“Toads Hatched by Ducks”

Early in July 1807, a most extraordinary phenomenon was observed by several people of credit, at the house of Mr. Rhodes, in Thornes-lane, near Wakefield. A hen had been sitting on ducks’ eggs, several of which had produced ducklings: on examining one egg, a small hole was found in one end of the shell, through which a toad was discovered, not alive, which filled the whole shell, and seemed, upon breaking it, to be absolutely straitened for want of room. Except the small hole, such as is usually found in an egg, when the animal within is mature for hatching, the shell was perfectly whole, so as utterly to preclude the supposition of the toad’s having crept in through the hole. We have ourselves seen the toad, and with a small part of the shell still adhering to it.

— Wakefield Star, quoted in Kirby’s Wonderful and Eccentric Museum, 1820

| Oddities

Breaking Bad

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/858487

Amy and Betty are playing a game. They have a chocolate bar that’s 8 squares long and 6 squares wide. Amy begins by breaking the bar in two along any division. Betty can then pick up any piece and break it in two, and so on. The first player who cannot move will be clapped in chains and rocketed off to a lifetime of soul-destroying toil in the cobalt mines of Yongar Zeta. (I know, it’s a pretty brutal game.) Who will win?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Bemused

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Clare-by_E_Hilton.jpg

“Dear Sir,–I am in a madhouse. I quite forget your name or who you are. You must excuse me, for I have nothing to communicate or tell of, and why I am shut up I don’t know. I have nothing to say, so I remain yours faithfully, JOHN CLARE.”

So wrote John Clare to an inquirer in 1860. At that point he had spent 18 years in a Northamptonshire asylum, after a promising if penurious career as a nature poet. His first volume, in 1820, had been brought out by Keats’ publisher and highly praised, but by 1835 he was descending into alcoholism and mental illness, confusing himself with Byron and Shakespeare and at one point interrupting a performance of The Merchant of Venice to berate Shylock.

Today Clare is ranked among the greatest of 19th-century poets, one whose sensitive nature had become increasingly disjoint as the industrial and agricultural revolutions swept the idyllic English countryside of his youth.

More’s the pity. When completing the paperwork to confine him to the asylum in 1841, Clare’s doctor had considered the question “Was the insanity preceded by any severe or long-continued mental emotion or exertion?” He answered, “After years of poetical prosing.”

| Literature

Girl Talk

The sun went down like a bale of dull fire, in the midst of smearing clouds of red-currant jam. The wind began to whistle worse than any of the lowest orders of society in a shilling gallery. … The cords of the ship snapped like bad stay-laces. No best Genoa velvet was ever blacker than the firmament, and not even the voices of the ladies calling for the stewardess were heard above the orchestral crashing of the elements.

— Douglas Jerrold, “A Young Lady’s Description of a Storm at Sea,” 1858

| Literature

Ghost Quiz

In 1885, Cecilia Garrett Smith and a friend were experimenting with automatic writing using a primitive Ouija board on which a planchette was guided by a visiting “spirit.”

“We got all sorts of nonsense out of it, sometimes long doggerel rhymes with several verses,” but the prophecies they asked for were rarely answered. When they asked who the guiding spirit was, the planchette wrote that his name was Jim and that he had been Senior Wrangler at Cambridge. Intrigued, they asked Jim to write the equation describing the heart-shaped planchette they were using, and they received this response:

http://books.google.com/books?id=i3QAAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&rview=1&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false

This they interpreted as ghost quiz equation, which J.W. Sharpe later graphed thus:

http://books.google.com/books?id=i3QAAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&rview=1&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q=planchette&f=false

“I am quite sure that I had never seen the curve before, and therefore the production of the equation could not have been an act of unconscious memory on my part,” Smith wrote later. “Also I most certainly did not know enough mathematics to know how to form an equation which would represent such a curve, or to know even of what type the equation must be.”

One wonders what Jim thought of all this. They never got any further math out of him.

| Oddities · Science & Math

The Kitchen Snitch

A logic puzzle from Mathematical Circles (Russian Experience), a collection of problems for Soviet high school math students:

During a trial in Wonderland the March Hare claimed that the cookies were stolen by the Mad Hatter. Then the Mad Hatter and the Dormouse gave testimonies which, for some reason, were not recorded. Later on in the trial it was found out that the cookies were stolen by only one of these three defendants, and, moreover, only the guilty one gave true testimony. Who stole the cookies?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Two Revolutionaries

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Washington_and_Lafayette_at_Mount_Vernon,_1784_by_Rossiter_and_Mignot,_1859.jpg

The key to the Bastille resides at Mount Vernon.

The Marquis de Lafayette had served under George Washington during the American Revolution, and when the French political prison fell in 1790 he sent the key to his former commander.

“Give me leave, my dear General,” he wrote, “to present you with a picture of the Bastille, just as it looked a few days after I had ordered its demolition,–with the main key of the fortress of despotism. It is a tribute, which I owe, as a son to my adoptive father, as an Aide-de-Camp to my General, as a Missionary of liberty to its Patriarch.”

| History