Search Results for: roll call

Heist

At Amsterdam, in a street called the Wood Market, recently lived a man who was curious in keeping fowls. One of his hens, though in the midst of summer, had several days stopped yielding her usual produce, and yet made her usual cackling; he searched the nest, but could not find even the shell of an egg, which made him resolve to watch her closely. He accordingly, the next day, placed himself in such a situation as to be able to observe her motions minutely; when, to his great surprise, he saw her discharge her egg; but no sooner was she off the nest, than three rats made their appearance. One of them immediately laid himself on his back, whilst the others rolled the egg upon his belly, which he clasped between his legs, and held it firm; the other two laid hold of his tail, and gently dragged him out of sight. This wonderful sagacity was exhibited for several days to some curious observers.

— London Globe, quoted in The Retrospective Review, 1826

| Oddities

Absentee Herding

http://www.google.com/patents?id=iissAAAAEBAJ&printsec=drawing&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

In 1980 Lem Madden invented a remote control for a horse. The rider operates an electronic transmitter, and the horse is fitted with a receiver that controls the reins. Optionally the receiver can be fitted with a remote-controlled bat for striking the animal and a speaker for giving voice commands.

Who would use such a thing? “An elderly person may be physically unable to mount and rein a horse by himself,” yet need to control it in order to accomplish chores. And “there are those who desire to break and train animals, but who are unable to do so because of the hazards involved with such tasks.” Fair enough.

| Technology

Self-Storage

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=cSQwAAAAEBAJ

I like this one: If you fill your air mattress with helium you can keep it on the ceiling.

William Calderwood’s 1989 brainstorm automatically increases the floor space in a small apartment. When you get up in the morning the bed floats to the ceiling, and you can spend the day roller-skating beneath it. Then at bedtime you pull it down again by the tether. Best of all, you never have to make the bed, because no one will ever see it!

| Technology

In a Word

logodaedalus
n. an inventor of words and phrases

I once had the honour of meeting a philosopher called McIndoe
Who had once had the honour of being flung out of an upstairs window.
During his flight, he said, he commenced an interesting train of speculation
On why there happened to be such a word as defenestration.

There is not, he said, a special word for being rolled down a roof into a gutter;
There is no verb to describe the action of beating a man to death with a putter;
No adjective exists to qualify a man bound to the buffer of the 12.10 to Ealing,
No abstract noun to mollify a man hung upside down by his ankles from the ceiling.

Why, then, of all the possible offences so distressing to humanitarians,
Should this one alone have caught the attention of the verbarians?
I concluded (said McIndoe) that the incidence of logodaedaly was purely adventitious.
About a thirtieth of a second later, I landed in a bush that my great-aunt brought back from Mauritius.

I am aware (he said) that defenestration is not limited to the flinging of men through the window.
On this occasion, however, it was so limited, the object defenestrated being I, the philosopher, McIndoe.

— R.P. Lister

| Language

Perpetual Locomotion

http://books.google.com/books?id=W5A5AAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

In 1829 a correspondent to the Mechanic’s Magazine proposed this design for a “self-moving railway carriage.” Fill the car with passengers and cargo as shown and set it on two rails that undulate across the landscape:

http://books.google.com/books?id=19VQAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

In the descending sections (a, c, e) the two rails are parallel. In the ascending ones (b, d) they diverge so that the car, mounted on cones, will roll forward to settle more deeply between them, paradoxically “ascending” the slope. If the track circles the world the car will “assuredly continue to roll along in one undeviating course until time shall be no more.”

“How any one could ever imagine that such a contrivance would ever continue in motion for even a short time … must be a puzzle to every sane mechanic,” wrote John Phin in The Seven Follies of Science in 1911. But what does he know?

| Science & Math

Round and Round

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Donaueschingen_wappen.svg

Does the top of a rolling wheel move faster than the bottom? In his Cyclopedia of Puzzles (1914), Sam Loyd calls this “an old problem which has created a considerable discussion in the mechanical world.”

