Average life of U.S. currency before it's replaced due to wear:
- $100 bill - 60 months
- $50 bill - 55 months
- $20 bill - 25 months
- $10 bill - 18 months
- $5 bill - 24 months
- $1 bill - 22 months
- From the begining woman has occupied a dependent position, and has been only what man has made her. The Turks, logical fellows, denied her a soul, and made of her an object of barter and sale; the American Indians made of her a beast of burden. In America, since we extended the area of civilization by butchering the Indians, we have copied both.
- The inferiority of the sex is easy of demonstration. It has been said that the mother forms the character of the man so long, that the proposition has become axiomatic. If this be true, we can crush those who prate of the equality of women, by holding up to the gaze of the world the inferior men she has produced. Look at the Congress of the United States.
- My friend is learned. She has a tolerable knowledge of Greek, is an excellent Latin scholar, and as she has read the Constitution of the United States, she excels in political lore the majority of our representatives in Congress. But nevertheless I protest against her voting for several reasons:
- She cannot sing bass! Her voice, as Dr. Bushnell justly observes in his blessed book, is pitched higher than the male voice, which indicates feminine weakness of mind.
- Her form is graceful rather than strong.
- She delights in millinery goods.
- She can't grow whiskers.
-- Satirical lyceum speaker Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby, "The Struggles of a Conservative with the Woman Question," 1868
|W|P|112847630125371852|W|P|Petroleum V. Nasby on "The Woman Question"|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Pareidolia is the experience of "seeing" something in a stimulus that's simply vague and random.
You've felt it if you've ever seen images of animals or faces in clouds, or the man in the moon, or heard messages when records are played in reverse. It's the basis for the Rorschach inkblot test.
This is a portrait of Elizabeth II as it appeared on the 1954 series Canadian dollar bill. So many people thought they saw the face of the devil in the queen's hair that the bills were eventually withdrawn from circulation.
There's nothing there -- the portrait was adapted from a photograph.
|W|P|113245552522365016|W|P|Pareidolia|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"A French statistician has just ascertained that a human being of either sex who is a moderate eater and who lives to be 70 years old consumes during his life a quantity of food which would fill twenty ordinary railway baggage cars. A good eater, however, may require as many as thirty."
-- Barkham Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889
|W|P|113115188658479971|W|P|A Lifetime's Eating|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comA clerihew is a four-line humorous verse about a well-known person. Here's the original one, composed by Edmund Clerihew Bentley in 1891:
Sir Humphrey Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.
They get pretty erudite, for some reason:
Sir Karl Popper
Perpetrated a whopper
When he boasted to the world that he and he alone
Had toppled Rudolf Carnap from his Vienna Circle throne.
(by Armand T. Ringer)
Sir Christopher Wren
Said, "I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls,
Say I am designing St Paul's."
John Stuart Mill,
By a mighty effort of will,
Overcame his natural bonhomie
And wrote Principles of Political Economy.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Lived upon venison;
Not cheap, I fear,
Because venison's dear.
(credited to Louis Untermeyer)
George the Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.
The world's densest clerihew was composed, over breakfast, by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, in honor of New Yorker poetry editor Howard Moss. It manages to rhyme the names of three people in four lines:
|W|P|113292798796871560|W|P|Clerihews|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comTo the Poetry Editor of the New Yorker
Is Robert Lowell
Better than Noel
Coward,
Howard?
Jupiter's Great Red Spot is one continous cyclone that has lasted at least 340 years.
It's more than twice the size of Earth.
|W|P|113282159313996303|W|P|Great Red Spot|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Yesterdays_ashes|W|P|You have the most interesting blog. I am just fascinated by all it has to offer. Thank you for all the many facts.A tremendous blizzard in January 1978 buried a flock of sheep under a snowdrift in Sutherland, Highland, England.
Weeks later, after digging out 16 dead sheep, Alex Maclellan found one ewe still alive. Its hot breath had created air holes in the snow, and it had gnawed its own wool for protein.
It had survived that way for 50 days.
|W|P|113292908578066898|W|P|Sheep Rising|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Nashville's Centennial Park contains a full-scale replica of the Parthenon.
Like the original in Athens, it's "more perfect than perfect": To counter optical effects, the columns swell slightly as they rise, and the platform on which they stand curves slightly upward. So the temple looks even more symmetrical than it actually is.
|W|P|113282029322190099|W|P|A Tennessee Parthenon|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves." -- Albert Einstein
|W|P|113029142234170452|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comA pangram is a sentence that contains every letter of the alphabet:
- John P. Brady, give me a black walnut box of quite a small size. (48 letters)
- Quixotic knights' wives are found on jumpy old zebras. (44)
- By Jove, my quick study of lexicography won a prize. (41)
- Sympathizing would fix Quaker objectives. (36)
- Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz. (31)
- Foxy nymphs grab quick-jived waltz. (29)
- Brick quiz whangs jumpy veldt fox. (27)
The 26-letter ones are nearly incomprehensible:
Nth black fjords vex Qum gyp wiz.
Or "An esteemed Iranian shyster was provoked when he himself was cheated: an alleged seaside ski resort he purchased proved instead to be a glacier of countless oil-abundant fjords."
|W|P|113227913960568928|W|P|"The Quick Brown Fox ..."|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
During the Depression, spinach farmers in Crystal City, Texas, erected a statue of Popeye -- the cartoon character almost singlehandedly saved the spinach industry.
|W|P|113292969964112363|W|P|I Yam What I Yam|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe heaviest newspaper ever printed was the New York Times of Sunday, Sept. 14, 1987.
At 1,612 pages, it weighed more than 12 pounds.
|W|P|113292976131469324|W|P|All the News ...|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comOpening excerpt from "Cadaeic Cadenza," a short story written in 1996 by Mike Keith:
One
A Poem: A Raven
Midnights so dreary, tired and weary,
Silently pondering volumes extolling all by-now obsolete lore.
