The Sage of Göttingen

Physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799) is not widely remembered outside Germany — which is a great pity, as his notebooks contain some of history’s most trenchant aphorisms:

  • “If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called Damn It.”
  • “What they call ‘heart’ lies much lower than the fourth waistcoat button.”
  • “What a pity it isn’t a sin to drink water, cried an Italian, how good it would taste.”
  • “A book is a mirror: If an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.”
  • “The often unreflected respect for old laws, old customs, and old religion we have to thank for all mischief in the world.”
  • “It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: If we sought a universal measure the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal.”
  • “Just as there are polysyllabic words that say very little, so there are also monosyllabic words of infinite meaning.”
  • “If walking on two legs is not natural to man it is certainly an invention that does him credit.”
  • “It is almost impossible to carry the torch of wisdom through a crowd without singeing someone’s beard.”
  • “Now that education is so easy, men are drilled for greatness, just as dogs are trained to retrieve. In this way we’ve discovered a new sort of genius, those great at being drilled. These are the people who are mainly spoiling the market.”
  • “Can it be that the evil in the world is in general of more use than the good?”

The “waste books” were admired by Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud, and even Tolstoy wondered “why the Germans of the present day neglect this writer so much.” He never got an answer.

| Literature

Countdown

Write the numbers 82 to 1 in descending order and string them together:

8281807978777675747372717069686766656463626160595857565554535251504948474645444-3424140393837363534333231302928272625242322212019181716151413121110987654321

The resulting 155-digit number is prime.

| Science & Math

A Nap Disturbed

http://books.google.com/books?id=_g8wAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_navlinks_s#v=onepage&q=&f=false

In February 1857 a Dr. Biccard was visiting Green Point in Cape Town when the lighthouse keeper asked him to “come and see a sea monster.” Biccard followed him and was astonished to see the creature illustrated above (“No. 1”) at a distance of about 150 yards. He borrowed a rifle and fired twice; the second ball apparently startled the animal, which straightened and submerged, but it reappeared 10 minutes later at about 200 yards and swam back to its original location, where it assumed position No. 2.

Biccard estimates the animal was about 200 feet long, but he could not estimate its thickness. He thinks the protuberance at one end, which was maculated with white spots, is the upper part of the head. The creature swam into Table Bay shortly afterward and was lost to sight; whatever it was, eight people saw it that day.

| Oddities

Just FYI

Under the terms of an 1845 treaty, Texas has the right to divide itself at any time into five new states.

That was part of the deal when the Lone Star State was first annexed to the Union, and, according to University of Minnesota law professor Michael Stokes Paulsen, it’s still valid and constitutional.

Such a move would create eight new senators and four new governors — and it would add eight votes to the Electoral College.

| History · Oddities

Unsuitable Footwear

There was a young lady of Twickenham
Whose shoes were too tight to walk quick in ’em;
She came back from her walk
Looking white as a chalk
And took ’em both off and was sick in ’em.

— Oliver Herford, collected in Carolyn Wells, The Book of Humorous Verse, 1920

| Humor · Poems

Spent Tears

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

George Moore was writing in his study when his aunt entered.

“I have sad news for you, Mr. Moore,” she said. “I regret to inform you that your friend Martin Ross is dead.”

Moore lowered his pen, sighed, and gazed quietly around him at the trappings of his long literary life. “How sad,” he said, “how sad. Here I am in the midst of this, alive … and my friend, my dear friend, Edmund Gosse, dead.”

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Moore,” the lady put in gently. “It is Martin Ross who is dead, not Edmund Gosse.”

Moore said, “Surely you don’t expect me to go through all that again?”

| Literature

History Denied

In 1997, University of Edinburgh linguistics professor Geoffrey K. Pullum submitted the following letter to the Economist:

‘Connections needed’ (March 15) reports that Russia’s Transneft pipeline operator is not able to separate crude flows from different oil fields: ‘they all come out swirled into a single bland blend.’ This is quite true. And worse yet, the characterless, light-colored mix thus produced is concocted blindly, without quality oversight, surely a grave mistake. In fact, I do not recall ever encountering a blinder blander blonder blender blunder.

It “would have been a true first in natural language text,” Pullum wrote, “a grammatical and meaningful sequence of five consecutive words in a natural context that are differentiated from each other by just a single character.” Alas, the Economist chose not to print it.

| Language

“Sir Theophilus Gooch … Is Being Roasted Alive”

On Jan. 16, 1926, a speech from Edinburgh on the BBC was interrupted with a shocking eyewitness report:

The Houses of Parliament are being demolished by an angry mob equipped with trench mortars. The clock tower 320 feet in height has just fallen to the ground, together with the famous clock, Big Ben, which used to strike the hours on a ball weighing nine tons. One moment, please. Fresh reports announce that the crowd has secured the person of Mr. Wurtherspoon, the minister of traffic, who was attempting to make his escape in disguise. He has now been hanged from a lamppost in Vauxhall. London calling. That noise you heard just now was the Savoy Hotel being blown up by the crowd.

Millions of Englishmen placed calls and wires to learn more about the calamity. Finally the radio company explained that the program they’d overheard had been intended by broadcaster Ronald Knox as a parody. One detail that should have tipped them off: According to the radio announcement, the riot in Trafalgar Square was led by one Mr. Popplebury, secretary of the National Movement for Abolishing Theatre Queues.

| Hoaxes