Passchendaele

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The Belgian village of Passchendaele before and after the Third Battle of Ypres, 1917. Aerial photography showed 1 million shell holes in one square mile.

After the battle, the following notice was found in a dugout full of dead British soldiers. It was signed by their Australian commander:

  1. This position will be held and section will remain here until relieved.
  2. The enemy cannot be allowed to interfere with this program.
  3. If the section cannot remain here alive it will remain here dead.
  4. Should any man through shell shock or such cause attempt to surrender he will remain here dead.
  5. Finally the position, as stated, will be held.

Clemenceau said, “War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.”

| Death · History

The Sentinelese

The Stone Age isn’t quite over — not everywhere. On North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal lives a tribe of about 250 people, the Sentinelese, who have remained so hostile to contact with outsiders that their society is almost entirely free of modern influences.

They have no agriculture, subsisting through hunting, fishing and gathering plants. It’s not even clear whether they can produce fire without an external source like lightning.

The Indian government has made overtures by leaving gifts, but the warlike Sentinelese drove them off. Earlier this year, Sentinelese archers killed two fishermen who came too close to the island. Their bodies still haven’t been recovered — even a helicopter sent to retrieve them was driven off by arrows.

| Oddities · Society

Newgrange

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Older than the pyramids, Ireland’s Newgrange lay lost for millennia until workers uncovered it while looking for building stone in the late 1600s.

No one knows who built it or why, but each year at the winter solstice the sun shines directly along a special passage into a chamber at its heart.

Oscar Wilde wrote, “The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”

| History · Oddities

Hotel Puzzle

Three men stop at a hotel and agree to share a room for $30. Each gives the desk clerk $10.

Later, the clerk realizes he’s overcharged them for the room by $5. He gives the bellboy five $1 bills and tells him to return the money to the three men. The unscrupulous bellboy keeps $2 for himself and gives $1 to each of the three men.

So the men paid $9 each for the room, for a total of $27. The bellboy has $2. What happened to the other dollar?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

The Valentich Disappearance

On Oct. 21, 1978, 20-year-old Frederick Valentich was piloting a Cessna 182 airplane off King Island, Australia. About 45 minutes after taking off, he radioed air traffic control to report a large aircraft with four lights at about his altitude.

He said the craft had passed about 1,000 feet above him at very high speed. He described it as “a long shape” with “a green light” and said it was “metallic,” as though it were “shiny all over.”

“It seems to me that he’s playing some sort of game,” he said. “He’s flying over me two … three times at speeds I could not identify.” He reported that the object “vanished,” then said it was approaching again from the southwest.

A few minutes later he said, “Melbourne, that strange aircraft is hovering on top of me again. … It is hovering, and it’s not an aircraft.” Valentich’s radio microphone stayed open for another 17 seconds, during which air traffic controller Steve Robey heard “metallic scraping sounds” before the signal died.

No trace of Valentich or his plane was ever found.

| Oddities

Sator Square

Found in the ruins of Pompeii, the Latin inscription SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS (“The sower Arepo holds the wheels with effort”) may be the most symmetrical sentence ever composed. If it’s written conventionally, it’s a palindrome, reading the same forward and backward. And if it’s written into a square:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Palindrom_TENET.svg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

… it reads the same left to right, top to bottom, right to left, or bottom to top.

| Language

Point Nemo

If you want to be really, really alone, head for 48°52.6’S 123°23.6’W in the South Pacific Ocean. That’s “Point Nemo,” the point in the ocean farthest from any land. You’ll be in the middle of 22,405,411 square kilometers of ocean, an area larger than the entire former Soviet Union.

The point on land farthest from any ocean is at 46°16.8’N 86°40.2’E, outside the Chinese city of Urumqi, in the Dzoosotoyn Elisen Desert. It’s 1,645 miles from the nearest coastline.

| Science & Math · Trivia

A Verbal Palindrome

Most palindromes are spelled symmetrically, so their letters produce the same phrase whether read backward or forward:

Able was I ere I saw Elba.

But it’s also possible to do this at the level of words, as in this example:

You can cage a swallow, can’t you, but you can’t swallow a cage, can you?

When this is read backward, word by word, it produces the same sentence as when read forward. And it’s true!

| Language

Welcome to America

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Here’s a symbol of American unity: the driving of the “golden spike” to complete the world’s first transcontinental railroad, Promontory, Utah, May 10, 1869.

Unfortunately, as it turns out, American unity is kind of a relative thing. The Central Pacific’s Chinese laborers were specifically excluded from the festivities. Most had received between one and three dollars a day.

| History