Futility Closet

French astronomer Camille Flammarion writes of a curious optical phenomenon in Wonders of Earth, Sea And Sky (1902):

Ulloa, being in company with six fellow-travellers upon the Pambamarca at daybreak one morning, observed that the summit of the mountain was entirely covered with thick clouds, and that the sun, when it rose, dissipated them, leaving only in their stead light vapors, which it was almost impossible to distinguish. Suddenly, in the opposite direction to where the sun was rising, "each of the travellers beheld, at about seventy feet from where he was standing, his own image reflected in the air as in a mirror. The image was in the centre of three rainbows of different colors, and surrounded at a certain distance by a fourth bow with only one color. … All these bows were perpendicular to the horizon; they moved in the direction of, and followed, the image of the person they enveloped as with a glory."

"The most remarkable point was that, although the seven spectators were standing in a group, each person only saw the phenomenon in regard to his own person, and was disposed to disbelieve that it was repeated in respect to his companions," Flammarion writes. "The same apparition was observed in the polar regions by Scoresby, and described by him. He states that the phenomenon appears whenever there is mist and at the same time shining sun."

"We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming." — Wernher von Braun

In 1864, the Inuit gave the skin and skull of an "enormous" yellow-furred bear to naturalist Robert MacFarlane. He packed them up and shipped them to the Smithsonian Institution, where they were placed in storage and forgotten.

Fifty-four years later, zoologist Clinton Hart Merriam unpacked the remains and realized they represented an entirely new species, and MacFarlane's specimen was apparently the last of its kind. No one has ever seen a living "MacFarlane's bear," except for those Inuit — and now their story is lost.

A "bookwheel," designed by Italian military engineer Agostino Ramelli (1531-1600).

Because it keeps the reader's place in various texts, it's considered an early prototype of the World Wide Web.

-20 = -20
25 - 45 = 16 - 36
5² - 45 = 4² - 36
5² - 45 + 81/4 = 4² - 36 + 81/4
(5 - 9/2)² = (4 - 9/2)²
5 - 9/2 = 4 - 9/2
5 = 4

We already know that 1 = 0, that 2 = 1 and that one dollar equals one cent. Does this mean that money has no value?

Dr. Price, in the second edition of his "Observations on Reversionary Payments," says: "It is well known to what prodigious sums money improved for some time at compound interest will increase. A penny so improved from our Saviour's birth, as to double itself every fourteen years — or, what is nearly the same, put out at five per cent. compound interest at our Saviour's birth — would by this time have increased to more money than could be contained in 150 millions of globes, each equal to the earth in magnitude, and all solid gold. A shilling, put out at six per cent. compound interest would, in the same time, have increased to a greater sum in gold than the whole solar system could hold, supposing it a sphere equal in diameter to the diameter of Saturn's orbit. And the earth is to such a sphere as half a square foot, or a quarto page, to the whole surface of the earth."

– Barkham Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889

Each spring, more than a million European starlings migrate through the marshlands of western Denmark, where they appear in mass formations like this shortly before sunset each day.

The Danes call it the "black sun."

Solution to One-Sided States, from Monday:

TEXAS can be typed with the left hand alone, and OHIO with the right.

Account of an encounter with a titanic shark, recorded by Australian naturalist David Stead in his 1963 book Sharks and Rays of Australian Seas:

In the year 1918 I recorded the sensation that had been caused among the "outside" crayfish men at Port Stephens, when, for several days, they refused to go to sea to their regular fishing grounds in the vicinity of Broughton Island. The men had been at work on the fishing grounds — which lie in deep water — when an immense shark of almost unbelievable proportions put in an appearance, lifting pot after pot containing many crayfishes, and taking, as the men said, "pots, mooring lines and all". These crayfish pots, it should be mentioned, were about 3 feet 6 inches in diameter and frequently contained from two to three dozen good-sized crayfish each weighing several pounds. The men were all unanimous that this shark was something the like of which they had never dreamed of. In company with the local Fisheries Inspector I questioned many of the men very closely and they all agreed as to the gigantic stature of the beast. But the lengths they gave were, on the whole, absurd. I mention them, however, as an indication of the state of mind which this unusual giant had thrown them into. And bear in mind that these were men who were used to the sea and all sorts of weather, and all sorts of sharks as well. One of the crew said the shark was "three hundred feet long at least"! Others said it was as long as the wharf on which we stood – about 115 feet! They affirmed that the water "boiled" over a large space when the fish swam past. They were all familiar with whales, which they had often seen passing at sea, but this was a vast shark. They had seen its terrible head which was "at least as long as the roof on the wharf shed at Nelson Bay." Impossible, of course! But these were prosaic and rather stolid men, not given to "fish stories" nor even to talking about their catches. Further, they knew that the person they were talking to (myself) had heard all the fish stories years before! One of the things that impressed me was that they all agreed as to the ghostly whitish colour of the vast fish.

Stead draws no conclusions, but writes, "The local Fisheries Inspector of the time, Mr Paton, agreed with me that it must have been something really gigantic to put these experienced men into such a state of fear and panic."

Before there were copyright laws, there were book curses:

For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying out for mercy, & let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails … when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.

That's from a volume in the monastery of San Pedro in Barcelona, but similar curses were used widely throughout the medieval period.