The rolling wheel retains its shape; it will arrive at its destination as a connected unit. This seems to imply that all of its parts are moving at the same speed. Yet the point in contact with the ground is moving not at all, while the top continuously overtakes it. Surely, then, the top is moving faster? “There is just enough of the mathematical and mechanical element in the make-up of the problem,” writes Loyd, “to provoke discussions from such as are well-up on these subjects.”

His answer: “The top of a wheel progresses exactly as fast as the bottom.” And, being Sam Loyd, he adds a wrinkle: “If the question referred to a mark on the tire the answer would be different, for the top is the highest point of the wheel and cannot revolve, for if it revolves the hundredth part of an inch it ceases to be the top.”

A second vexed wheel riddle; William James and Lewis Carroll consider related questions; a train moves simultaneously east and west.

| Puzzles

Placebo Buttons

In most elevators installed since the early 1990s, the “close door” button has no effect. Otis Elevator engineers confirmed the fact to the Wall Street Journal in 2003.

Similarly, many office thermostats are dummies, designed to give workers the illusion of control. “You just get tired of dealing with them and you screw in a cheap thermostat,” said Illinois HVAC specialist Richard Dawson. “Guess what? They quit calling you.”

In 2004 the New York Times reported that more than 2,500 of the 3,250 “walk” buttons in New York intersections do nothing. “The city deactivated most of the pedestrian buttons long ago with the emergence of computer-controlled traffic signals, even as an unwitting public continued to push on.”

(Thanks, Tad.)

| Oddities

Push and Pull

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Begegnung_im_Haus_(Werwolf_von_Neuses).png

In short, there appears to be something paradoxical about the horror genre. It obviously attracts consumers; but it seems to do so by means of the expressly repulsive. Furthermore, the horror genre gives every evidence of being pleasurable to its audience, but it does so by means of trafficking in the very sorts of things that cause disquiet, distress, and displeasure. So different ways of clarifying the question ‘Why horror?’ are to ask: ‘Why are horror audiences attracted by what, typically (in everyday life), should (and would) repel them?,’ or ‘How can horror audiences find pleasure in what by nature is distressful and unpleasant?’

— Noël Carroll, “Why Horror?” in Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley, eds., Arguing About Art, 1995

| Art

Offerings

At Frank Sinatra’s funeral, friends and family members were invited to place items of personal significance into his coffin. Reportedly these included:

  • several Tootsie Rolls
  • a pack of Black Jack chewing gum
  • a roll of wild cherry Life Savers
  • a ring engraved with the word Dream
  • a mini-bottle of Jack Daniel’s
  • a pack of Camel cigarettes and a Zippo lighter
  • 10 dimes

Why 10 dimes? “He never wanted to get caught not able to make a phone call,” his daughter Tina told Larry King.

| Death · Entertainment

Cash and Carry

A favorite problem of Lewis Carroll involves a customer trying to complete a purchase using pre-decimal currency. He wants to buy 7s. 3d. worth of goods, but he has only a half-sovereign (10s.), a florin (2s.), and a sixpence. The shopkeeper can’t give him change, as he himself has only a crown (5s.), a shilling, and a penny. As they’re puzzling over this a friend enters the shop with a double-florin (4s.), a half-crown (2s. 6d.), a fourpenny-bit, and a threepenny-bit. Can the three of them negotiate the transaction?

Happily, they can. They pool their money on the counter, and the shopkeeper takes the half-sovereign, the sixpence, the half-crown, and the fourpenny-bit; the customer takes the double-florin, the shilling, and threepenny-bit as change; and the friend takes the florin, the crown, and the penny.

“There are other combinations,” writes John Fisher in The Magic of Lewis Carroll, “but this is the most logistically pleasing, as it will be seen that not one of the three persons retains any one of his own coins.”

Related: From Henry Dudeney, a magic square:

http://books.google.com/books?id=COkvAAAAMAAJ&pg=PP7&dq=strand+1897&hl=en&ei=_muSTOWvI4W0lQepvNGlCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

(Strand, December 1896)

| Puzzles · Science & Math