During my rather long nap -- the weirdest tap!
An ominous vibrating sound disturbing my chamber's antedoor.
"This," I whispered quietly, "I ignore." ...
If you write out the number of letters in each word, they form the first 3,834 digits of pi.
|W|P|113270645475814235|W|P|Cadaeic Cadenza|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
If you slide slowly down the Kelso Dunes in the Mojave Desert, they'll sing. It's a low-frequency rumble that can be both felt and heard; it's been variously described as roaring, booming, squeaking, and musical.
The same phenomenon can be found at about 35 sites around the world, including the Eureka Dunes in California, Sand Mountain in Nevada, and the Booming Dunes in the Namib Desert of Africa.
No one's quite sure how it works. It's a loud, low-pitched rumble that emanates from crescent-shaped dunes, without any direct wind involvement. Scientists think it's a reverberating resonance produced by the sliding of similarly sized grains of sand.
|W|P|113270682761215441|W|P|Singing Sand Dunes|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comChristopher Lee has 211 screen credits, more than any other living actor. He's performed in English, French, Canadian, German, Russian, Norwegian, Swedish, Italian, Pakistani, Spanish, Japanese, American, Australian and New Zealand productions.
If that's not impressive enough, he's also 6 foot 5 and a direct descendent of Charlemagne.
|W|P|113292960092054359|W|P|Longest Hollywood Resume|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comPun fans claim that Sir Francis Drake reported the defeat of the Spanish Armada with a single word: "Cantharides" (an aphrodisiac; hence: "The Spanish fly").
And when Sir Charles Napier took the Indian province of Sind in 1843, he supposedly sent a one-word report to the British War Office: "Peccavi" (Latin for "I have sinned").
|W|P|113236819620177353|W|P|Drake and Napier|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWhat are these?
They're snow crystals, magnified by a scanning electron microscope.
|W|P|113270676068094962|W|P|The Weather Outside Is Frightful ...|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Servants are a necessary evil. He who shall contrive to obviate their necessity, or remove their inconveniences, will render to human comfort a greater benefit than has yet been conferred by all the useful-knowledge societies of the age. They are domestic spies, who continually embarrass the intercourse of the members of a family, or possess themselves of private information that renders their presence hateful, and their absence dangerous. It is a rare thing to see persons who are not controlled by their servants. Theirs, too, is not the only kitchen cabinet which begins by serving and ends by ruling."
-- From The Laws of Etiquette, by "A Gentleman," 1836
|W|P|113097146265409003|W|P|A Word to the Wise|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.compe�tri�chor
n. pleasant smell accompanying the first rain after a dry spell
It's only a happy accident that our moon "fits" over the sun's disc during a solar eclipse. The sun is 400 times the diameter of the moon, but it's nearly 400 times farther from Earth, so to us the two have almost exactly the same angular size.
|W|P|113277568806678756|W|P|The Stars Align|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comFrom Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine by George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle, 1896:
A convict at Brest put up his rectum a box of tools. Symptoms of vomiting, meteorism, etc., began, and became more violent until the seventh day, when he died.
After death, there was found in the transverse colon, a cylindric or conic box, made of sheet iron, covered with skin to protect the rectum and, doubtless, to aid expulsion. It was six inches long and five inches broad and weighed 22 ounces.
It contained a piece of gunbarrel four inches long, a mother-screw steel, a screw-driver, a saw of steel for cutting wood four inches long, another saw for cutting metal, a boring syringe, a prismatic file, a half-franc piece and four one-franc pieces tied together with thread, a piece of thread, and a piece of tallow, the latter presumably for greasing the instruments.
"On investigation it was found that these conic cases were of common use, and were always thrust up the rectum base first," the authors explain. "In excitement this prisoner had pushed the conic end up first, thus rendering expulsion almost impossible."
|W|P|113183820730725775|W|P|Nice Try|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comKoko the gorilla is famous for mastering more than 1,000 signs based on American Sign Language, which she uses to communicate with Stanford researchers.
That's not all she's learned from humans. One day her attendants discovered that a steel sink in her enclosure had been torn from its moorings. When they confronted her, she pointed to her pet kitten.
"Cat did it," she signed.
|W|P|113285700518652266|W|P|Koko's Morality|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
People were willing to believe in a chess-playing automaton as early as 1769. That's when Wolfgang von Kempelen unveiled "The Turk," a cloaked and turbaned robot that played over a maplewood cabinet full of clockwork. The contraption toured the courts of Europe, where it beat Benjamin Franklin and Charles Babbage, among many others.
The machine's secret emerged only in 1854, after the automaton was destroyed in the great Philadelphia fire. The cabinet had contained a human player who followed the game by watching magnets on the board's underside. He made his moves on a secondary board that transmitted them to the Turk.
