“An Egg Sent Through the Post”

https://archive.org/details/the-strand/The%20Strand%20v26%201903/page/596/mode/2up

I send you a photograph of the empty shell of an ostrich’s egg, with the necessary Customs declaration attached by means of a string tied to a match, and inserted in one of the holes. The shell bears the addresses of the sender and receiver written in ink, and also has the postage-stamps affixed. The novelty lies in the fact that it came by the ordinary post from Port Elizabeth (S. Africa) to Whitstable, nearly seven thousand miles, exactly as seen in the photo — that is to say, with no packing whatever — and arrived in a perfectly undamaged condition.

— W.H. Reeves, in the Strand, November 1903

| Oddities

The Pulfrich Effect

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

When you view a pendulum swinging laterally before your eyes, your brain understands correctly that the bob is moving in a straight line perpendicular to your line of sight. But if you put a dark filter over one eye, the bob seems to move in an ellipse, swinging somewhat closer to the screened eye.

Apparently the visual system responds more quickly to bright objects than to dim ones, so when the clear eye correctly sees the bob’s position at A, B, and C, the obscured eye sees it at A’, B’, and C’, and the brain reconciles these reports by supposing it’s at A*, B*, and C*. German physicist Carl Pulfrich first described the effect in 1922.

| Oddities · Science & Math

The Devil’s Golf Course

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Golf_devil%27s_course.JPG

Death Valley contains an enormous jagged salt flat produced by the evaporation of an ancient lake.

It takes its name from a 1934 National Park Service guidebook, which declares that “only the devil could play golf on such rough links.”

| Oddities

Neck Deep

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tie_diagram_inside-out_start.svg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 1999, while serving as research fellows at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory, physicists Thomas Fink and Yong Mao made a mathematical study of necktie knots. They published a summary in Nature that year and a detailed exposition in Physica A in 2000.

They found that, if knots are modeled as persistent random walks on a triangular lattice, there are exactly 85 ways to tie a tie. Of the 10 knots they scored as most aesthetic (for symmetry and balance), only four (four-in-hand, Pratt knot, half-Windsor, Windsor) are well known to Western men; interestingly, the simplest of the remainder, the unassuming small knot, above, is popular in the communist youth organization in China.

Here’s a list of the most aesthetic knots in their list.

| Science & Math

Sliding Dominoes

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:100_grid.svg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

The squares of a 9×9 board are colored as shown, and then its surface is covered with 40 dominoes. Each domino covers two orthogonally adjacent squares, and the uncovered square is a black square on the boundary.

A move shifts a domino along its length by one square, so that it covers one empty square and exposes another. Prove that, for each of the black squares on the board, there’s a sequence of moves that will uncover it.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Inspiration

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Director_Jack_Arnold.jpg

The creature from the Black Lagoon has the best possible pedigree. As director Jack Arnold was planning the iconic monster’s 1954 debut, his eye fell on his Academy Award nomination certificate for With These Hands, a documentary he’d worked on three years earlier.

“I said, ‘If we put a gilled head on [the Oscar statuette], plus fins and scales, that would look pretty much like the kind of creature we’re trying to get,'” he told Cinefantastique in 1975. “So they made a mold out of rubber, and gradually the costume took shape.”

Former Disney animator Milicent Patrick and makeup artist Bud Westmore collaborated on the creature. “They gave him some human characteristics, which helped to make him sympathetic,” Arnold said. Today the film is regarded as a classic of monster horror — but it didn’t earn an Oscar.

| Entertainment · Trivia

Daring

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We have more respect for a man who robs boldly on the highway, than for a fellow who jumps out of a ditch, and knocks you down behind your back. Courage is a quality so necessary for maintaining virtue, that it is always respected, even when it is associated with vice.

— James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791

| Society

Words and Numbers

Andrzej Bartz offered these “doubly true” alphametics in the May 2017 issue of Word Ways. If the letters in each equation encode digits, what mathematical facts do these expressions represent?

CCCLVI + CCCI + CCLI = CMVIII

ONE + THIRTYNINE + NINETYONE = THREE + NINE + THIRTY + EIGHTYNINE

TWO × TWO + TEN × FIVE = SIX × NINE

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Hue and Cry

The story goes that one day when Cézanne was picknicking in the country with some friends and a collector, the latter suddenly realized that he had dropped his overcoat somewhere on the way. Cézanne raked the landscape with his gaze, then exclaimed: ‘I’ll swear that black over there doesn’t belong to nature!’ Sure enough, it was the overcoat.

— André Malraux, The Voices of Silence, 1978

| Art