Inner Vision

http://books.google.com/books?id=cmI9AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA197&dq=rectilineator&hl=en&ei=9Fl1TO63FYT48Aaw3Ky2Bw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

In 1897, Cyrus Teed proved that we inhabit a hollow earth. He did this by building a “Rectilineator,” essentially a giant straightedge that could extend a perfectly straight line across a great distance. On a convex earth this line should rise gradually in altitude as the earth’s surface falls away from it. But in his trials in Florida, Teed found that the line ran into the earth after 4 1/8 miles, proving that the surface is concave, in accord with his “Koreshan cosmogony.”

The extension of the arc of curvature which we have measured and have demonstrated to be concave, forms a circumference of about 25,000 miles; which conclusion, taken in connection with all the astronomical, geographical, and geodetic facts obtained by centuries of observation and survey, demonstrates that the surface of the earth upon which we live is the inner surface of a great cell about 8,000 miles in diameter.

“No one has ever seriously attempted either to debunk or to repeat the Rectilineator experiment,” writes John Michell in Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions, “but it is natural for those who can not bring themselves to accept its results to wonder how they were obtained. The Rectilineator apparatus, though cumbersome, was scientifically sound, and so was the principle behind its use, and one can hardly suppose that the Koreshan surveyors, who lived by the doctrines of their leader, were engaged in an elaborate conspiracy of deception. Perhaps the answer lies in the malleable, obliging nature of the universe, which reflects every image projected upon it and gives every experiment a tendency to gratify the experimenter.”

A Higher Star

At a dinner, Oliver Herford found himself sitting next to a very serious young woman.

“Tell me, Mr. Herford,” she said. “Have you no ambition beyond making people laugh?”

“Yes, I have,” he replied. “And someday I hope to gratify it.”

“Please tell me,” she said eagerly. “What is it?”

He said, “I want to throw an egg into an electric fan.”

Nurse’s Aide

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

Florence Nightingale had a pet owl. She found it in 1850 on the Parthenon, where it had fallen out of its nest. She named it Athena and carried it away in her pocket, “where I regret to say he ate a live Athenian grasshopper, but failed to make any impression on two small tortoises which I was also bringing to England.”

At home, Athena became Nightingale’s “constant & sociable companion.” He slept in her pocket and nested in a bookcase, “where he made his presence known by uttering a peculiar cry, some 150 times, like a prayer.”

That cry would come to haunt her. The owl died during her preparations for the Crimea, but he visited her dreams as late as 1855, when she was in Constantinople: “Athena came along the cliff quite to my feet, rose upon her tiptoes, bowed several times, made her long melancholy cry, and fled away.”

“Poor little beastie,” she said. “It was odd how much I loved you.”

Current Affairs

At 1:17 one afternoon a canoeist left his riverside camp and paddled upstream at 4 mph against a current of 1.5 mph. At 2:05 he passed a corked bottle floating downstream and noticed that it contained a message. He paddled some distance further but finally couldn’t help himself — he turned around and paddled after the bottle. He caught it just as it reached his camp. The message read:

HOW FAR DID YOU GET FROM CAMP BEFORE YOU GAVE IN TO YOUR CURIOSITY?

“There is no reason why the camper should have paid any attention to this odd message, but you know how these things are,” writes Geoffrey Mott-Smith in Mathematical Puzzles for Beginners and Enthusiasts (1946). The camper had noticed a landmark at the point upstream where he’d turned around, so he was able to measure the distance the next day. But he could have reasoned the thing out from the facts. Can you?

Click for Answer

Future Perfect

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/115138

“It makes no more sense to talk of changing the future than it does to talk of changing the past. Suppose that I decide to change the future, by having coffee for breakfast tomorrow instead of my usual tea. Have I changed the future? No. For coffee for breakfast was the future. It has been objected to me that the above argument is perhaps misleading. For, it has been said, there is quite clearly a sense in which I can change the future and not the past, and this is because my acts of will determine the future and not the past — I cannot undo what has been done. Now I do not wish to deny that we can causally affect the future and not the past, and indeed this causal directionality of time is part of the problem of the ‘direction of time.’ Nevertheleless I would reiterate that the fact that our present actions determine that future would be most misleadingly expressed or described by saying that we can change the future. A man can change his trousers, his club, or his job. Perhaps he may even change the course of world history or the state of scientific thought. But one thing that he cannot change is the future, since whatever he brings about is the future, and nothing else is, or ever was.”

— J.J.C. Smart, Problems of Space and Time, 1964

Wedding Belles

Mary Hamilton invented a new crime in 1746 — transvestite bigamy. Dressing as a man and calling herself Charles and George, she convinced no fewer than 14 women to marry her. At a trial in Somersetshire, the 14th wife testified against her “female husband”:

She swore that she was lawfully married to the prisoner, and that they bedded and lived together as man and wife for more than a quarter of a year; during all which time, so well did the impostor assume the character of man, she still actually believed she had married a fellow-creature of the right and proper sex.

The justices found Mary “an uncommon, notorious cheat” and sentenced her to six months in prison and three whippings. “And Mary, the monopoliser of her own sex, was imprisoned and whipped accordingly, in the severity of the winter of the year 1746.”

“A Parsnip Resembling a Human Hand”

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

The parsnip of which a figure is annexed, represents a human hand, particularly the back of it so correctly, that it could not be surpassed by the best painter. This root was bought at the market of a woman who sold vegetables, and as it was shewn to several persons, it came at last into the hands of an engraver. Though roots of this kind, especially of the parsnip species, are not rare, yet there could scarcely be found one that so nearly resembles a human member. Dr. Menzel, however has seen a parsnip which accurately exhibits the figure of a man, complete in all its parts.

Kirby’s Wonderful and Eccentric Museum, 1820