Still, it played some good games. Here it beats the crap out of Napoleon Bonaparte, who has White:
1. e4 e5 2. Qf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 Nf6 4. Ne2 Bc5 5. a3 d6 6. O-O Bg4 7. Qd3 Nh5 8. h3 Bxe2 9. Qxe2 Nf4 10. Qe1 Nd4 11. Bb3 Nxh3+ 12. Kh2 Qh4 13. g3 Nf3+ 14. Kg2 Nxe1+ 15. Rxe1 Qg4 16. d3 Bxf2 17. Rh1 Qxg3+ 18. Kf1 Bd4 19. Ke2 Qg2+ 20. Kd1 Qxh1+ 21. Kd2 Qg2+ 22. Ke1 Ng1 23. Nc3 Bxc3+ 24. bxc3 Qe2# 0-1
|W|P|113270578941005060|W|P|The Turk|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comA man, a plan, a caret, a ban, a myriad, a sum, a lac, a liar, a hoop, a pint, a catalpa, a gas, an oil, a bird, a yell, a vat, a caw, a pax, a wag, a tax, a nay, a ram, a cap, a yam, a gay, a tsar, a wall, a car, a luger, a ward, a bin, a woman, a vassal, a wolf, a tuna, a nit, a pall, a fret, a watt, a bay, a daub, a tan, a cab, a datum, a gall, a hat, a fag, a zap, a say, a jaw, a lay, a wet, a gallop, a tug, a trot, a trap, a tram, a torr, a caper, a top, a tonk, a toll, a ball, a fair, a sax, a minim, a tenor, a bass, a passer, a capital, a rut, an amen, a ted, a cabal, a tang, a sun, an ass, a maw, a sag, a jam, a dam, a sub, a salt, an axon, a sail, an ad, a wadi, a radian, a room, a rood, a rip, a tad, a pariah, a revel, a reel, a reed, a pool, a plug, a pin, a peek, a parabola, a dog, a pat, a cud, a nu, a fan, a pal, a rum, a nod, an eta, a lag, an eel, a batik, a mug, a mot, a nap, a maxim, a mood, a leek, a grub, a gob, a gel, a drab, a citadel, a total, a cedar, a tap, a gag, a rat, a manor, a bar, a gal, a cola, a pap, a yaw, a tab, a raj, a gab, a nag, a pagan, a bag, a jar, a bat, a way, a papa, a local, a gar, a baron, a mat, a rag, a gap, a tar, a decal, a tot, a led, a tic, a bard, a leg, a bog, a burg, a keel, a doom, a mix, a map, an atom, a gum, a kit, a baleen, a gala, a ten, a don, a mural, a pan, a faun, a ducat, a pagoda, a lob, a rap, a keep, a nip, a gulp, a loop, a deer, a leer, a lever, a hair, a pad, a tapir, a door, a moor, an aid, a raid, a wad, an alias, an ox, an atlas, a bus, a madam, a jag, a saw, a mass, an anus, a gnat, a lab, a cadet, an em, a natural, a tip, a caress, a pass, a baronet, a minimax, a sari, a fall, a ballot, a knot, a pot, a rep, a carrot, a mart, a part, a tort, a gut, a poll, a gateway, a law, a jay, a sap, a zag, a fat, a hall, a gamut, a dab, a can, a tabu, a day, a batt, a waterfall, a patina, a nut, a flow, a lass, a van, a mow, a nib, a draw, a regular, a call, a war, a stay, a gam, a yap, a cam, a ray, an ax, a tag, a wax, a paw, a cat, a valley, a drib, a lion, a saga, a plat, a catnip, a pooh, a rail, a calamus, a dairyman, a bater, a canal -- Panama!
-- A 544-word palindrome composed in 1984 by Dan Hoey (with computer assistance)
|W|P|113227687718856307|W|P|Able Was I ...|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comLeprosy is the oldest recorded disease -- it was reported as early as 1350 B.C. in Egypt.
|W|P|112899896587094528|W|P|Oldest Disease|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Art doesn't just imitate life -- sometimes it anticipates it. Fourteen years before the Titanic was built, the American Morgan Robertson wrote a novel called The Wreck of the Titan (1898) that prefigured the real ship's destiny with remarkable precision.
The Titanic and the Titan were both triple-screwed British passenger liners with a capacity of 3,000 and a top speed of 24 knots. Both were deemed unsinkable; both carried too few lifeboats. And both sank in April in the North Atlantic after colliding with an iceberg on the forward starboard side.
That ain't all. Robertson followed this up with The Submarine Destroyer (1905), in which he described a submarine device he called a periscope. Officials of the Holland Submarine Company approached him to ask whether he thought it was practical, and he produced a model that he claimed already to have patented. The company bought the invention for $50,000.
Finally, in Beyond the Spectrum (1914), Robertson forecast a war between the United States and Japan, including a Japanese sneak attack (on San Francisco). The United States wins by using an ultraviolet searchlight to blind Japanese crews.
Robertson died in Atlantic City in 1915.
|W|P|113260980069637714|W|P|The Wreck of the Titan|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Good-by -- if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico -- ah, that is euthanasia!"
-- An excerpt from one of Ambrose Bierce's last letters, posted in 1913 from Chihuahua. He vanished shortly afterward. His disappearance remains a mystery.
|W|P|112802388449908678|W|P|Ambrose Bierce's Disappearance|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comAccording to an ancient legend, as long as there are ravens at the Tower of London, England is safe from invasion.
Currently eight ravens are fed there at government expense: Gwylum, Thor, Hugine, Munin, Branwen, Bran, Gundulf, and Baldrick.
They clip their flight feathers. Is that cheating?
|W|P|113156899210568037|W|P|Ravens in the Tower|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comMost people are familiar with the drawings in Peru's Nazca Desert:
It's thought they were created by local peoples between 200 B.C. and 600 A.D. They're remarkably well realized, considering that the builders probably couldn't have viewed them from the air. Here's a view from a satellite:
It's easy to decide that they're the work of visiting extraterrestrials -- the airliners that first spotted them in the 1920s described them as "primitive landing strips" -- but researcher Joe Nickell has shown that a small team of people can reproduce a drawing in 48 hours, without aerial supervision, using Nazcan technology. Still, well done.
|W|P|113245561334538076|W|P|Nazca From Space|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comAlexander d'Agapeyeff included this "challenge cipher" in Codes and Ciphers (1939), his introductory textbook in cryptography:
75628 28591 62916 48164 91748 58464 74748 28483 81638 18174
74826 26475 83828 49175 74658 37575 75936 36565 81638 17585
75756 46282 92857 46382 75748 38165 81848 56485 64858 56382
72628 36281 81728 16463 75828 16483 63828 58163 63630 47481
91918 46385 84656 48565 62946 26285 91859 17491 72756 46575
71658 36264 74818 28462 82649 18193 65626 48484 91838 57491
81657 27483 83858 28364 62726 26562 83759 27263 82827 27283
82858 47582 81837 28462 82837 58164 75748 58162 92000
No one could solve it, and he later admitted he'd forgotten how he'd encrypted it.
