Futility Closet

The Indian mathematical prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan showed an almost supernatural facility with numbers. British mathematician G.H. Hardy once visited him in the hospital:

I had ridden in taxicab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. "No," he replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways."

"Every positive integer," remarked J.E. Littlewood, "is one of Ramanujan's personal friends."

Baseball players who died on their birthdays:

• Bucky Harris, 81
• Gabby Hartnett, 72
• Bob Moose, 29
• Joe Tinker, 68

Besieged by Prussians in 1870, Paris found a clever way to get mail to the outside world. For 20 centimes you could write a letter on a thin piece of green paper; these were collected and sent hopefully upward on unguided mail balloons. Each 4-gram postcard carried an address; the Parisians hoped that the balloons would drift to earth somewhere and that whoever found the messages would forward them.

It worked. During the four-month siege they sent up 65 balloons, and only two went missing.

Rudolph Valentino's real name was Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Piero Filiberto Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antoguolla.

You can write a message to future generations at the KEO project. It'll be launched on a satellite that won't return to Earth for 50,000 years.

Even more ambitious is the LAGEOS satellite, which will re-enter our atmosphere in 8.4 million years bearing a plaque that shows the arrangement of the continents. Let's hope our descendants still have catcher's mitts.

"By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher." — Socrates

"Tecumseh's curse" refers to an odd coincidence in U.S. history: Every 20 years, we elect a president who dies in office:

• William Henry Harrison, elected in 1840, died of pneumonia in 1841.
• Abraham Lincoln, elected in 1860, was assassinated in 1865.
• James Garfield, elected in 1880, was assassinated in 1881.
• William McKinley, elected in 1900, was assassinated in 1901.
• Warren G. Harding, elected in 1920, died of a heart attack in 1923.
• Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected in 1940, died of cerebral hemorrhage in 1945.
• John F. Kennedy, elected in 1960, was assassinated in 1963.

The curse was supposedly invoked by a Native American chief's mother as he died. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, for some reason, seem to have escaped.

In the 16th century, the English navy would put messages in bottles to send information ashore about enemy positions.

Queen Elizabeth I even created the official position "Uncorker of Ocean Bottles." Anyone else caught opening them faced the death penalty.

In 1897 the English composer Edward Elgar sent this enciphered message to his friend Dora Penny. Dora couldn't decipher it, and neither can anyone else. Can you?

Making toast at the fireside,
Nurse fell in the grate and died;
And, what makes it ten times worse,
All the toast was burned with Nurse.

– Col. D. Streamer