Futility Closet

Hunting blinds, 1897-1991. Are these the ingredients of the perfect crime? You could dress up as a cow and shoot your rich Uncle Oswald, then stand there and chew your cud as the police searched for clues.

Perhaps someone’s already done this.

Down in the silent hallway
Scampers the dog about,
And whines, and barks, and scratches,
In order to get out.

Once in the glittering starlight,
He straightway doth begin
To set up a doleful howling
In order to get in.

– R.K. Munkittrick, in A Book of American Humorous Verse, ed. Carolyn Wells, 1917

In 1938, a group of freshmen at the University of Michigan circulated a petition asking that a psychology lecture be rescheduled to avoid a conflict with a football game. The upperclassmen who signed it read the full text in the undergraduate newspaper the following day:

We, the undersigned, hereby petition that the lecture in Psychology 2 be changed from Saturday to Wednesday afternoon. By signing this document without reading it we cheerfully disqualify ourselves as candidates for any degree conferred by this university. We furthermore declare that the freshmen are our superiors in wit and wisdom, and that our stupidity is surpassed only by the mental lethargy of the underpaid faculty that teaches us.

I can’t find a report of the fallout, but there sure must have been some. “Carelessness,” wrote Benjamin Franklin, “does more harm than a want of knowledge.”

In English, the name of each integer shares a letter with each of its neighbors. ONE shares an O with TWO, TWO shares a T with THREE … and so on to infinity.

coenaculous
adj. loving supper

Crouching in a Flanders trench in November 1917, 21-year-old Walter Butler addressed a field service card to his fiancee Amy to let her know he was safe.

She never received it. After the war Butler returned to England and the pair married, moved to London, and had a daughter. Eventually they divorced; Amy returned to her family home while Walter remarried and led a career as a builder. She died in 1974 at age 81, he four years later at 82.

In February 2007, the card arrived. Their daughter, now an 86-year-old grandmother, received it.

“I am quite well,” it said. “Letter follows at first opportunity. I have received no letter from you for a long time.”

The South African flower Mesembryanthemum draws its name from the Greek roots for middle, embryo, and flower.

It’s believed to be the English word containing the highest “score” in Roman numerals — four Ms.

Solution to Arms Race:

The moving missiles form the corners of a shrinking, rotating square. Ignore the rotation and focus on the shrinking. Each missile homes constantly on the missile to its left, which means it’s moving continously along one side of the shrinking square. Each missile moves at 1 mile per second, so the square will shrink to nothing in 20 seconds.

From George Gamow and Marvin Stern, Puzzle-Math, 1958.

Excavating a cave near the sacred Galilean catacomb of Beth She’Arim in 1956, a bulldozer unearthed an enormous rectangular slab, 11 × 6.5 × 1.5 feet. Rather than try to move the 9-ton mass, workers at first paved over it. Seven years would pass before anyone thought to examine it closely.

It was one gigantic piece of glass.

No one knows who made it or precisely how. Evidently an ancient furnace had produced great batches of molten glass that could be cooled and broken into reworkable pieces. This batch had been abandoned, perhaps because contamination had ruined its clarity.

Whatever its origins, it’s an amazing achievement. On its discovery, the Beth She’Arim slab was the third largest piece of glass ever made; even today, only large telescope mirrors rival its size. And it was produced 1600 years ago.

The New York Times carried a surprising headline on March 15, 1918: BIG CONCRETE SHIP AFLOAT IN PACIFIC. Noting the lack of shipyards and steel plants on the West Coast, California businessman W. Leslie Comyn had built a 7,900-ton steamer out of ferrocement.

“The huge hull, careening sharply as it slid sidewise down a steeply pitched incline, threw up a big wave in the narrow estuary, but then righted sharply and rode like a buoy,” the Times reported. “She looks as if she might have been carved out of rock, so massive is her build.”

Experts announced a new era of rapid shipbuilding, and Comyn made plans to build 54 more concrete vessels. But steel ships, though more expensive, proved lighter and faster, and by 1921 Faith had been sold and scrapped as a breakwater in Cuba.