It remains unsolved to this day.
|W|P|113226265437904521|W|P|D'Agapeyeff Cipher|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"A thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for." -- W.C. Fields
|W|P|112813123661280161|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comNow you can receive Futility Closet by e-mail -- you'll get the full text of each day's posts, including images. Sign up in the right panel.
Please use this method rather than downloading the whole site to read offline -- I can't spare the bandwidth. Thanks.
|W|P|113259151378542915|W|P|Subscribe by E-mail|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Mike the Headless Chicken was something of a celebrity in the western U.S. in the 1940s. He started life as an ordinary Wyandotte rooster in Fruita, Colo., but a botched decapitation in 1945 missed his brain stem and jugular vein, leaving him headless but still mostly functional.
When the rooster did not die, his surprised owner resolved to care for him permanently, feeding him milk and water with an eyedropper, as well as small grains of corn. Mike actually put on weight on this regimen: At his beheading he weighed 2.5 pounds; at his death he was up to nearly 8.
Mike reportedly seemed fairly happy with his headless existence. He could balance on a perch and walk clumsily; he would even attempt to preen and crow, as far as possible without a head.
On tour, Mike made $4,500 a month at West Coast sideshows. Animal-rights activists were aghast, but several humane societies examined him and declared he was free from suffering. He finally died in March 1947 at a Phoenix motel, 18 months after losing his head.
To this day, Fruita holds a "Mike the Headless Chicken Day" each year on the third weekend of May. Events include Pin the Head on the Chicken, a "chicken cluck-off," and chicken bingo, in which chicken droppings fall on a numbered grid to determine the numbers.
|W|P|113156891209094393|W|P|Mike the Headless Chicken|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comAddresses of fictional characters:
Dr. John Dolittle
Oxenthorpe Road
Puddleby-on-the-Marsh
Slopshire, England
Clark Kent
344 Clinton Street
Apt. 3B
Metropolis, USA
Leopold Bloom
7 Eccles Street
Dublin, Ireland
Miss Marple
Danemead
High Street
St. Mary Mead
Hercule Poirot
Apt. 56B
Whitehaven Mansions
Sandhurst Square
London W1, U.K.
Lucy Ricardo
Apartment 4A
623 East 68th Street
New York, New York
The Simpsons
742 Evergreen Terrace
Springfield, USA
In 1911, three murderers were hanged on Greenberry Hill, London.
Their names were Green, Berry, and Hill.
|W|P|113251307553924211|W|P|Death by Coincidence|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
"Stendhal syndrome" refers to rapid heartbeat, dizziness, confusion, and even hallucinations in the presence of great art.
It's named for Stendhal himself, the 19th century French author, who reported experiencing it on an 1817 visit to Florence (and described it in his book Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio).
It wasn't formally described until 1979, when Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini documented more than 100 cases among visitors to Florence. The syndrome was first diagnosed in 1982.
|W|P|113183395485419120|W|P|Stendhal Syndrome|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comSolution to "An International Riddle," from Saturday:
A bell in a tower.
Bonus factoid: The heaviest bell in Britain is not Big Ben but "Great Paul," of St. Paul's Cathedral. It weighs 37,483 pounds.
|W|P|113240435278421896|W|P|Riddle Solution|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comcy�no�clept
n. one who steals dogs
This is the most isolated tree on Earth, the "Tree of T�n�r�," a single determined acacia that grew alone for decades in the Sahara in northeastern Niger. There were no other trees for more than 400 kilometers; it was the only tree to appear on maps of the area, even at a scale of 1:4,000,000.
"What is its secret?" wondered a French commandant in 1939. "How can it still be living in spite of the multitudes of camels which trample at its sides? How at each azalai does not a lost camel eat its leaves and thorns? Why don't the numerous Touareg leading the salt caravans cut its branches to make fires to brew their tea? The only answer it that the tree is taboo and considered as such by the caravaniers. ... The acacia has become a living lighthouse; it is the first or the last landmark for the azalai leaving Agadez for Bilma, or returning."
What could bring down such an exalted spirit? Believe it or not, it was hit by a truck. Twice. The first instance, in which a lorry headed to Bilma detached one of its two trunks, happened apparently in the 1950s. The noble tree struggled on for 20 more years before it was knocked down by an allegedly drunk Libyan driver in 1973. The dead tree was taken to the Niger National Museum in Niamey; today it's been replaced by a simple metal sculpture. (Image �2001 Peter Krohn)
|W|P|113234922391002792|W|P|Spectacularly Bad Driving|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
|W|P|NIGER DAILY NEWS ON WWW.NIGER1.COMThe following riddles have the same answer. What is it?
- Scotland: "What is it that hangs high, and cries sore, has a head and no hair?"
- Wales: "I saw some object near to a town, in a very finely made palace between earth and heaven. It has a fine tail which almost reaches to the ground, and its tongue hangs in a very large skull. It spends most of its time in silence, but sometimes it calls its friends together."
- France: "The more one pulls it, the more it cries out."
- Lithuania: "A horse with a silver tail neighs on a high hill."
- Serbia: "A dead mare doesn't neigh, but when somebody pulls it by the tail, it neighs so that all men can hear it."
- Newfoundland: "Round as a hoop, deep as a pail, never sings out till it's caught by the tail."
- Chile: "Señora Carolina likes to live in a high house, and if they pull her feet, she disturbs the inhabitants."
I'll give the answer tomorrow.
|W|P|113191729270032924|W|P|An International Riddle|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comLewis Carroll once wrote a story in which a poet is excited to find a sign reading:
Simon Lubkin
Dealer in Romancement
He's disappointed to learn that Mr. Lubkin actually deals in Roman cement.
|W|P|113228165108832913|W|P|Lubkin's Sign|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
It's important to acknowledge your mistakes. In a 1920 editorial, the New York Times attacked Robert Goddard's claim that a rocket would work in space:
That Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react -- to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.
