barbatulous
adj. having a small beard
debarb
v. to deprive of a beard
imberb
adj. without a beard
“A Poor Man’s Disneyland”
Jim Bishop’s castle is exactly that — a 160-foot baroque edifice that Bishop has constructed single-handed over the course of 40 years in the forest of southern Colorado.
It already contains a thousand tons of stone and iron, and still Bishop’s not finished. Before he dies he wants to add a moat, a roller coaster, a balcony big enough to accommodate an orchestra — and a second castle for his wife.
Close Call
On Sept. 26, 1983, Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Air Defense Forces received a warning that the U.S. had launched an ICBM toward the Soviet Union. He dismissed it as a false alarm. Later four additional missiles were detected, and again Petrov decided they were phantoms.
He was right, but he couldn’t have been certain, and if he’d followed protocol he might have started a full-scale nuclear exchange between the superpowers. Bruce Blair of the World Security Institute said, “I think that this is the closest we’ve come to accidental nuclear war.”
Mima Mounds
What are these? They appear by the hundreds throughout western North America, but no one knows what produces them. Earthquakes? Glaciers? People? Gophers? The force involved must be considerable — the mounds can reach 8 feet in height and 50 feet in diameter — but for now their origin is a mystery.
01/15/2014 UPDATE: Gophers. (Thanks, Hugh.)
Dispatch
The Wow! Signal
On Aug. 15, 1977, a telescope at Ohio State University detected a strong narrowband radio signal in the constellation Sagittarius — one so unusual that astronomer Jerry Ehman marked the printout with an exclamation.
The signal’s intensity rose and then fell as the beam swept past its position in the sky. That’s consistent with an extraterrestrial origin … but in 30 years and more than 100 searches, no one has been able to relocate it.
Without a recurrence, there’s no way to know what Ehman’s telescope heard that night — it’s just a frustrating splash in a large, silent sea.
08/27/2024 UPDATE: It appears there’s a natural explanation. New research suggests that the Wow! signal occurred when an interstellar cloud of cold hydrogen was stimulated by a strong transient radiation source, causing it to brighten momentarily. This phenomenon is rare but recognized, and it matches the described characteristics of the signal. This natural explanation is much preferable to the hypothesis of an alien technology — aliens may be out there, but we don’t need them to explain what Jerry Ehman saw in 1977. Thanks to podcast listener Eugene Chang for the tip.
Hard Times
In 1820, Richard Whatley wrote a facetious elegy for Oxford geologist William Buckland:
Where shall we our great Professor inter,
That in peace he may rest his bones?
If we hew him a rocky sepulchre
He will rise and break the stones,
And examine each stratum that lies around
For he’s quite in his element underground.
Ironically, when Buckland did pass away in 1856, the gravedigger struck an outcrop of limestone just below the surface and had to use gunpowder to put Buckland to rest.
Ambrose Bierce defined geology as “The science of the earth’s crust–to which, doubtless, will be added that of its interior whenever a man shall come up garrulous out of a well.”
Zalcman’s Paradox
Is the question “What is an example of a question which is not its own answer?” its own answer?
Unquote
“If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.” — Anatole France
Curiously, when France died in 1924, doctors found that his brain was two-thirds normal size. But, said surgeon Louis Guillaume, “It was the most beautiful brain one could dream of seeing. Its convolutions were marvelous.”
Interlude
There was a Man who presented to Henry the Great of France, an Anagram upon his name, (Borbonius) which was Bonus Orbi, Orbus Boni; the King asked him what it meant, he told him, That when his Majesty was a Hugonot he was Bonus Orbi [good to the world], but when he turned Catholick he was Orbus Boni [destitute of good]; a very fine Anagram, saith the King; I pray what Profession are you of? Please your Majesty I am a maker of Anagrams, but I am a very poor Man: I believe it, said the King, for they that use that Trade cannot grow very Rich.
— William De Britaine, Humane Prudence, 1693