How’s That Diet Going?

Dr. Boehmen, of Wittenberg, described a man who on one occasion ate a raw sheep, a sucking-pig, and by way of dessert sixty pounds of prunes without ejecting the stones; and on another devoured two bushels of cherries, several earthen vessels, and chips from a furnace. He also ate at the same time, some pieces of glass, pebbles, a shepherd’s bagpipe, rats, birds with their feathers, and an incredible number of caterpillars, finishing his astonishing meal by swallowing a pewter inkstand, with its pens, pen-knife, and sand-box. The doctor also informs us that during this miraculous deglutition he was generally under the influence of brandy, but appeared to relish his strange food, and was a man of extraordinary muscular strength, who died in his seventy-ninth year!

— The World of Wonders, 1883

| Oddities

See No Evil

Ken Rex McElroy was the town bully of Skidmore, Mo., and a thoroughly vile man. A thief, rapist, and arsonist, he had been charged with dozens of crimes but avoided jail by intimidating witnesses.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that two townsmen finally shot him to death on July 10, 1981, in broad daylight in the center of town.

But somehow, though McElroy’s wife identified the attackers, none of the 46 witnesses could quite recall what they had seen that day.

Without corroboration, the case could not move forward–and it remains unsolved to this day.

| Crime

Last Out

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Medical_School_rear.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

On Aug. 11, 1978, English medical photographer Janet Parker fell ill with muscle pain, headache, and a rash.

She had often used the darkroom on the upper floor of the University of Birmingham Medical School in Edgbaston.

On the lower floor was a research lab where a live smallpox virus was being grown.

Parker was diagnosed with the disease two weeks later, and she died on Sept. 11. That makes her the last human being on earth to die of smallpox, the only infectious disease we have completely eradicated.

| Death

“Be Good, Be Good. A Poem.”

Be good, be good, be always good,
And now & then be clever,
But don’t you ever be too good,
Nor ever be too clever;
For such as be too awful good
They awful lonely are,
And such as often clever be
Get cut & stung & trodden on by persons of lesser mental capacity, for this kind do by a law of their construction regard exhibitions of superior intellectuality as an offensive impertinence leveled at their lack of this high gift, & are prompt to resent such-like exhibitions in the manner above indicated — & are they justifiable? alas, alas they

(It is not best to go on; I think the line is already longer than it ought to be for real true poetry.)

— Mark Twain

| Poems · Society

The Ulam Spiral

Write the numbers from 41 to 440 in a square spiral:

ulam spiral

Remarkably, all the numbers on the red diagonal are prime — even when the spiral is continued into a 20 × 20 square.

No one’s quite sure what to make of this. Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam discovered the pattern while doodling at a scientific meeting in 1963.

| Science & Math

A Bad Night

Description of the bed chamber of countess Cornelia Bandi as discovered by her maid one morning in 1731, reprinted in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1745:

Four feet distance from the bed there was a heap of ashes, 2 legs untouched, from the foot to the knee, with their stockings on: between them was the lady’s head: whose brains, half of the back part of the skull, and the whole chin, were burnt to ashes; among which were found 3 fingers blackened. All the rest was ashes, which had this particular quality, that they left in the hand, when taken up, a greasy and stinking moisture.

… The bed received no damage; the blankets and sheets were only raised on one side, as when a person rises up from it, or goes in; the whole furniture, as well as the bed, was spread over with moist and ash-coloured soot, which had penetrated into the chest-of-drawers, even to foul the linens; nay the soot was also gone into a neighbouring kitchen, and hung on the walls, moveables, and utensils of it. From the pantry a piece of bread covered with that soot, and grown black, was given to several dogs, which refused to eat it.

“It is impossible that by any accident the lamp should have caused such a conflagration,” remarks the correspondent. “There is no room to suppose any supernatural cause. The likeliest cause then is a flash of lightning.”

| Death · Oddities

Sighs and Whispers

http://www.google.com/patents?id=PM9bAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Frustrated with the intertitles in silent films, Charles Pidgin invented a better solution in 1917: The performers would inflate balloons on which their dialogue was printed. “The blowing or inflation of the devices by the various characters of a photo-play will add to the realism of the picture by the words appearing to come from the mouth of the players,” Pidgin wrote. Even better, “the size of the speech may be increased with the increase of various emotions depicted on the screen.”

It’s not too late to implement this.

| Entertainment · Technology