“Enormous Undescribed Animal”

fly serpent

Sailing in the Gulf of California aboard H.M.S. Fly around 1838, Capt. George Hope looked down through waters “perfectly calm and transparent” and saw something new. Or, perhaps, old. From The Zoologist, 1849:

[H]e saw at the bottom a large marine animal, with the head and general figure of the alligator, except that the neck was much longer, and that instead of legs the creature had four large flappers, somewhat like those of turtles, the anterior pair being larger than the posterior: the creature was distinctly visible, and all its movements could be observed with ease: it appeared to be pursuing its prey at the bottom of the sea: its movements were somewhat serpentine, and an appearance of annulations or ring-like divisions of the body was distinctly perceptible.

“Captain Hope made this relation in company, and as a matter of conversation,” writes Edward Newman. “When I heard it from the gentleman to whom it was narrated, I inquired whether Captain Hope was acquainted with those remarkable fossil animals, Ichthyosauri and Plesiosauri, the supposed forms of which so nearly correspond with what he describes as having seen alive, and I cannot find that he had heard of them; the alligator being the only animal he mentioned as bearing a partial similarity to the creature in question.”

| Oddities

Relativity

A correspondent of the Drawer is involved in domestic perplexities. He writes:

‘I got acquainted with a young widow, who lived with her step-daughter in the same house. I married the widow; my father fell, shortly after it, in love with the step-daughter of my wife, and married her. My wife became the mother-in-law and also the daughter-in-law of my own father; my wife’s step-daughter is my step-mother, and I am the step-father of my mother-in-law. My stepmother, who is the step-daughter of my wife, has a boy: he is naturally my step-brother, because he is the son of my father and of my step-mother; but because he is the son of my wife’s step-daughter so is my wife the grandmother of the little boy, and I am the grandfather of my step-brother. My wife has also a boy: my step-mother is consequently the step-sister of my boy, and is also his grandmother, because he is the child of her step-son; and my father is the brother-in-law of my son, because he has got his step-sister for a wife. I am the brother of my own son, who is the son of my step-mother; I am the brother-in-law of my mother, my wife is the aunt of her own son, my son is the grandson of my father, and I am my own grandfather.’

— Harper’s Magazine, April 1865

| Oddities

Math Notes

1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
000002569 is prime.

| Science & Math

Sea Legs

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=wdVdAAAAEBAJ&dq=22457

Henry Rowlands’ “apparatus for walking on the water” is exactly that, a “new and useful Contrivance for Traveling on Water” essentially by wearing boats as shoes.

Rowlands’ patent was issued in December 1858. Curiously, on Nov. 27 of that year, Chambers’s Journal reported that a Heer Ochsner of Rotterdam (“and who so likely to accomplish such a feat as a Dutchman?”) had made essentially the same invention, which he called a podoscaph.

But there’s more: As if to outdo Rowlands, Ochsner had “recently astonished his countrymen by appearing on the Maas, wearing a podoscaph fifteen feet long on each foot, and holding a pole, flattened at one end as a paddle, in his hand. Thus equipped, he walked up the Maas to the Rhine, and on to Cologne in seven days.”

I can’t find any record that the two met in the mid-Atlantic and fought it out during a lightning storm, but I think we should assume that this definitely happened.

| Technology

… What?

From a September 1909 Baseball Magazine account of a Giants-Pirates game:

With the third inning faded into the dim and forgotten past, the fourth spasm in the afternoon’s matinee of Dementia Baseballitis hopped into the glare of the calcium glim. It was the Giants’ turn to paddle the pellet, Murderous Michael Donlin taking his turn beside the glad glum. Mike biffed the bulb on the proboscis and sent it gleefully gliding to the distant shrubbery. … Bresnahan managed to get next to the seamy side of a floater and the Toledo kid sent the denizens of Coogan’s Bluff into Seventh Heaven of Gleefullness by starting the pulsating pill on a line for the extreme backyard. But they reckoned without the mighty Wagner. The Carnegie Dutchman extended a monster paw, the near-two bagger was cleverly captured by a dainty dab of his lunch hook and before you could bat an eye he had whipped the globule over to Abby, who made an earnest effort to put Donlin down and out but missed by a fraction of an inch.

Baseball historian Douglas Wallop translates: “In the New York half of the fourth inning, Mike Donlin singled and catcher Roger Bresnahan lined out to Wagner, who almost doubled up Donlin at first base.”

Now how long before the translation becomes incomprehensible?

| Language

You Are Here

http://books.google.com/books?id=6U3vAAAAMAAJ

In “Partial Magic in the Quixote,” Borges quotes philosopher Josiah Royce:

Let us imagine that a portion of the soil of England has been levelled off perfectly and that on it a cartographer traces a map of England. The job is perfect; there is no detail of the soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not registered on the map; everything has there its correspondence. This map, in such a case, should contain a map of the map, which should contain a map of the map of the map, and so on to infinity.

This sequence tends to a single point, the point on the map that corresponds directly to the point it represents in the territory.

Cover England entirely with a 1:1 map of itself, then crumple the map into a ball. So long as it remains in England, the balled map will always contain at least one point that lies directly above the corresponding point in England.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fannie_Ratchford_1970_0009_(9504657688).jpg

Related (sort of): In The Humor and Drama of Early Texas (2003), George U. Hubbard notes that one day in 1865, Thomas Jefferson Chambers was standing in this house in a room containing his portrait when someone fired a shot through the second-story window. “The bullet passed through Chambers’ body and lodged in his portrait on the wall. The citizens of Anahuac thought it very singular that the bullet that killed him struck the portrait in exactly the same place it had passed through his body.” The crime was never solved.

See Garganta and Papered Over.

| Science & Math

Fair Point

‘My dearest Maria,’ wrote a recently-married husband to his wife. She wrote back, ‘Dearest, let me correct either your grammar or your morals. You address me, “My dearest Maria.” Am I to suppose you have other dear Marias?’

— The Illinois Farmer, June 1863

| Language

Deer Prudence

In 1946, while on location shooting The Yearling, Victor Fleming was barraged with interfering telegrams by producer Sidney Franklin. Finally he wired back:

JUST SAT DOWN AND READ SCRIPT AND YOUR TELEGRAM TO DEER + FEEL HE WILL DO BETTER HEREAFTER.

| Entertainment

Hand Count

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yankee_Stadium_Grandstand_Level_View.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Suppose we fill Yankee Stadium with 50,000 people and ask them to spend the day shaking hands with one another.

Prove that, at the end of the day, at least two participants will have shaken hands with the same number of people.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles