Ghost Train

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cincinnati_Subway_Entrance_01_2005_10_22.JPG

Cincinnati has a subway. Or, rather, the abortive beginnings of one. The digging began in 1920, when streetcars couldn’t keep up with the city’s growing population. But cost overruns and the advent of the automobile gradually turned it into a white elephant. In all, seven miles were prepared, but no cars were ever ordered.

In the years since 1925, when construction stopped, the empty tunnel has been proposed for use as an air-raid shelter, a storage area, a mall, a film set, a wind tunnel, and a wine cellar, but none of these received approval. Instead the entrances have been sealed with concrete, and it remains simply the nation’s largest abandoned subway tunnel.

If enough time passes, perhaps it will be forgotten entirely. Intriguingly, this has happened before.

| Oddities

Mirror Years

If you’re over 18, you’ve lived through two years whose dates are palindromes: 1991 and 2002. That’s a rare privilege. Since 1001, the normal gap between palindromic years has been 110 years (e.g., 1661-1771). The 11-year gap 1991-2002 has been the only exception, and we’ll wait a millennium for the next such gap, 2992-3003. Until then we’re back to 110-year intervals, and most people will see only one palindrome in a lifetime.

See Two Milestones.

| Science & Math

Work and Play

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

Here’s one solution to the energy crisis: enlist the children. Julius Restein’s “device for operating churns,” patented in 1888, will exercise your kid and produce loads of delicious butter at the same time.

It also works with washing machines.

| Technology

Ready Order

In the word ARCHETYPICAL, five letters occupy the same positions as in the alphabet — A is first, C third, E fifth, I ninth, and L twelfth.

In the remarkable sentence A bad egg hit KLM wipers two ways, composed by Ross Eckler, fully 16 of 26 letters occupy their alphabetic positions.

| Language

Conway’s Prime-Producing Machine

Here’s something amazing — a machine made of fractions:

conway's prime-producing machine

Start with the number 2 as your seed. Multiply it by each of the fractions above, in order, until you find one that produces an integer. (It’s 15/2.) Now adopt that integer (15) as the new seed, and multiply that by each of the fractions until you produce another integer. Keep this up, making a note whenever you produce a power of 2.

The first such power (4, or 22) appears after 19 steps. Fifty steps later, 23 turns up. Then 25 appears about 200 steps further on. A pattern emerges: the exponents are 2, 3, 5 …

It turns out that “these fourteen fractions alone have it in them to produce an infinity of primes, even those that no one yet knows about,” writes Dominic Olivastro. “There is something enormously magical about it.” John Horton Conway devised the technique; it’s an instance of his Fractran computing algorithm.

| Science & Math

The Breaks

I once had a friend who objected to assigning chores by lot on the grounds that random selection was biased in favour of lucky people. He claimed to be serious and went on to compare unlucky people with … groups he took to be victims of discrimination. Sincere or not, wherein lies the absurdity of my friend’s objection?

— Roy A. Sorensen, Blindspots, 1988

| Science & Math

Adventures in Tuition

In 1987, University of Illinois freshman Mike Hayes wrote to Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene with a modest proposal: that each of Greene’s readers contribute a penny to finance his education.

“Just one penny,” he told Greene. “A penny doesn’t mean anything to anyone. If everyone who is reading your column looks around the room right now, there will be a penny under the couch cushion, or on the corner of the desk, or on the floor. That’s all I’m asking. A penny from each of your readers.”

Greene published the appeal in 200 newspapers via his syndicated column — and Hayes received 77,000 letters and enough pennies to break his bank’s coin-counting machine three times. He easily reached his goal of $28,000, enough for four years of tuition, room and board, and books.

He graduated with a degree in food science. Asked why the scheme worked, he said, “I didn’t ask for a lot of money. I just asked for money from a lot of people.”

| Oddities · Society