aquabib
n. a drinker of water
Klerksdorp Spheres
For years, South African miners have been finding disks and spheres like this one. Usually brown or red, the objects can measure up to 10 centimeters in diameter, and like this one they’re often engraved with parallel grooves or ridges.
How could worked artifacts have found their way into mineral deposits that are billions of years old? Did aliens visit southern Africa in the remote past? Or is the region’s geologic history vastly different than we’d imagined?
Neither. Despite their artificial appearance, geologists say the objects arose naturally, probably as concretions as volcanic sediments in the region hardened into pyrophyllite.
See The Eltanin Antenna.
To a Thesaurus
O precious codex, volume, tome,
Book, writing, compilation, work,
Attend the while I pen a pome,
A jest, a jape, a quip, a quirk.
For I would pen, engross, indite,
Transcribe, set forth, compose, address,
Record, submit–yea, even write
An ode, an elegy to bless–
To bless, set store by, celebrate,
Approve, esteem, endow with soul,
Commend, acclaim, appreciate,
Immortalize, laud, praise, extol
Thy merit, goodness, value, worth,
Experience, utility–
O manna, honey, salt of earth,
I sing, I chant, I worship thee!
How could I manage, live, exist,
Obtain, produce, be real, prevail,
Be present in the flesh, subsist,
Have place, become, breathe or inhale
Without thy help, recruit, support,
Opitulation, furtherance,
Assistance, rescue, aid, resort,
Favour, sustention, and advance?
Alack! Alack! and well-a-day!
My case would then be dour and sad,
Likewise distressing, dismal, gray,
Pathetic, mournful, dreary, bad.
Though I could keep this up all day,
This lyric, elegiac, song,
Meseems hath come the time to say
Farewell! Adieu! Good-by! So long!
— Franklin P. Adams, collected in Carolyn Wells, The Book of Humorous Verse, 1920
Sky Fanfare
Introduced at the end of the 19th century, hail cannons offered farmers a novel way to protect their crops: They could disrupt the formation of hailstones by blasting sound at approaching storms.
Unfortunately, there’s no scientific evidence that they work. And anyway, if loud sounds can prevent hail, won’t thunder do the work for us?
See also Japanese War Tuba.
Market Forces
The following question was a favourite topic for discussion, and thousands of the acutest logicians, through more than one century, never resolved it: ‘When a hog is carried to market with a rope tied about its neck, which is held at the other end by a man, whether is the hog carried to market by the rope or the man?’
— Isaac Disraeli, Curiosities of Literature, 1893
A Riddle
At a Cambridge dinner, Arthur C. Clarke asked Clive Sinclair, “What was the first human artifact to break the sound barrier?”
What was it?
R.I.P.
Preparing for heart surgery at age 81, Rodney Dangerfield was asked how long he’d be in the hospital.
“If all goes well, about a week,” he said. “If not, about an hour and a half.”
The Misfortune Field
One of the most enduring contributions to the [Wolfgang] Pauli legend was the ‘Pauli Effect,’ according to which Pauli could, by his mere presence, cause laboratory accidents and catastrophes of all kinds. Peierls informs us that there are well-documented instances of Pauli’s appearance in a laboratory causing machines to break down, vacuum systems to spring leaks, and glass apparatus to shatter. Pauli’s destructive spell became so powerful that he was credited with causing an explosion in a Göttingen laboratory the instant his train stopped at the Göttingen station.
– William H. Cropper, Great Physicists, 2004
(To exaggerate the effect, Pauli’s friends once arranged to have a chandelier crash to the floor when he arrived at a reception. When he appeared, a pulley jammed, and the chandelier refused to budge.)
First Class
On April 19, 1944, Howard Hughes flew a Lockheed Constellation from California to Washington, D.C., in just under seven hours.
On the way back he picked up Orville Wright in Ohio, giving him the last airplane flight of his life.
The Constellation’s wingspan, 126 feet, was 6 feet greater than the length of Wright’s first flight in 1903.
Tacet
When George Bernard Shaw was a music critic, he dined one evening at a restaurant with a mediocre orchestra.
Recognizing Shaw, the leader sent him a note asking what he would like them to play next.
Shaw replied, “Dominoes.”