“Some years ago there was a craze for rolling pellet puzzles,” wrote Henry Dudeney in 1909, “though they are really more trials of patience than puzzles.”
One exception was this undulated glass tube, which contained three shots or pellets. The task was to get them into the three depressions at A, B, and C, which are unfortunately positioned at high points in the tube.
This “could be solved by a puzzle trick which I was surprised to notice how few people discovered,” Dudeney wrote. What was it?
After a national competition in 1938, the hamlet of Monsanto became known as “the most Portuguese village in Portugal.”
That’s an odd epithet, because it’s one of the most distinctive towns in the country — its architecture incorporates enormous boulders from the surrounding landscape.
In the year 4299, five cave explorers are trapped by a landslide. To stay alive they decide to engage in cannibalism, choosing the victim by throwing dice. When the four survivors are rescued, they’re convicted of murder and face a mandatory sentence of death. After a public outcry, the “Supreme Court of Newgarth” takes up the case. Its five judges subscribe to five different legal philosophies, with the result that two vote to affirm the convictions, two vote to overturn them, and one recuses himself. As this is a tie, the original conviction is upheld and the four explorers face death.
Harvard philosopher Lon L. Fuller presented this story in 1949 to contrast various legal philosophies prevailing in the 20th century, primarily natural law and legal positivism.
But in the ensuing years, dozens of further hypothetical judgments have been offered by writers from perspectives ranging from historical contextualism to process theory. Frank Easterbrook wrote in 1999 that Fuller’s essay combines “a timely consideration of contemporaneous debates with a timeless quality that continues to entice students and scholars to think and write about [it] some half a century later — and will doubtless engage our successors well into the next millennium.”
Fuller had written, “The case was constructed for the sole purpose of bringing into a common focus certain divergent philosophies of law and government. These philosophies presented men with live questions of choice in the days of Plato and Aristotle. Perhaps they will continue to do so when our era has had its say about them. If there is any element of prediction in the case, it does not go beyond a suggestion that the questions involved are among the permanent problems of the human race.”
(Lon L. Fuller, “The Case of the Speluncean Explorers,” Harvard Law Review 62:4 [February 1949], 616–645.)
“It was hard for me to believe. I would look down and say, ‘This is the moon, this is the moon,’ and I would look up and say, ‘That’s the Earth, that’s the Earth,’ in my head. So it was science fiction to us even as we were doing it.” — Alan Bean, Apollo 12
tsundoku
n. the practice of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one’s home without reading them
The first “true cat,” Proailurus, or “Leman’s Dawn Cat,” appeared about 30 million years ago. But from 25 to 18.5 million years ago, strangely few catlike fossils are found in North America. Biologist Luke Hunter writes:
Following the appearance of the dawn cat, there is little in the fossil record for 10 million years to suggest that cats would prosper. In fact, although Proailurus persisted for at least 14 million years, there are so few felid fossils towards the end of the dawn cat’s reign that paleontologists refer to this as the ‘cat gap’. The turning point for cats came about with the appearance of a new genus of felids, Pseudaelurus.
The gap may be due to changes in climate and habitat, the rise of competing doglike species, an unsustainable “hypercarnivorous” dietary specialization, or some other factor. Modern cats descended from Pseudaelurus.
Point Nemo, the point in the ocean farthest from land, lies in the southern Pacific Ocean at 48°52.6’S 123°23.6’W.
R’lyeh, the fictional city that imprisons the entity called Cthulhu in H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction, lies at 47°9’S 123°43’W. (August Derleth, a correspondent of Lovecraft, placed it at 49°51’S 128°34’W.)
Lovecraft’s story was written 66 years before Point Nemo was discovered.
The Spanish town of Setenil de las Bodegas extends along the course of the Rio Trejo.
Some of its buildings are set into the walls of the gorge itself — which can add a startling ceiling to an ordinary street.
Three male offspring, aged 9–14 years, of one of the authors were observed to experience visual problems profound enough to imply functional blindness. The visual deficit was evident on almost every occasion when any one of the children of this physician went to the refrigerator and opened the door. The acute visual problem encountered was noted to be part of a consistent behaviour pattern, wherein a few seconds after the fridge door was opened a cry would be heard from the affected child of ‘Mum, where’s the milk?’
— Andrew J. Macnab and Mary Bennett, “Refrigerator Blindness: Selective Loss of Visual Acuity in Association With a Common Foraging Behaviour,” Canadian Medical Association Journal, Dec. 6, 2005
“In all education the main cause of failure is staleness.” — Alfred North Whitehead
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