In 1969, days before Apollo 11 landed on the moon, it published this correction:
Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century, and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere.
It added: "The Times regrets the error."
|W|P|113191804670959470|W|P|Erratum|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comAn equivoque is a poem that can be read in two different ways. This one appeared in The Weekly Pacquet of Advice from Rome in 1679. Protestants were to read each line straight across, Catholics down each column:
The Jesuit's Double-Faced Creed
| I hold for sound faith | What England's church allows |
| What Rome's faith saith | My conscience disavows |
| Where the king's head | The flock can take no shame |
| The flock's misled | Who hold the Pope supreme |
| Where th'altar's dress'd | The worship's scarce divine |
| The people's bless'd | Whose table's bread and wine |
| He's but an ass | Who their communion flies |
| Who shuns the Mass | Is Catholic and wise. |
Humans have no monopoly on valor. A pigeon won the French Croix de Guerre for heroic service delivering messages in Verdun during World War I.
Cher Ami, a Black Check cock, delivered 12 important messages for the U.S. Army Signal Corps.
On his final mission, during the battle of the Argonne in October 1918, he was shot through the breast and still delivered his message. It was found in a capsule hanging from his shattered leg, and helped saved around 200 U.S. soldiers of the 77th Infantry Division's "Lost Battalion."
|W|P|113148556833110751|W|P|War Pigeon|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
In 1908, Jim Garside, the landlord of Leeds' Adelphi Inn, was called before the local magistrate. In places where alcohol is consumed, English law permits betting only on games of skill. Garside had been permitting bets on darts. Wasn't that a game of chance?
Garside summoned a dartboard and local champion William "Bigfoot" Anakin, who proceeded to hit every number the court named.
Garside was discharged.
|W|P|113089562593760677|W|P|Unlucky in Darts?|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIn the 1840s, John Banvard painted a panorama of the Mississippi River valley -- possibly the largest painting ever attempted. It was 12 feet high and 1,300 feet long.
He traveled with it through Europe, Asia, and Africa, and Queen Victoria even got a private viewing.
Improbably, it's been lost. How do you misplace a painting that's half a mile long?
|W|P|113183458583599867|W|P|Ars Longa|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comYou always know when it's 11 a.m. at Memphis' Peabody Hotel: Five ducks are escorted from their penthouse suite, down the elevator to the lobby, along a red carpet (accompanied by a Sousa march), and into the fountain, where they spend the day. At 5 p.m. they return, with equal ceremony.
This has happened every day since the 1930s.
|W|P|113156900722290420|W|P|The Peabody Hotel Ducks|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Most adult cats are lactose-intolerant.
|W|P|113206846578948381|W|P|Cats and Milk|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe Rev. William Archibald Spooner (1844�1930) was notoriously prone to swapping consonants in his speech ("The weight of rages will press hard upon the employer").
His legend has grown so popular that today it's hard to known which "spoonerisms" really happened. For instance, Spooner might really have asked, "Is the bean dizzy?", but he almost certainly never said, "You have hissed all my mystery lectures and were caught fighting a liar in the quad. Having tasted two worms, you will leave by the next town drain."
But we can be fairly certain that when he proposed a toast to "The Boar's Head" (a pub), it was not a spoonerism.
He was a priest, after all.
|W|P|113200443257466473|W|P|"Come Into the Arms of the Shoving Leopard"|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIf water is essential to life, and diamonds are mostly for show ... why are diamonds more valuable than water?
Adam Smith first raised this question in The Wealth of Nations. Economists still don't have an answer.
|W|P|113183431906464364|W|P|The Paradox of Value|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com |W|P|Supply of diamonds is much more limited than supply of water. Greg Ross|W|P|That's true; I should have said it's a paradox within classical economics. But even the neoclassical explanation involves some irrational subjectivity. If the world shunned ornamentation, the value of diamonds would plummet, even though they remained scarce. Ultimately they're valuable only because we all agree (or have been told) that they are. Smith called them "the greatest of all superfluities."
Copernicus, that learned wight,
The glory of his nation,
With draughts of wine refreshed his sight,
And saw the Earth's rotation;
Each planet then its orb described,
The Moon got under way, sir;
These truths from nature he imbibed
For he drank his bottle a day, sir!
-- From "The Astronomer's Drinking Song," in Augustus De Morgan's Budget of Paradoxes, 1866
|W|P|113209975788980266|W|P|Seeing Stars|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comTeller, of the magician duo Penn and Teller, has no first or middle name. His parents named him Raymond Joseph Teller, but he had the given names legally removed. On government documents his first name is listed as NFN, meaning "no first name."
|W|P|113020364033898944|W|P|Just Teller|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Do you recognize this passage?
Homme petit d'homme petit, s'attend, n'avale
Homme petit d'homme petit, � degr�s de b�gues folles
Anal deux qui noeuds ours, anal deux qui noeuds s'y m�nent
Coup d'un poux tome petit tout guetteur � gaine
No? Try reading it aloud.
Cognitive scientists use it to illustrate the complexity of human communications.
|W|P|113191644790981939|W|P|"It Means Just What I Choose It to Mean"|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comMore anagrams:
- ANGERED = ENRAGED
- CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE = ACTUAL CRIME ISN'T EVINCED
- CLINT EASTWOOD = OLD WEST ACTION
- DISAPPOINTMENT = MADE IN PINT POTS
- ENDEARMENTS = TENDER NAMES
- MARRIAGE = A GRIM ERA
- MEDICAL CONSULTATIONS = NOTED MISCALCULATIONS
- ORCHESTRA = CARTHORSE
- PUNISHMENT = NINE THUMPS
- ROME WAS NOT BUILT IN A DAY = ANY LABOUR I DO WANTS TIME
- SAINT ELMO'S FIRE = IS LIT FOR SEAMEN
- SAUCINESS = CAUSES SIN
- SOFT-HEARTEDNESS = OFTEN SHEDS TEARS
- A STITCH IN TIME SAVES NINE = THIS IS MEANT AS INCENTIVE
- WESTERN UNION = NO WIRE UNSENT
Louis XIII appointed a Provençal to be his royal anagrammatist. He was paid £1,200 a year.
|W|P|113200994382860908|W|P|More Anagrams|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know." -- W.H. Auden
|W|P|113144933195193001|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Short on human help, England enlisted another species at its Sheffield munitions plant during World War I.
