In 1726, the Swiss naturalist Johann Jakob Scheuchzer mistook the skull and vertebral column of a large salamander from the Miocene epoch for the “betrübten Beingerüst eines alten Sünders” (sad bony remains of an old human sinner) and dubbed it Homo diluvii testis, “the man who witnessed the Deluge.” The fossil lacked a tail or hind legs, so he thought it was the remains of a trampled human child:

It is certain that this [rock] contains the half, or nearly so, of the skeleton of a man; that the substance even of the bones, and, what is more, of the flesh and of parts still softer than the flesh, are there incorporated in the stone; in a word it is one of the rarest relics which we have of that accursed race which was buried under the waters. The figure shows us the contour of the frontal bone, the orbits with the openings which give passage to the great nerves of the fifth pair. We see there the remains of the brain, of the sphenoidal bone, of the roots of the nose, a notable fragment of the maxillary bone, and some vestiges of the liver.

The fossil made its way to Teylers Museum in the Netherlands, where in 1811 Georges Cuvier recognized it as a giant salamander. Ironically, Scheuchzer’s original belief is reflected in the fossil’s modern name, Andrias scheuchzeri — Andrias means “image of man.”

Howard W. Bergerson devised these:

As in a word square, the “columns” in each sum are identical with the “rows.”

12/07/2021 UPDATE: Reader James Foster finds that 20 such squares are possible. (Thanks, James.)

The programming language efghij is literally object-oriented — its logic is expressed by arranging ordinary items in meaningful tableaus:

In this example, the tray and the cutting board constitute code blocks. The oblong plate, however, has a clothes peg on it, which expresses a for loop. The fork is a local variable. The fork variable is initialized to 1 within the for loop’s initial-value expression. The sauce with the rubber band indicates that the number of iterations is equal to the function’s argument. The stuff on the cutting board is the loop body. Using a stapler, the fork is multiplied by the sauce and the result assigned to the fork using a drinking glass. A hammer decrements the sauce, which demonstrates that the function’s parameter can be used as a local variable too. Finally, the toilet roll indicates that the return value is the final value of the fork.

That produces a factorial. The program below outputs the phrase “Hello, world!” — it’s just a pillow bearing a piece of paper on which those words are written.