All in the Family

This curious epitaph is found at Martham Church in Norfolk:

Here Lyeth the Body of Christr. Burraway, who departed this
Life ye 18 day of October, Anno Domini 1730.
Aged 59 years.

And there Lyes ☞
Alice who by his Life
Was my Sister, my mistress
My mother and my wife.
Dyed Feb. ye 12. 1729
Aged 76 years.

According to Thomas Joseph Pettigrew in Chronicles of the Tombs (1888), in 1670 Martham farmer Christopher Burraway had seduced his daughter, Alice, and she had borne him a son, who was placed at a foundling home. When the son turned 20 he was apprenticed to a farmer and eventually came to Martham, where he applied to Alice for a job, not knowing their relation. By this time the father was dead. She hired him and eventually married him, becoming “mother, sister, mistress and wife, to this modern Œedipus.”

At age 76 she recognized a peculiar mark on his shoulder and, realizing she’d married her son, “was so horror stricken that she soon after died, he surviving her scarcely four months.”

See Endless Love.

| Death · Oddities

Query

“If the northern hemisphere were land, and all the southern hemisphere water, ought we to call the northern hemisphere an island, or the southern hemisphere a lake?” — Augustus De Morgan

| Oddities

Double Duty

These verses can be interpreted to support either the Stuarts or the Hanovers, according as they’re read. If each is addressed separately, from top to bottom, they’ll seem to support the Hanoverian regime; read together, right across the page, they declare for the Stuarts:

https://books.google.com/books?id=KbJ1dbG0XjYC&pg=PA170

From Reuben Percy, Relics of Literature, 1823.

| History · Oddities · Poems

Square Meal

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Missing_square_edit.gif
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In this conundrum by Mitsunobu Matsuyama, when four congruent quadrilaterals are rotated about their centers, their area seems to increase. What has become of the red square?

The answer is that each side of the large square is slightly shorter after the rotation. If θ is the angle between two opposing sides in each quadrilateral, then the ratio of the areas of the two large squares is sec2 θ, about 0.8 percent when θ is 5°.

| Oddities

“An Electric Man”

https://archive.org/details/strand-1900-v-20/page/587/mode/2up?view=theater

In 1900, Louis Philip Perew of Tonawanda, New York, built a “gigantic man” of wood, rubber, and metal that “walks, talks, runs, jumps, [and] rolls its eyes.”

Standing 7 foot 5 in size 13 1/2 shoes and clothed in white duck, the nameless man “walked smoothly, and almost noiselessly” at an exhibition for the Strand, circling the hall twice without stopping. Perew was cagey as to its inner workings, saying only that its aluminum skin concealed a steel framework.

When a large block of wood was placed in its path, “it stopped, rolled its eyes in the direction of the obstacle, as if calculating how it could surmount it. It then deliberately raised the right foot, placed it upon the object, and stepped down on the other side. The motion seemed uncannily realistic. You almost feel like shrinking from before those rolling eyes. The visionless orbs are operated by means of clock-work situated within the head.”

https://archive.org/details/strand-1900-v-20/page/589/mode/2up?view=theater

When the robot announced, “I am going to walk from New York to San Francisco,” Perew acknowledged that the team planned to send it across the continent drawing a light wagon bearing two men. He claimed it could cover 20 miles in an hour.

I don’t know any more about it. This isn’t the first mechanical man we’ve encountered — a steam-powered robot had been proposed as early as 1868. But neither seems to have gone anywhere.

03/23/2025 UPDATE: Readers Kendra Colman, Justin Hilyard, and Hans Havermann point out that Cybernetic Zoo has a whole summary on the “Electric Man” and its history, including Perew’s original 1894 patent and various news articles (with additional photos) from 1895 up to 1914. Apparently the effect is deceiving — the man doesn’t actually pull the wagon, the wagon pushes the man. Many thanks to everyone who’s written in about this.

| Oddities · Technology

Speeding Indeed

We have a strong intuition that it’s wrong to punish someone for a crime he hasn’t committed, but is this always the case? Algy, an Alaskan motorist, and Ben, a traffic policeman, both know reliably that Algy intends to speed on a remote, unpatrolled, but radar-surveyed highway at 10:31 tomorrow morning. They also know that, if this happens, police won’t be able to reach the scene of the offense until several hours after it’s been committed.

Algy radios Ben with an offer: If Ben issues a ticket for this crime before it occurs, Algy will pay the fine. If Ben doesn’t issue the ticket until after the offense has occurred, then Algy will flee the country to avoid paying the fine. Ben thinks about this, then issues the ticket now, writing in tomorrow’s date. He delivers the ticket to Algy’s address, where Algy’s wife gives him Algy’s check for the fine, which Ben cashes immediately. At 10:31 tomorrow, Algy exceeds the speed limit as described.

University of Hong Kong philosopher Christopher New writes, “If this example is valid, it suggests that there may be room in our moral thought for the notion of prepunishment [punishment before an offense is committed], and that it may be only epistemic, rather than moral, constraints that prevent us from practising it.”

(Christopher New, “Time and Punishment,” Analysis 52:1 [January 1992], 35-40.)

| Oddities

Double Duty

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ambigrams_by_Gustave_Verbeek_(1904)_-_comics_The_Upside_Downs_of_Little_Lady_Lovekins_and_Old_Man_Muffaroo_-_At_the_house_of_the_writing_pig.jpg

This 1904 comic by Gustave Verbeek (click to enlarge) is a sort of visual palindrome — the first six panels are presented conventionally, and then they’re displayed again in reverse order and upside down to compose the story’s second half. Even the written messages change their meaning: why big buns am mad u! becomes in pew we sung big hym, and so on. Only the captions beneath the first panels are discarded in the second half.

| Entertainment · Oddities

In a Word

vatic
adj. relating to a prophet

futurition
n. future existence

natalitial
adj. of or relating to a person’s birth

aporetic
adj. inclined to raise objections

In 2000, three sisters from Inverness bought a £1 million insurance policy to cover the cost of bringing up the infant Jesus Christ if one of them had a virgin birth.

Simon Burgess, managing director of britishinsurance.com, told the BBC, “The people were concerned about having sufficient funds if they immaculately conceived. It was for caring and bringing up the Christ. We sometimes get weird requests and this is the weirdest we have had.”

The company withdrew the policy in 2006 after objections by the Catholic Church. “The burden of proof that it was Christ had rested with the women and any premium on the insurance was donated to charity, said Mr Burgess.”

| Language · Oddities · Religion