Futility Closet

The shortest decisive tournament chess game ever played was Dordevic-Kovacevic, Bela Crkva 1984:

1. d4 Nf6 2. Bg5 c6 3. e3

3. … Qa5+ wins the bishop. Dordevic resigned.

History's 10 deadliest natural disasters:

1. Yellow River flood, China, summer 1931: 1 million to 2 million dead
2. Yellow River flood, China, September-October 1887: 900,000 to 2 million dead
3. Bhola cyclone, East Pakistan, Nov. 13, 1970: 500,000 to 1 million dead
4. Shaanxi earthquake, China, Jan. 23, 1556: 830,000 dead
5. Cyclone, Coringa, India, Nov. 25, 1839: 300,000 dead
6. Kaifeng flood, China, 1642: 300,000 dead
7. Indian Ocean earthquake/tsunami, Dec. 26, 2004: 283,100 dead
8. Tangshan earthquake, China, July 28, 1976: 242,000 dead
9. Banqiao Dam failure, China, August 1975: 231,000 dead
10. Aleppo earthquake, Syria, 1138: 230,000 dead

Six of the 10 occurred in China. See also Death Tolls.

At the Panama Canal, the Pacific is east of the Atlantic.

More nouns of assemblage:

• a business of ferrets
• a cartload of chimpanzees
• a coalition of cheetahs
• a congress of baboons
• a gang of elk
• a huddle of penguins
• a kaleidoscope of butterflies
• a labour of moles
• a prickle of porcupines
• a quarrel of sparrows
• a romp of otters
• a tiding of magpies
• a tower of giraffes
• a ubiquity of sparrows
• a whiteness of swans
• a zeal of zebras

My sources insist that a group of gnus is called an implausibility. Should I believe them?

Countries with the lowest high points:

1. Maldives: 2 meters
2. Tuvalu: 5 meters
3. Tokelau: 5 meters
4. Cocos (Keeling) Islands: 5 meters
5. Marshall Islands: 10 meters
6. Cayman Islands: 43 meters
7. Turks and Caicos Islands: 49 meters
8. The Gambia: 53 meters
9. The Bahamas: 63 meters
10. Anguilla: 65 meters

The Maldives may eventually disappear altogether — sea levels have risen about 20 centimeters in the last century.

"Formosa" is both a province in Argentina and the former name of Taiwan.

Curiously, those locations are on precisely opposite sides of the earth. Noon at one is midnight at the other, and midwinter at one is midsummer at the other.

Men per woman:

• Northern Mariana Islands: 0.77
• Russia: 0.86
• Puerto Rico: 0.92
• United States: 0.97
• Canada: 0.98
• United Kingdom: 0.98
• Australia: 0.99
• Iceland: 1
• India: 1.06
• Greenland: 1.12
• Qatar: 1.87

The world average is 1.01.

When asked his age, mathematician Augustus De Morgan used to offer a clue: "I was x years of age in the year x²." (He was 43 in 1849.)

That quirk puts De Morgan in a pretty exclusive club. Other members include Charles Atlas (who was 44 in 1936) and Jake Gyllenhaal (who will be 45 in 2025). Next up: Babies born in 2070 will be 46 in 2116.

The border between Delaware and Pennsylvania is a perfect curve.

It's the arc of a circle centered on the cupola of the courthouse at New Castle.

It's the only such boundary in the territorial United States.

A force of 1 newton is about the weight of an apple.