A woman visits a jewelry store and buys a ring for $100.
The next day she returns and asks to exchange it for another. She picks out one worth $200, thanks the jeweler and turns to go.
“Wait, miss,” he says. “That’s a $200 ring.”
“Yes,” she says. “I paid you $100 yesterday, and I’ve just given you a ring worth $100.”
And she trips lightly out of the store.
Army slang collected in Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words:
George Washington said, “An army of asses led by a lion is better than an army of lions led by an ass.”
As it happens, the morning star and the evening star are both Venus–but the solar system might have evolved so that Mercury, for instance, was the brightest star in the morning sky.
Thus the morning star has a property that the evening star does not have: It’s necessarily identical with the morning star.
And if the morning star and the evening star have different properties, then they’re not the same object after all.
Notice, Hartford Courant, May 20, 1875:
TWO HUNDRED & FIVE DOLLARS REWARD–At the great base ball match on Tuesday, while I was engaged in hurrahing, a small boy walked off with an English-made brown silk UMBRELLA belonging to me, and forgot to bring it back. I will pay $5 for the return of that umbrella in good condition to my house on Farmington avenue. I do not want the boy (in an active state) but will pay two hundred dollars for his remains.
Samuel L. Clemens
Can you move an object using only your mind? Of course not. But can you move one in the past?
Since January 1997, the Retropsychokinesis Project at the University of Kent has invited Web visitors to try to influence the replay of a prerecorded bitstream. In other words, they must try to influence an event that has already happened.
The experimenters claim to be agnostic as to whether retroactive causality exists, but “the best existing database suggests that the odds are in the order of 1 in 630 thousand million that the experimental evidence is the result of chance.”
Try it for yourself here — but remember, if you have some skepticism about this, it may only be because someone in the future is influencing you.
In 1972, the Procrastinators Club of America sent a letter to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London, complaining that the Liberty Bell was cracked.
After an interval, the foundry responded:
“We would be happy to provide a replacement bell. Kindly return the damaged bell to us in its original packaging.”
The very worst case of delerium tremens on record is one told of by the Bonham (Texas) Enterprise, which says that a few days ago a man residing five or six miles from that place ‘saw something resembling an enormous serpent floating in a cloud that was passing over his farm. Several parties of men and boys, at work in the fields, observed the same thing, and were seriously frightened. It seemed to be as large and long as a telegraph-pole, was of a yellow striped color, and seemed to float along without any effort. They could see it coil itself up, turn over, and thrust forward its huge head as if striking at something.’
— New York Times, July 8, 1873
macropicide
n. a slayer of kangaroos
If you die in a fiery air crash, don’t blame Samuel Young. His combination pillow and crash helmet, patented in 1970, provides both comfort and safety.
“Upon being informed of the imminence of a crash landing, the passenger puts this pouch-like device over his head and ties the free ends of the strings together under his chin so that the crash helmet remains in position during the crash landing, despite the violent forces which are likely to be encountered on impact.”
H.G. Wells’ 1914 novel The World Set Free is not his best known, but it’s certainly his most prescient — he predicted nuclear weapons:
She felt torn out of the world. There was nothing else in the world but a crimson-purple glare and sound, deafening, all-embracing, continuing sound. Every other light had gone out about her, and against this glare hung slanting walls, pirouetting pillars, projecting fragments of cornices, and a disorderly flight of huge angular sheets of glass.
The novel imagines an invention that accelerates radioactive decay, producing unthinkably powerful bombs. (Wells even dedicated the novel “to Frederick Soddy’s interpretation of radium.”)
This application was far ahead of the science of the time — physicist Leó Szilárd later said it helped inspire his own conception of a nuclear chain reaction.
If that’s not impressive enough: In Wells’ novel, allies drop an atomic bomb on Germany during a world war in the 1940s!
