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

Apathy on Rails

When the San Diego Wild Animal Park opened in 1972, it featured a monorail that visitors could ride around the park’s perimeter. The railway was called the Wgasa Bush Line, a suitably exotic name that many visitors assumed was African.

In fact the name arose in a planning meeting. When chief designer Chuck Faust couldn’t think of a name, he wrote WGASA on the plans. “Everybody laughed because they knew what it stood for, but they loved it because it sounded African,” zoo founder Charles Schroeder wrote later. “We thought WGASA would blow over, but it actually stuck.”

It stands for “Who gives a shit anyway?”

| Language

“Newfoundland Dog”

One of the magistrates in Harbour Grace, in Newfoundland, had an old dog of the regular web-footed species peculiar to this island, who was in the habit of carrying a lantern before his master at night, as steadily as the most attentive servant could do, stopping short when his master made a stop, and proceeding when he saw him disposed to follow. If his master was absent from home, on the lantern being fixed to his mouth, and the command given, ‘Go fetch thy master,’ he would immediately set off, and proceed directly to the town, which lay at the distance of more than a mile from the place of his master’s residence: he would then stop at the door of every house which he knew his master was in the habit of frequenting, and laying down his lantern, growl and strike the door, making all the noise in his power until it was opened; if his master was not there, he would proceed farther in the same manner, until he had found him. If he had accompanied him only once into a house, this was sufficient to induce him to take that house in his round.

— The Scrap Book, Or, A Selection of Interesting and Authentic Anecdotes, 1825

| Oddities

Half-Hearted

half-hearted

Draw a semicircle and surmount it with two smaller semicircles.

A line drawn through A, at any angle, will divide the perimeter precisely in half.

This probably has some romantic symbolism, but I’m not very good at that stuff.

06/19/2024 Very belated update: This is called the cardioid of Boscovich, after Roger Boscovich, 1711-1787. There’s a proof of the theorem in Alsina and Nelsen, Icons of Mathematics.

| Science & Math