Write your own joke.
|W|P|113148570585588843|W|P|War Elephant|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe International Zetetic Challenge offered a prize of 200,000 euros to "any person who could prove any paranormal phenomenon." It ran for 15 years, starting in 1987.
Magician James Randi has offered $1 million to anyone who can show evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event, under test conditions agreed to by both parties.
Both prizes have gone unrewarded.
|W|P|112906143641745739|W|P|Skeptics' Prizes|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Workers were digging a well in New York in 1869 when they made a sensational discovery: a 10-foot man made of stone.
Was it an ancient statue? A huge petrified human? The truth turned out to be more mundane: The "Cardiff Giant" was carved out of gypsum and deliberately buried by a New York tobacconist named George Hull. He turned a good profit: His $2,600 investment sold for $37,500 when it was "discovered."
The continuing hysteria drove profits higher, and P.T. Barnum offered $60,000 to lease it for three months. Rebuffed, he built his own plaster replica and decried the original as a fake, leading exhibitor David Hannum to grumble, "There's a sucker born every minute" -- a remark later misattributed to Barnum himself.
Eventually the whole thing blew over; by 1870 both giants were revealed as fake. But the old gypsum carving still makes a good show -- it's on display today in a Cooperstown, N.Y., museum.
|W|P|113044356735581912|W|P|The Cardiff Giant|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comFor a time in the 1880s, a baboon named Jack was employed as a railroad signalman in South Africa. He was working, apparently successfully, as a voorloper, or ox driver, in the Eastern Cape when he was discovered by James Erwin Wide, a Uitenhage signalman who had recently lost his legs in an accident.
Impressed and needing a helper, Wide bought the baboon and trained him to operate his junction. When a train approached it would identify itself with a whistle; Jack would get the keys, head into the signal box and pull the correct lever to change tracks. Alarmed riders complained, but railway management investigated and were so impressed that they actually put the baboon on a railway allowance and rations, including a small amount of brandy per day.
I know this sounds preposterous, but there are photographs of Jack at work and eyewitness accounts of his abilities. His skull can be seen today in the Albany Museum in Grahamstown.
|W|P|113156974670602930|W|P|The Monkey Signalman|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comEdgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven" does not contain the letter Z.
|W|P|113183359951858224|W|P|Nevermore|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
The arctic tern see more daylight than any other creature on the planet -- it migrates from pole to pole, 12,000 miles.
In its lifetime, that's equivalent to flying to the moon and back.
|W|P|113183768921465471|W|P|Longest Migration|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comQ: What is the difference between a rhododendron and a cold apple-dumpling?
A: The one is a rhododendron and the other is a cold apple-dumpling.
-- "Professor Hoffman," Drawing-Room Amusements, 1879
He adds, "You surely wouldn't wish for a greater difference than that."
|W|P|113188394102046413|W|P|Riddle|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comquin�qui�pli�cate
v. to multiply by five
Self-portrait of Sarah Biffen (1784�1850), a Victorian painter who had no arms.
She painted this with her mouth.
|W|P|113052781504887422|W|P|Sarah Biffen|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIf you wear an analog watch, you can use it as a compass:
Hold it flat in the palm of your hand, with the hour hand pointing in the direction of the sun. The point midway between the hour hand and the figure 12 is due south.
(In the Southern Hemisphere, point the figure 12 toward the sun. The midpoint between the 12 and the hour hand points north.)
|W|P|113131141027033689|W|P|Wrist Compass|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe king of hearts has no mustache -- he lost it when the original design was copied badly, and the error has persisted.
|W|P|112801664869884419|W|P|Who Shaves the King?|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Counterfeiting was a lot harder in the old days.
In the 1880s, Emanuel Ninger, known as "Jim the Penman," drew $50 and $100 bills by hand, spending weeks on each one. Fifty bucks was a lot back then, about $2,000 in today's money, so the effort was worthwhile. This also meant that his "work" ended up in the hands of rich people, and he actually gained a perverse following who realized the forgeries' value as works of art.
He drew this note in 1896, just before the Secret Service nabbed him. He'd left a note on a wet bar, and the bartender saw the ink run. Ninger served six months and was forced to pay restitution of $1. He never forged again.
|W|P|113153922850997561|W|P|Ninger Note|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comDecibel levels:
- 0 - Threshold of human hearing (with good ears)
- 10 - Human breathing at 3 meters
- 30 - Theater, with no talking
- 40 - Residential area at night
- 50 - Quiet restaurant
- 60 - Office or restaurant
- 70 - Busy traffic at 5 meters
- 80 - Vacuum cleaner at 1 meter; curbside of busy street
- 90 - Loud factory, heavy truck at 1 meter
- 100 - Pneumatic hammer at 2 meters; inside a disco
- 110 - Accelerating motorcycle at 5 meters; chainsaw at 1 meter
- 120 - Rock concert; jet aircraft taking off at 100 meters
- 130 - Threshold of pain; train horn at 10 meters
- 140 - Rifle being fired at 1 meter
- 150 - Jet engine at 30 meters
- 180 - Rocket engine at 30 meters
- 250 - Inside a tornado
- 1,000 - Eruption of Krakatoa
Schopenhauer wrote, "The amount of noise which anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity."
|W|P|113141328793674865|W|P|Decibel Levels|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIt's estimated that if you flip a U.S. nickel 6,000 times, it will land once on its edge.
|W|P|113148471096293026|W|P|Call It!|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
This is The Ambassadors (1533), the celebrated painting by Hans Holbein the Younger. It's full of noteworthy symbols of exploration, but what's that odd skewed element at the bottom?
