unasinous
adj. equally stupid
“Vegetable Fungus”
At the beginning of the present century Sir Joseph Banks, of London, had a cask of wine which was too sweet for immediate use, and it was placed in the cellar to become mellowed by age. At the end of three years he directed his butler to ascertain the condition of the wine, when, on attempting to open the cellar door, he could not effect it in consequence of some powerful resistance. The door was cut down, and the cellar was found completely filled with a firm fungus vegetable production — so firm that it was necessary to use an ax for its removal. This had grown from and had been nourished by the decomposed particles of the wine. The cask was empty and touched the ceiling, where it was supported by the surface of the fungus.
— Frank H. Stauffer, The Queer, the Quaint and the Quizzical, 1882
Euler’s Identity
You know these numbers:
On the surface they appear unrelated. e is the base of natural logarithms, i is imaginary, π concerns circles. But, amazingly:
Harvard mathematician Benjamin Peirce told a class, “It is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don’t know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth.”
Renaissance Surrealism
There’s no mistaking a portrait by Giuseppe Arcimboldo — the Milanese painter represented his subjects as masses of flowers, vegetables, fruits, and fish. These personifications of the four seasons were composed between 1563 and 1573.
Estranged
Each year, the moon moves 3.82 centimeters farther from Earth.
Still a Sin?
A man’s likelihood of being gay increases by 33 percent for each older brother he has.
“Australasian Monster”
At Liverpool, New South Wales, two men voluntarily made affidavits, that they had seen in a bush, two miles and a half out of town, a tremendous snake, which to the best of their belief, was forty-five feet in length, and three times in circumference of the human body!!! He who first saw it, thinking it dead, threw a stick at it, when it reared its monstrous body five feet from the ground. A third person offered to corroborate on oath the depositions. A party of respectable gentlemen went in quest of this extraordinary object, but succeeded only in finding its track, which bore the impression of immense scales, and confirmed the reports. Some conjecture it must be a species of crocodile, from a mark in the earth fourteen inches long, apparently indented by its jaw.
— The Cabinet of Curiosities, 1824
The Tehachapi Loop
Engineers despaired of getting trains over the Tehachapi Mountains in Southern California. The climb was just too steep.
The solution, reportedly suggested by a 9-year-old boy, is both simple and beautiful: Send the trains through an ascending loop.
A train with 85 boxcars will actually pass over itself on the way up.
Unquote
“It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.” — H.L. Mencken
Nonstop
In August 2005, an Airbus A340 airliner overshot the runway at Toronto, plunged into a ravine, and burst into flames.
Of the 309 people on board, all survived.
It’s known as the Toronto Miracle.