There’s no blue circle here. The space among the lines is white. In the presence of black lines, the hue of a colored object seems to bleed into the surrounding background.
The phenomenon was first discovered in 1971. It’s known as neon color spreading.
In 1903, David Walsh, M.D., proposed building a national monument in Hyde Park so that the greatness of the British empire might be remembered in 8,000 years.
A square pyramid 150 feet high could enclose sculptures depicting British life and serve as a mausoleum for distinguished Britons. The cost might be defrayed by public subscription.
Asked his opinion, architect Aston Webb wrote, “It sounds to me too grand to have much chance of being carried through in this material age of ours, but I wish you all success.”
Born with an orthopedic condition that caused her knees to bend backward, Ella Harper made a virtue of necessity and joined W.H. Harris’s Nickel Plate Circus, where she took up a starring role and earned $200 a week ($7,200 today). Her pitch card reads:
I am called the camel girl because my knees turn backward. I can walk best on my hands and feet as you see me in the picture. I have traveled considerably in the show business for the past four years and now, this is 1886 and I intend to quit the show business and go to school and fit myself for another occupation.
She married a schoolteacher in 1905 and died in 1921 at 51.
The peculiar architecture of Echo Bridge, in Newton, Massachusetts, will re-echo a human voice 18 times and a pistol shot (reportedly) 25 times.
In 1889 author Moses King wrote, “The favorite word to hurl at the arch is JULY, and the serious charge of lie — lie — lie is thrown back as vigorously and almost as frequently as if the bridge were a political newspaper in campaign time.”
In Riddles in Mathematics (1961), Eugene Northrop proposes that two men can simultaneously be each other’s uncle and nephew:
Mr. and Mrs. Allen … had a son Tom, and Mr. and Mrs. Black … had a son Dick. Mr. Allen and Mr. Black both died. And Tom and Dick, after they were grown men, each married the other’s mother. Dick and Mrs. Allen then had a son Harry, and Tom and Mrs. Black a son George. Now consider the relationship between Harry and George. Since Harry is the brother of Tom, George’s father, Harry must be George’s uncle. On the other hand George is the brother of Harry’s father, Dick, so Harry must be George’s nephew. In exactly the same way George is Harry’s uncle and nephew.
In Fun for the Family (1939), Jerome S. Meyer observes that if you father a son with the mother of your father’s second wife, and if your stepmother also has a son, then you can dine alone and still enjoy the company of your stepbrother’s nephew’s father, your father’s mother-in-law’s husband, and your stepmother’s father-in-law. Lewis Carroll considered a similar dinner.
Robert Heinlein’s 1959 short story “–All You Zombies–“ accomplishes a kind of narrative hat trick: All the major characters turn out to be the same person, who takes on different roles through time travel and sex reassignment. The main character is his own partner, mother, father, and child.
Though it contains a number of paradoxes, Princeton philosopher David Lewis judged it to be a “perfectly consistent” time travel story. Ironically, Heinlein had written it in a single day.
Visiting a London bookshop in 1995 or 1996, British musician DJ Cylob noticed a pile of booklets near the entrance, with a note indicating that they were free. He asked an assistant about them, and she said that she knew nothing, only that a mysterious person was leaving them.
Each booklet consists of 20 pages of rectangular symbols. There are no letters or numbers, not even page numbers. Analysis shows that 24 different symbols make an appearance in the collection, which is consistent with encrypted English text, though some appear only at the beginning of the booklet and other very similar symbols only at the end.
The meaning of all this has never been discovered. One possibility is that the booklet is not a message at all but a game accessory. But then why does it contain no text? And why was someone silently offering it in a London bookshop?
In 2011 I wrote about the Flemish municipality of Baarle-Hertog, a complex of Belgian exclaves surrounded by the Netherlands.
Reader Serge De Man tells me that residents have now installed a swing on the border, so it’s possible to swing between countries.
There’s a pun here, but I can’t find it.
‘I’ll bet you a dollar you won’t give me a dollar to keep,’ Bob says to Sue. She accepts the bet and gives him a dollar. Thus he loses the bet and returns the dollar. But that means he wins the bet, and she has to give him the dollar again. And so Bob and Sue pass the buck back and forth for the rest of their lives.
— Dave Morice, Alphabet Avenue, 1997
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