If you view the canvas from a narrow angle, the image resolves into a skull:
This is an early example of anamorphic perspective, an invention of the early Renaissance. It's thought that Holbein intended that the painting would be hung in a stairwell, when people ascending the stairs would view the image from the proper angle and get a gruesome surprise.
Why? That's an unanswered question.
|W|P|113131039977623067|W|P|Anamorphosis|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comPhysicist J.H. Hetherington had already typed his manuscript when he learned of an unfortunate style rule: Physical Review Letters says you can't use the pronoun we in single-author papers.
Hetherington didn't want to retype the paper -- this was in the 1970s, before word processors were widespread. So he added his cat as a second author ("F.D.C. Willard," for "Felis Domesticus Chester Willard.")
Chester is believed to be the only cat who has published research in low-temperature physics.
|W|P|113156920667244102|W|P|Cat as Coauthor|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe Empire State Building weighs 727,525,465 pounds.
|W|P|112974990993453385|W|P|Empire State Building Weight|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
"Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial 'we.'" -- Mark Twain
|W|P|112835572864990323|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comBaseball is a game of statistics, but numbers can be deceiving. It's possible for one batter to outperform another in both halves of the season and still receive a lower batting average:
| First Half | Second Half | Total Season | |
| Player A | 4/10 (.400) | 25/100 (.250) | 29/110 (.264) |
| Player B | 35/100 (.350) | 2/10 (.200) | 37/110 (.336) |
This is an example of Simpson's paradox, a mathematical quirk that arises occasionally in social science and medical statistics.
|W|P|113129846013911017|W|P|Simpson's Paradox|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comA 747 has 6 million parts.
|W|P|112916727233524937|W|P|Jumbo Jet 3|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
"Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy" was presented to sideshow audiences as a freak of nature, raised by a savage in a Russian cave and prone to barking and growling incoherently when upset.
In reality, Fedor Jeftichew was born in St. Petersburg in 1868, and he spoke Russian, German, and English. His appearance was due to a medical condition called hypertrichosis, or excessive hair growth, the same disorder that produces "bearded ladies."
Jeftichew inherited the condition from his father, Adrian, who had performed in French circuses. When his father died, Fedor eventually signed with an American show, going on to tour Europe and the United States extensively. He died in Turkey in 1904.
|W|P|113044618158264797|W|P|Fedor Jeftichew|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIn 1898, Columbus prison inmate Charles Justice helped build and install Ohio's only electric chair.
Justice finished his sentence and returned to society, but irony caught up with him. Thirteen years later he was back in prison, and on Nov. 9, 1911, he was executed in the same electric chair he had helped to build.
|W|P|113112599349059550|W|P|Electric Chair|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comAt pH 2.5, Coca-Cola's acidity is midway between vinegar and gastric acid.
|W|P|113020306896575495|W|P|Coke's Acidity|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
These circles are linked ... but no two of them are linked.
They're called Borromean rings.
|W|P|113124774165878233|W|P|Borromean Rings|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comHarvard philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine typed all his work on an old 1927 Remington typewriter. He had customized it by replacing the 1, !, and ? keys with specialized mathematical symbols.
Someone once asked him how he managed to write without using a question mark.
"Well, you see," he replied, "I deal in certainties."
|W|P|113112689893700822|W|P|Quine's Typewriter|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comil�le�ist
n. one who refers to oneself in the third person
At $950 per troy ounce, a B-2 bomber costs more than twice its weight in gold.
|W|P|113089548393192647|W|P|B-2 Bomber|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"SENDING VESSELS OVER NIAGARA FALLS. -- There have been three such instances. The first was in 1827. Some men got an old ship -- the Michigan -- which had been used on lake Erie, and had been pronounced unseaworthy. For mere wantonness they put aboard a bear, a fox, a buffalo, a dog and some geese and sent it over the cataract. The bear jumped from the vessel before it reached the rapids, swam toward the shore, and was rescued by some humane persons. The geese went over the falls, and came to the shore below alive, and, therefore, became objects of great interest, and were sold at high prices to visitors at the Falls. The dog, fox, and buffalo were not heard of or seen again.
"Another condemned vessel, the Detroit, that had belonged to Commodore Perry's victorious fleet, was started over the cataract in the winter of 1841, but grounded about midway in the rapids, and lay there till knocked to pieces by the ice.
"A somewhat more picturesque instance was the sending over the Canada side of a ship on fire. This occurred in 1837. The vessel was the Caroline, which had been run in the interest of the insurgents in the Canadian rebellion. It was captured by Colonel McNabb, an officer of the Canada militia, and by his orders it was set on fire then cut loose from its moorings. All in flames, it went glaring and hissing down the rapids and over the precipice, and smothered its ruddy blaze in the boiling chasm below. This was witnessed by large crowds on both sides of the falls, and was described as a most magnificent sight. Of course there was no one on board the vessel."
-- From Barkham Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889
|W|P|113115194866057841|W|P|"Sending Vessels Over Niagara Falls"|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comElton John's middle name is Hercules.
|W|P|113020370784715499|W|P|Elton John's Middle Name|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Looks pretty innocuous, right? This is part of a letter composed by New York doll shop owner Velvalee Dickinson in May 1942. The FBI decoded it as follows:
I just secured information on an aircraft carrier warship. It had been damaged, that is, torpedoed in the middle. But it is now repaired. ... They could not get a mate for this, so a plain ordinary warship is being converted into a second aircraft carrier. ...
Probably she was referring to the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Saratoga. Apparently Dickinson had been operating as a Japanese spy throughout the war -- her letters to Buenos Aires, ostensibly about doll collecting, had actually contained detailed information about U.S. warships, coastal defenses, and repair operations.
