Put him to flight forever.

A closer look (he seemed to turn) might have
Revealed in the ragged moon
A momentary glimpse of gleaming eyes
A shape amid the shadows,
Blackness that moved.

Peering furtively from behind a bush,
I saw him, for the first time,
Entering the lonely house with my wife.

— J.A. Lindon

| Language · Poems

A Kinder Cut

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=9cxLAAAAEBAJ

In the 19th century manuals such as Gunn’s Domestic Medicine promised that “any man, unless he be an idiot or an absolute fool,” could perform an amputation. But Pennsylvania surgeon George Griswold had found that “persons unskilful in the use of the saw, and even the most experienced, will find it difficult to hold the bone firmly,” increasing both the patient’s pain and length of the operation. He invented this “amputator’s assistant” to hold a limb steady while a surgeon saws through it.

He patented it in 1854, only seven years before the Civil War. I haven’t been able to learn how widely it was used.

| Technology

Knitted News

In making up newspapers–that is, in piecing together paragraphs into columns–two separate items may sometimes be jumbled together with amazing results. Thus, the New Haven Journal announced in one paragraph that ‘The large cast-iron wheel, revolving nine hundred times a minute, exploded in that city yesterday after a long and painful illness. Deceased was a prominent thirty-second degree Mason,’ and in another that ‘John Fadden, a well-known florist and real-estate broker of Newport, Rhode Island, died in Wardner Russell’s sugar-mill at Crystal Lake, Illinois, on Saturday, doing $3000 damages to the building and injuring several workmen severely.’

— William Shepard Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1892

| Language · Literature

Hoofbeats

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

When I think of a unicorn, what I am thinking of is certainly not nothing; if it were nothing, then, when I think of a griffin, I should also be thinking of nothing, and there would be no difference between thinking of a griffin and thinking of a unicorn. But there certainly is a difference; and what can the difference be except that in the one case what I am thinking of is a unicorn, and in the other a griffin? And if the unicorn is what I am thinking of, then there certainly must be a unicorn, in spite of the fact that unicorns are unreal. In other words, though in one sense of the words there certainly are no unicorns–that sense, namely, in which to assert that there are would be equivalent to asserting that unicorns are real–yet there must be some other sense in which there are such things; since, if there were not, we could not think of them.

— G.E. Moore, Philosophical Studies, 1922

| Science & Math

The Bach-Peters Paradox

Pronouns refer to nouns. In the sentence Francis touched the beggar and cured him, we can “unpack” the pronoun him by replacing it with its referent, the beggar: Francis touched the beggar and cured the beggar.

But what if a sentence has two phrases that refer to each other? The pilot that shot at it hit the Mig that chased him. Now there’s an infinite regress:

The pilot that shot at the Mig that chased the pilot that shot at it hit the Mig that chased the pilot that shot at it.

It seems that no amount of unpacking can resolve these pronouns. Yet most readers can understand the sentence immediately. How are they able to do so?

| Language

A Prayer

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

It deals with a game that [Theodore] Roosevelt and I used to play at Sagamore Hill. After an evening of talk, perhaps about the fringes of knowledge, or some new possibility of climbing inside the minds and senses of animals, we would go out on the lawn, where we took turns at an amusing little astronomical rite. We searched until we found, with or without glasses, the faint, heavenly spot of light-mist beyond the lower left-hand corner of the Great Square of Pegasus, when one or the other of us would then recite:

That is the Spiral Galaxy of Andromeda.
It is as large as our Milky Way.
It is one of a hundred million galaxies.
It is 750,000 light-years away.
It consists of one hundred billion suns, each larger than our sun.

After an interval Colonel Roosevelt would grin at me and say: ‘Now I think we are small enough! Let’s go to bed.’

— William Beebe, The Book of Naturalists, 1944

| Science & Math

King Without a Country

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

Pity James Harden-Hickey — he founded a nation and no one believed him.

In 1893, newly rich after marrying into steel money, the American adventurer stopped at the empty island of Trinidad in the South Atlantic (not its larger namesake in the Caribbean) and, fancying a military dictatorship, proclaimed himself James I.

To his credit, Harden-Hickey did everything he could to legitimize his claim, but it’s hard to get these things off the ground. He named a secretary of state; opened a consular office in New York; established a flag, postage stamps, and a coat of arms; and began to sell bonds. After only two years, though, Britain seized the island for a telegraph station, occasioning a dispute with Brazil, and Harden-Hickey’s protests brought him only ridicule in the popular press.

Bold to the last, Harden-Hickey even tried to arrange an invasion of England from Ireland, but he couldn’t arrange financing. In 1898 he took an overdose of morphine, leaving behind a note to his wife–and the crown of his quondam nation.

| Oddities