What is the sum of all the figures in the numbers from 1 to 1 million?
Hint: With the right technique, this can be done in the head.
The Alexamenos Graffito
In 1857 archaeologists unsealed an ancient house on the Palatine Hill in Rome. Inside, carved into the plaster of one of the walls, they found this inscription.
It appears to show a donkey-headed figure attached to a cross. A young man raises his hand to it, perhaps in worship. Below this is written in crude Greek, “Alexamenos worships [his] God.”
It’s believed to be one of the first representations of the crucifixion of Jesus.
The Last Word
The newspaper man, indeed, is a dangerous person to fool with. He is extremely ingenious in his methods of retaliation. Here is another story in point. One Bennett was city editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer somewhere in the sixties. It was Bennett’s plan, if news were scarce, to make small children–offspring of the brain only–fall from the Newport ferry-boat into the Ohio River, where they would infallibly have been drowned but for the gallant rescue of some by-stander, usually a personal friend of Bennett’s. One of these friends, Kellum by name, grew very weary after he had figured several times as a savior of drowning innocents, and requested that Bennett should desist. So, in next day’s Enquirer, Kellum read that a beautiful little girl, child of a prominent citizen in Newport, had fallen into the river, and that Mr. Kellum, who was standing near and could have rescued her, refused to render the slightest assistance. A few minutes later the maddest man in Cincinnati arrived in the Enquirer office, threatening the direst vengeance on Bennett. But Bennett calmly pulled off his coat, and said, ‘See here, Kellum, you are a good enough fellow in your way, but I can’t stand any interference with my department. If I make any statement in the Enquirer you mustn’t come round here contradicting it. That isn’t journalism.’
— William Shepard Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1892
Misc
- The sum of the numbers on a roulette wheel is 666.
- ANTITRINITARIANIST contains all 24 arrangements of the letters I, N, R, and T.
- The Empire State Building has its own zip code.
- 63945 = 63 × (-9 + 45)
- “Isn’t it strange that we talk least about the things we think about most!” — Charles Lindbergh
For Your Consideration
I send you a photograph of a snake made of postage-stamps. It contains, I believe, from fifteen thousand to twenty thousand stamps. The only portion not made of stamps is the head, which is of black velvet, with eyes of white beads, also teeth of beads; the fang is a match stuck into the mouth. The snake was made by Mrs. Membury, of Hyde Corner, Bridport, Dorset, and took about three years to complete. The length is four feet nine inches.
— Strand, March 1907
Happenstance
As the Mayflower was crossing the Atlantic in 1620, passenger John Howland was swept overboard during a storm. He managed to sieze a trailing halyard and was pulled back to safety. His descendants in the New World have included:
- Franklin Roosevelt
- George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- Joseph Smith and Brigham Young
- Humphrey Bogart
- Benjamin Spock
- Sarah Palin
- Chevy Chase
- Christopher Lloyd
- Alec Baldwin
If Howland had lost his life in that storm, none of these people would have existed.
Animal Talk
A newspaper reporter submitted a story about the theft of 2,025 pigs.
His editor, struck at the size of the theft, called the farmer to confirm.
“Is it true that you lost two thousand twenty-five pigs?” he asked.
“Yeth,” said the farmer.
The editor thanked him, hung up, and changed the phrase to “two sows and 25 pigs.”
Shades of Gray
An optical illusion. The gray bars on the left appear lighter than those on the right, but in fact they’re the same color.
Pssst
Can praying improve your reasoning? I once questioned a student about his suspicious behavior during a logic examination. He confessed that he was praying for the correct answer. I felt this was cheating. Even if God did not give him the answer, the student was soliciting the answer from Someone Else.
— Dartmouth philosopher Roy Sorensen, in A Brief History of the Paradox, 2003
Black Widow
In 1902, 42-year-old Norwegian emigrant Belle Gunness bought an Indiana farm with $8,500 in insurance money she’d received when her husband and two children died. A second husband died after only nine months, and over the next six years a succession of prosperous suitors visited her farm and failed to return.
When the brother of one of these men grew suspicious, the farmhouse suddenly burned to the ground in April 1908. Firemen discovered the remains of four people stacked in the cellar: Three were Gunness’ children, but the fourth — an adult woman — was unidentifiable because its head was missing.
Investigation began to turn up butchered corpses buried around the property. Under questioning, farmhand Ray Lamphere said that Gunness would lure her victims to the farmhouse, drug them, kill them with an ax, and bury them in the hog pen or around the grounds.
It’s estimated that Gunness killed more than 40 people, making her one of America’s most prolific serial killers of either sex. Curiously, her own fate is uncertain — officially she was declared dead, but neighbors insisted the headless remains could not have been hers. Lamphere claimed she had staged her own death and absconded with $100,000 in stolen money. He may be right — there’s not enough surviving DNA to decide for certain.