She protested her innocence but got the maximum sentence, 10 years and a $10,000 fine. She died in 1980.
|W|P|113096394397700321|W|P|An Unlikely Spy|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe condensed wisdom of Greece's "seven sages," as recorded on the temple wall at Delphi:
- Solon of Athens - "Nothing in excess."
- Chilon of Sparta - "Know thyself."
- Thales of Miletus - "To bring surety brings ruin."
- Bias of Priene - "Too many workers spoil the work."
- Cleobulus of Lindos - "Moderation is the chief good."
- Pittacus of Mitylene - "Know thine opportunity."
- Periander of Corinth - "Forethought in all things."
"Somebody said to me, 'But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.' That's a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, 'Now, let's write a swimming pool.'" -- Paul McCartney
|W|P|111927963784397816|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
"If anyone has been outside and fallout particles have collected on his shoes or clothing, they should be brushed off before he enters the shelter area again."
-- From In Time of Emergency: A Citizen's Handbook on Nuclear Attack, 1968
|W|P|113097227204991371|W|P|"In Time of Emergency"|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comDubious states:
- albocracy - government by white people
- argentocracy - government by money
- barbarocracy - government by barbarians
- cannonarchy - government by superior firepower
- capelocracy - government by shopkeepers
- chiliarchy - government by one thousand people
- chirocracy - government by physical force
- corpocracy - government by corporate bureaucrats
- demonarchy - government by a demon
- dulocracy - government by slaves
- foolocracy - government by fools
- iatrarchy - government by physicians
- infantocracy - government by an infant
- millionocracy - government by millionaires
- neocracy - government by new or inexperienced rulers
- partocracy - government by a single unopposed political party
- pollarchy - government by the multitude or a mob
- squarsonocracy - government by landholding clergymen
- tritheocracy - government by three gods
- xenocracy - government by a body of foreigners
Solution to "The Dovetailed Block," from Wednesday:
"The mystery is made clear by the illustration. It will be seen at once how the two pieces slide together in a diagonal direction."
"When I published this little puzzle in a London newspaper I received (though they were unsolicited) quite a stack of models, in oak, in teak, in mahogany, rosewood, satinwood, elm, and deal; some half a foot in length, and others varying in size right down to a delicate little model about half an inch square. It seemed to create considerable interest." -- Henry Ernest Dudeney (1917)
|W|P|113094259925120375|W|P|"The Dovetailed Block": Solution|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comAchievements of Carl Herman Unthan (1848-1928), who was born without hands:
- He could feed himself at age 2.
- At age 10 he taught himself the violin.
- At 16 he was sent to a music conservatory.
- At 20 he was performing to full concert halls. During his first performance he replaced a broken string with his toes.
- As a marksman, operating a rifle with his feet, he could shoot the spots out of a playing card.
- He married Antonie Neschta, whom he met while touring Cuba, Mexico, South America, and Europe.
- He moved to the United States and eventually gained citizenship.
In 1925, Unthan published an autobiography, Das Pediscript (not "manuscript," because he typed it with his toes). It was published in English in 1935, seven years after his death.
|W|P|113052989491010470|W|P|No Handicap|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Saddam" is Arabic for "one who confronts."
|W|P|112998852493448388|W|P|What's in a Name?|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comAnother puzzle from Henry Ernest Dudeney:
"Here is a curious mechanical puzzle that was given to me some years ago, but I cannot say who first invented it. It consists of two solid blocks of wood securely dovetailed together. On the other two vertical sides that are not visible the appearance is precisely the same as on those shown. How were the pieces put together?"
I'll post the answer tomorrow.
|W|P|112984004303729345|W|P|"The Dovetailed Block"|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com |W|P|hurry up and post the solution! This is KILLIN' me! Greg Ross|W|P|It's up.Pack your stuff -- the Globus Cassus project plans to refashion the earth into a geodesic icosahedron 52,000 miles across.
We'll live on the inside, held in place by centrifugal force and taking the sun through big windows.
The undertaking was envisioned by architect and artist Christian Waldvogel and presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2004. Fortunately, it's an open-source project, so you can campaign for more trampolines.
|W|P|112992348757105648|W|P|Globus Cassus|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comru�ri�co�lous
adj. living in the country or in fields
For a genocidal monster, Adolf Hitler was kind of a pansy:
- He didn't drink.
- He largely avoided eating meat, beginning in the early 1930s. ("The world of the future will be vegetarian.")
- He slept with his dog, Blondi, a German Shepherd given to him by Martin Bormann.
- He disapproved of cosmetics, since they contained animal byproducts, and he frequently teased Eva Braun about her makeup.
Hitler didn't smoke, either, and he promoted aggressive anti-smoking campaigns throughout Germany. Witnesses reported that, upon learning of his suicide, many of his officers, aides and secretaries responded by lighting cigarettes.
|W|P|112994468119177416|W|P|Hitler's Soft Side|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comEurope hit a bump in 1582 when it switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian: to realign the equinox, Pope Gregory XIII decreed that October 4 would simply be followed by October 15. This didn't go over well -- servants demanded full pay for the missing time, and people objected to "losing" 10 days of their lives.
At least they got it over with. Protestant England and the American colonies put off the switch until 1752, when they had to skip 10 days in September. "Take this for your consolation," wrote Ben Franklin in his Almanack, "that your expenses will appear lighter and your mind be more at ease. And what an indulgence is here, for those who love their pillow to lie down in Peace on the second of this month and not perhaps awake."
Russia stayed on the Julian calendar until it became the Soviet Union -- according to the Gregorian calendar, the "October Revolution" actually took place in November.
|W|P|113027356387247265|W|P|Calendar Switch|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comA young woman once asked Robert Peary, "But how does anyone know when he has reached the North Pole?"
"Nothing easier," Peary said. "One step beyond the pole, you see, and the north wind becomes a south one."
|W|P|113027436023038138|W|P|Peary on Arctic Orienteering|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com