Small Talk

A gentleman sitting in one of the boxes in company with the late Lord North, not knowing his lordship, entered into conversation with him, and, seeing two ladies come into an opposite box, turned to him, and addressed him with, ‘Pray, sir, can you inform me who is that ugly woman that is just come in?’ ‘O,’ replied his lordship, with great good humor, ‘that is my wife.’ ‘Sir, I ask you ten thousand pardons; I do not mean her, I mean that shocking monster who is along with her.’ ‘That,’ replied his lordship, ‘is my daughter.’

— M. Lafayette Byrn, The Repository of Wit and Humor, 1853

| Society

A Slap From Poseidon

In the Marine Observer (55:203), T. Wilson Cameron reports one ship’s alarming encounter off the coast of Spain in the 1960s. At 5:20 a.m. one morning the moon disappeared:

I looked to port to see what type of cloud could obscure the moon so thoroughly, and was amazed — horrified, rather, to discover it was no cloud, but an immense wave approaching on our port beam. It stretched far north and south, had no crest, nor white streaks, and as it neared at quite a speed, I could see its front was nearly vertical. I yelled to the lookout man to come into the wheelhouse as he was on the starboard side of the bridge and could not see the wave.

As near as I could judge, about 80 to 100 yards away the wave started to break, and in another few seconds reached our ship and struck us fair abeam with three distinct separate shocks, sweeping our ship for her full length. Fortunately, the vessel rolled away just before the impact and this I am sure saved us from even more serious damage.

“The wave was higher than our foremost track — 85 ft above the water. As this wave approached from a direction 90 degrees different from the normal sea and wind, which had been northerly for a few days previously, I put its existence down to a submarine earthquake in the mid-Atlantic ridge. Certainly it appeared so much different from the normal wind-generated sea, of which I have seen thousands. There was no crest, nor white streaks, a nearly vertical front and quite fast approach.”

| Oddities

King Hunt

Late in 1912, a 26-year-old German named Edward Lasker made his first trip to London. Still a bit seasick from a rough channel crossing, he made his way to the local chess club, as was his custom whenever he visited a new country. He spoke no English, but one of the members invited him to a game. Lasker took white, and they started innocently enough:

1. d4 e6 2. Nf3 f5 3. Nc3 Nf6 4. Bg5 Be7 5. Bxf6 Bxf6 6. e4 fxe4 7. Nxe4 b6 8. Ne5 O-O 9. Bd3 Bb7 10. Qh5 Qe7

lasker-thomas, position before combination

But here the young German saw a remarkable opportunity, an eight-move combination that produced one of the most striking endings in chess history:

11. Qxh7+! Kxh7 12. Nxf6+ Kh6 13. Neg4+ Kg5 14. h4+ Kf4 15. g3+ Kf3 16. Be2+ Kg2 17. Rh2+ Kg1 18. Kd2#

lasker-thomas, final position

Or 18. O-O-O#! “This was very nice,” said his opponent, who turned out to be Sir George Thomas, president of the club and later British champion. In after years Lasker would remember his effort modestly as “the most beautiful game I ever succeeded in winning,” but Mikhail Botvinnik was more forthcoming: “If Edward Lasker had played only one game in his entire life,” he wrote, “this would have been enough to preserve his name in the annals of time.”

| Entertainment

Steampunk Chauffer

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=d6kAAAAAEBAJ&dq=75874

Zadoc Dederick and Isaac Grass quietly patented this as an “improvement in steam-carriage” in 1868, but the details are pretty sensational: They’d invented a mechanical man with jointed legs who could pull a cart, lift its legs to clear obstacles, and even run backward.

The boiler is in the torso. “It is unnecessary to describe this part of the mechanism, as there is nothing peculiar in it.”

| Technology

Claws and Effect

From Lewis Carroll’s first textbook in symbolic logic:

  1. No kitten that loves fish is unteachable.
  2. No kitten without a tail will play with a gorilla.
  3. Kittens with whiskers always love fish.
  4. No teachable kitten has green eyes.
  5. No kittens have tails unless they have whiskers.

What conclusion can be drawn from these premises?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Cloudy

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%91%D0%BE%D0%B3_%D0%A1%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BE%D1%84.jpg

All rational beings believe in their own existence, whether or not they actually exist. Sherlock Holmes believes that he exists, but he is wrong. God too believes in his own existence–and his omniscience makes it impossible that he is mistaken. Therefore God exists.

On the other hand: Perfection is essential to godhood, and a perfect God must be perfectly virtuous. But virtue implies overcoming pain, fear, and temptation, and a God who is subject to these ills is less perfect than one who is not. Thus perfection is impossible, and God cannot exist.

Asked what he would say to God on Judgment Day, Bertrand Russell said, “Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!”

| Religion

New-Minted Coins

Words of which William Shakespeare was the only recorded user, at some point, according to the Oxford English Dictionary:

  • bepray
  • bragless
  • compulsative
  • conceptious
  • confineless
  • continuantly
  • correctioner
  • disliken
  • exceptless
  • exsufflicate
  • foxship
  • insultment
  • oathable
  • offendress
  • omittance
  • overgreen
  • overstink
  • questant
  • razorable
  • successantly
  • thoughten
  • uprighteously
  • wenchless

In Inventing English, Stanford literary historian Seth Lerer credits him with inventing nearly 6,000 new words.

| Language