Butterflies in the genus Diaethria are commonly called “eighty-eights” because their wings bear a pattern that resembles the number 88 or 89.
The Australian ringneck parrot has four subspecies, one of which is known as the 28 parrot for its triple-noted call, which sounds like “twentee-eight.”
Each year on August 1 the city of Warsaw comes to a voluntary standstill for one minute at 5 p.m.
It’s done to honor those who fought for freedom during the Warsaw Uprising, which began at that hour on August 1, 1944.
This is neat: Figure 1 in this physics paper is a 1:1 scale image of a primordial black hole whose mass is 5 times that of Earth.
A black hole of 10 Earth masses “is roughly the size of a ten pin bowling ball.”
(Jakub Scholtz and James Unwin, “What If Planet 9 Is a Primordial Black Hole?”, arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.11090 [2019].)
In the 11th century, sailors in the Mediterranean developed a pidgin language to communicate with one another, a mix of Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, Occitan, French, Latin, English, and other languages in which they could conduct trade and diplomacy. Known as Sabir, it appears briefly in Molière’s comedy Le Bourgeois gentilhomme when the Mufti sings:
Se ti sabir
Ti respondir
Se non sabir
Tazir, tazir
Mi star Mufti:
Ti qui star ti?
Non intendir:
Tazir, tazir.
This means:
If you know
You answer
If you do not know
Be silent, be silent
I am Mufti
Who are you?
If you do not understand,
Be silent, be silent
The language persisted into the 19th century, and traces of it can still be found in modern slang and in geographical names.
Is 94,271,013 the sum of 12 consecutive integers?
cimicine
adj. smelling of insects
hircinous
adj. smelling like a goat
suaveolent
adj. smelling sweet
alliaceous
adj. smelling like garlic or onions
puant
adj. stinking
macrosmatic
adj. having a well-developed sense of smell
Why do we enjoy sad fiction? In 2009 Boston College psychologist Thalia Goldstein asked 59 subjects to rate the sadness and anxiety they felt in response to four film clips (two presented as fictional, two as factual) and to their own memory of a sad event they’d experienced personally. While they reported equivalent levels of sadness in response to all these things, their anxiety level was significantly higher when recalling their own experience.
“Apparently we do not mind experiencing intense sadness if that sadness is not tinged with anxiety,” Goldstein writes. Indeed, that might make it more cathartic. And because we know that we can walk away from a fictional sadness, we may feel safer suspending our disbelief to explore and understand our feelings deeply.
(Thalia R. Goldstein, “The Pleasure of Unadulterated Sadness: Experiencing Sorrow in Fiction, Nonfiction, and in Person,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 3:4 [2009], 232.)
“If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.” — Mario Andretti
In 1929, detective novelist Arthur Upfield wanted to devise the perfect murder, so he started a discussion among his friends in Western Australia. He was pleased with their solution — until local workers began disappearing, as if the book were coming true. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe the Murchison murders, a disturbing case of life imitating art.
We’ll also incite a revolution and puzzle over a perplexing purchase.
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