On the House

The thirsty but impecunious soul approaches the bar-tender with a request for brandy, or what not. He takes a sip, pronounces it detestable, and offers to change it for a glass of whiskey. The obliging bar-tender substitutes the whiskey. The customer drinks, smacks his lips, and prepares to depart. ‘Here,’ says the bar-tender, ‘you haven’t paid for your whiskey.’ ‘No,’ is the innocent response; ‘I gave you the brandy in exchange for it.’ ‘But you didn’t pay for the brandy.’ ‘But I didn’t drink it.’ And while the publican intellect is vainly struggling with the mathematical puzzle involved, the puzzler makes good his escape.

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

Fun With Bones

http://books.google.com/books?id=u1GZEdfvaZwC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false

In 1840, Albert Koch made a sensation in London with the “Missouri Leviathan,” an enormous monster whose remains he purported to have discovered in Benton County, Mo. It turned out to be “a mastodon preposterously mounted.” From Scribner’s Magazine:

Koch had added an extra dozen or more joints to the back-bone and ribs to the chest, turned the tusks outward into a semicircle, and converted the animal into an aquatic monster which anchored itself to trees by means of its sickle-shaped tusks and then peacefully slumbered on the bosom of the waves.

The British Museum bought this up and, sniffing, reassembled it into a mastodon. Koch only warmed to his work — in Alabama he turned up the remains of two basilosauri and, writes Rupert Gould, arranged them to form “a serpentine creature 114 feet long, for which he manufactured, from any spare bones that were handy, a corresponding skull, ribs and paddles” (below). He had time to exhibit “Hydrarchos sillimani” in New York and Boston before outraged naturalists finally shut him down; the restored basilosaurs found a home in Berlin.

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

Enjoy Your Flight

Items prohibited from carry-on baggage by the Transportation Security Administration, as of June 2010:

  • Meat cleavers
  • Spear guns
  • Sabers
  • Hatchets
  • Cattle prods
  • Swords
  • Brass knuckles
  • Nunchakus
  • Throwing stars
  • Blasting caps
  • Dynamite
  • Hand grenades

And “snow globes … even with documentation.”

Noble Wisdom

Maxims of Rochefoucauld:

  • “Few men are able to know all the ill they do.”
  • “We are never made so ridiculous by the qualities we have, as by those we affect to have.”
  • “In every profession, every individual affects to appear what he would willingly be esteemed; so that we may say, the world is composed of nothing but appearances.”
  • “We like better to see those on whom we confer benefits, than those from whom we receive them.”
  • “Everybody takes pleasure in returning small obligations; many go so far as to acknowledge moderate ones; but there is hardly any one who does not repay great obligations with ingratitude.”
  • “In misfortunes we often mistake dejection for constancy; we bear them without daring to look on them, as cowards suffer themselves to be killed without resistance.”
  • “None but the contemptible are apprehensive of contempt.”
  • “We want strength to act up to our reason.”
  • “We easily forget crimes that are known only to ourselves.”
  • “It is as easy to deceive ourselves without our perceiving it, as it is difficult to deceive others without their perceiving it.”
  • “We are sometimes less unhappy in being deceived than in being undeceived by those we love.”

And “Those who apply themselves too much to little things commonly become incapable of great ones.”

Car Hop

http://books.google.com/books?id=OiEDAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false

A classic railroad shunting puzzle. The segment at the top can accommodate either freight car, but not the locomotive. The freight cars can be joined if desired, and the locomotive can push or pull either or both cars from either direction. The task is to use the locomotive to swap the positions of the two cars.

Click for Answer

Never Mind

In 1987, the residents of Wilkinsburg, Pa., prepared to dig up a time capsule that had been buried in the last century. But no one could remember where it was.

In 1976, during the American bicentennial, a cross-country wagon train collected the signatures of a reported 22 million Americans to be buried at Valley Forge, Pa. But when President Ford arrived for the sealing ceremony, someone had stolen the capsule from an unattended van. It remains missing.

In 1939, MIT engineers deposited a brass time capsule beneath an 18-ton magnet used in a new cyclotron. No one has figured out how to retrieve it.

(Thanks, Luke.)

“Singular Old Coin”

The editor of the Milford (Del.) Beacon, was shown, a few days go, a coin — a composition of copper and brass — found on the farm of Mr. Ira Hammond, about two miles from that place. It is over 600 years old, bearing, date 1178; on one side is a crown, and upon the other the words ‘Josephus, I D J-PO RT-ET-AL G-REX,’ very legible, and the work well executed. This coin is about two hundred years older than the discovery of America, and the question very naturally arises, where did it come from?

Scientific American, 6:250, 1851

UPDATE: Another mystery solved: A reader points out this entry in the U.S.
Bureau of the Mint catalogue of coins and tokens:

Gold
16. Meia dobra, 1768. (R). 6*Jy.
JOSEPHUS.I.D.G. – PORT. ET.ALG.REX.
Laureated bust, draped, to right; below, R 1758. Rev. Garnished shield
of arms of
Portugal, crowned. Edge, wreath. 32 mm. ; 216 grs.

Probably Scientific American‘s correspondent discovered a Portuguese coin from the 18th century and misread the date. (Thanks, John.)

Meek Chic

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Durandelle_Opera_Statues_decoratives_27_Modestie.jpg

Why is modesty a virtue? Classically, to be virtuous is to be wise, thoughtful, and prudent. But modesty seems to depend on ignorance.

Julia Driver writes, “For a person to be modest, she must be ignorant with regard to her self-worth. She must think herself less deserving, or less worthy, than she actually is. … Since modesty is generally considered to be a virtue, it would seem that this virtue rests upon an epistemic defect.”

As Sherlock Holmes says, “To underestimate one’s self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one’s own powers.”