The concave side of a mask can produce the strong impression of a normal convex face. Our bias toward seeing faces as convex is so strong that we’ll favor this impression despite available cues that the object is hollow.
The same principle underlies this mistrustful dragon.
When I was young I had an elderly friend who used often to ask me to stay with him in the country. He was a religious man and he read prayers to the assembled household every morning. But he had crossed out in pencil all the passages in the Book of Common Prayer that praised God. He said that there was nothing so vulgar as to praise people to their faces and, himself a gentleman, he could not believe that God was so ungentlemanly as to like it.
— Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up, 1938
The cemetery at Aurora, Texas, bears a notable marker from the state’s historical commission: “This site is also well known because of the legend that a spaceship crashed nearby in 1897 and the pilot, killed in the crash, was buried here.”
An April 1897 article by S.E. Haydon in the Dallas Morning News explains that “the airship which has been sailing through the country” had had a fatal accident in Aurora:
It was traveling due north, and much nearer the earth than ever before. Evidently some of the machinery was out of order, for it was making a speed of only ten or twelve miles an hour and gradually settling toward the earth. It sailed directly over the public square, and when it reached the north part of town collided with the tower of Judge Proctor’s windmill and went to pieces with a terrific explosion, scattering debris over several acres of ground, wrecking the windmill and water tank and destroying the judge’s flower garden.
The pilot, purportedly a Martian, was carrying papers bearing indecipherable hieroglyphics. The ship, “built of an unknown metal,” was “too badly wrecked to form any conclusion as to its construction or motive power.”
The story has been inspiring investigations for more than a century, but one item stands out. In a 1980 interview in Time magazine, 86-year-old Aurora resident Etta Pegues said that Haydon had invented the story “as a joke and to bring interest to Aurora. The railroad bypassed us, and the town was dying.”
(Thanks, Meaghan.)
A hybrid image by Pablo Carlos Budassi. View it from a distance.
In 2021, Istanbul’s public rail service spotted a curious passenger: “We noticed a dog using our metros and trains and he knows where to go,” spokesman Aylin Erol told India Today. “He knows where to get out. It’s like he has a purpose.”
The dog, known as Boji, is a stray Anatolian shepherd who’s been observed using the city’s buses, metro trains, trams, and ferries. Since city officials fitted him with a microchip, he’s been tracked through as many as 29 metro stations in one day, traveling up to 30 kilometers and ranging as far afield as the Princes’ Islands in the Sea of Marmara.
“You take the train and, suddenly, you see Boji,” Erol said. “And look at him. He lies, just like this. You just smile and catch the moment, really. This is what Boji evokes for Istanbulites. He also reminds us that we can still enjoy Istanbul as we rush about.”
A Weak Man going down-hill met a Strong Man going up, and said:
‘I take this direction because it requires less exertion, not from choice. I pray you, sir, assist me to regain the summit.’
‘Gladly,’ said the Strong Man, his face illuminated with the glory of his thought. ‘I have always considered my strength a sacred gift in trust for my fellow-men. I will take you up with me. Go behind me and push.’
— Ambrose Bierce, Fantastic Fables, 1899
Hungarian mathematician József Kürschák offered this “proof without words” that a regular dodecagon inscribed in a unit circle has area 3. If the circle is inscribed in a square, the resulting figure can be tiled by triangles of two families — 16 equilateral triangles whose sides are equal to those of the dodecagon and 32 isosceles triangles with angles 15°-15°-150° and longest side 1. The area of the large square is 4, and the triangles that make up the dodecagon can be rearranged to fill 3 of its quadrants (see the video below). So the area of the dodecagon is 3/4 of 4, or 3.
(To see that the square and the dodecagon can be tiled as claimed, see Alexander Bogomolny’s discussion here.)
(Gerald L. Alexanderson and Kenneth Seydel, “Kürschak’s Tile,” Mathematical Gazette 62:421 [October 1978], 192-196.)
Her face Her tongue Her wit so fair so sweet so sharp first bent then drew then hit mine eye mine ear my heart Mine eye Mine ear My heart to like to learn to love her face her tongue her wit doth lead doth teach doth move Her face Her tongue Her wit with beams with sound with art doth blind doth charm doth knit mine eye mine ear my heart Mine eye Mine ear My heart with life with hope with skill her face her tongue her wit doth feed doth feast doth fill O face O tongue O wit with frowns with checks with smart wrong not vex not wound not mine eye mine ear my heart This eye This ear This heart shall joy shall yield shall swear her face her tongue her wit to serve to trust to fear.
— Arthur Gorges
“Don’t do for others what you wouldn’t think of asking them to do for you.” — Josh Billings
Released in 1978, The Campaign for North Africa has been called “the most complicated board game ever released.” On each turn a player must:
His opponent then completes the same sequence, and that constitutes just one game turn.
Reviewer Luke Winkie estimated that “If you and your group meets for three hours at a time, twice a month, you’d wrap up the campaign in about 20 years.” Reviewer Nicholas Palmer added, “No doubt the first ten years are the hardest.”
