The first motion picture to feature a live cat is believed to be this 1894 short in which French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey drops an inverted feline to watch it land on its feet.
When the experiment was published in Nature in 1894, the editors wrote, “The expression of offended dignity shown by the cat at the end of the first series indicates a want of interest in scientific investigation.”
In a monastery cloisters on the edge of Venice is a sundial inscribed with the motto Horas non numero nisi serenas.
Literally that means “I don’t count the hours unless they are serene ones” (or “I count only the sunny hours”).
“But it really means, ‘When I come to die, the only moments that matter will have been the moments when I was at ease,'” writes Harry Mount in Amo, Amas, Amat and All That.
Of the motto, William Hazlitt wrote, “There is a softness and a harmony in the words and in the thought unparalleled.”
More entries from unusual indexes:
From Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy:
Cabbage brings heaviness to the soul, 192
Calis, who would wash in no common water, 397
Fish discommended, 192; defended, 398
Genesis, thought inadvisable reading, 771
Kisses, honest and otherwise, 701 et seq.
Pork, naught for quasy stomachs, 190
Roman courtesans, their elegancy of speech, 699
Spider in a nutshell, medicine for ague, 596
Statues, love in, 649
Venison, a melancholy meat, 190
Verjuice and oatmeal is good for a parrot, 80 note
And from Gilbert White’s 1789 The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne:
ANNE, Queen, came to Wolmer-forest to see the red deer
August, the most mute month respecting the singing of birds
Castration, its strange effects
Cats, house, strange that they should be so fond of fish
Daws breed in unlikely places
Dispersion of birds, pretty equal, why
Fishes, gold and silver, why very amusing in a glass bowl
Fly, bacon, injurious to the housewife
Hogs, would live, if suffered, to a considerable age
Slugs, very injurious to wheat just come out of the ground, by eating
Worms, earth, no inconsiderable link in the chain of nature, some account of
There’s much more in Hazel K. Bell’s wonderful Indexers and Indexes in Fact & Fiction.
In the Pisco Valley on Peru’s Nazca Plateau is a band of 5,000 to 6,000 holes, each about 1 meter in diameter and 100 centimeters deep. The band, which averages about 20 meters in width, starts at the edge of a valley and extends about 1.5 kilometers up a hill understandably known as Cerro Viruela, or Smallpox Hill. (You can see its extent in Google Earth.)
No one knows who dug the holes or why. They’re circular and lined with stone, resembling pits found elsewhere that serve as resting places for mummies. But these are empty. Possibly they were designed for storage by users of the Inca road system, or possibly they were used to measure quantities of produce owed as tribute to the Inca state. Archaeologists are still investigating.
Two trains set out at 7 a.m., one headed from A to B and the other from B to A. The first reaches its destination in 8 hours, the second in 12. At what hour will the two trains pass one another?
This is a miniature, a tiny replica of an English dining room of the late 18th century. Between 1932 and 1940, American artist Narcissa Niblack Thorne made about 100 such diminutive rooms, often enlisting architects, designers, and craftsmen whose talents became available during the Depression.
Of the miniatures still in existence, most are on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, where they serve as documents of the decorating styles of periods past. Generally designed on a scale of one inch per foot, many of them include authentic materials: bowls of real silver, chandeliers of real crystal, even original paintings and sculpture contributed by admired artists.
In 2010, the institute began to decorate them for the holidays each year, after researchers discovered Thorne’s affection for Christmas. But “Some of the rooms will never have a holiday theme,” the museum’s Lindsey Mican Morgan told the Chicago Tribune. “That is because many of them depict a room from a time when holidays were simply not celebrated as they are now.”
In the game Chomp, two players begin with a rectangular grid. The first player chooses any square and removes it from the grid, together with all the squares above and to the right of it. The second player chooses one of the remaining squares and removes that, together with all the squares above it and to its right. The two take turns in this way until one of them is forced to remove the last square. That player loses.
If the starting grid is square, can either player force a win?
A self-working card curiosity by Shippensburg University mathematician Douglas E. Ensley:
I give you the four aces from a deck of cards and turn my back. Then I ask you to stack the four cards face up with the heart at the bottom, then the club, the diamond, and the spade. Now turn the uppermost card, the spade, face down.
Now you’re invited to perform any of these operations as many times and in any order that you wish:
When you’ve finished, I ask you to turn the topmost card over, then turn the top two cards over as one, then turn the top three cards over as one. I predict that the club is the only card facing the opposite way from the others, and as long as you’ve followed the directions above, it always will be.
The answer is explained by group theory — see the article below for the details.
(Douglas E. Ensley, “Invariants Under Group Actions to Amaze Your Friends,” Mathematics Magazine 72:5 [December 1999], 383-387.)
In 1805 a disturbed Venice shoemaker named Matthew Lovat nearly managed to crucify himself. From William Wood Seymour’s The Cross in Tradition, History, and Art, 1898:
Having prepared a cross, he stripped himself naked except for a girdle about his loins. Fearing that he would not be able to attach himself securely to the cross, he covered the lower part with a net, extending from the suppedaneum to the transverse. Having introduced himself into this, he next drove a nail through the palm of his right hand by striking it on the floor until the point appeared on the outside. He then drove a nail through both feet, fastening them to the wood. Tying himself around the waist to the cross, he next wounded himself in the side with a knife. He was yet in the room: to show himself to the people required the exercise of much fortitude and resolution. The foot of the cross having been placed upon the window-sill, he drew himself forward by means of his fingers pressing on the floor, until the lower end, overbalancing the rest, the cross fell outside of the house and hung by ropes previously fixed to sustain it. He then fastened the right hand, already pierced by the nail, to its proper place, but after driving the nail through the left hand he was unable to affix it. This took place at eight o’clock in the morning. As soon as he was seen he was taken down and carried to the hospital where his wounds were completely cured.
I haven’t been able to learn why he thought this was necessary. After an earlier attempt was prevented, “Being interrogated repeatedly as to the motive for his self-crucifixion, he maintained an obstinate silence, except, that he once said to his brother, that that day was the festival of St. Matthew, and that he could give no farther explanation.” After the 1805 attempt, he would say only, “The pride of man must be mortified, it must expire on the cross.” He starved himself to death in an asylum shortly afterward.
Sentenced in 1964 to life in prison, anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Kathrada got permission during his confinement to pursue a history degree through the University of South Africa. He used his access to books and writing materials to compile a series of secret notebooks in which he recorded quotations that inspired him. Together they form what used to be called a commonplace book — a series of personal memoranda that, taken together, illuminate the spirit of the compiler:
Ofttimes the test of courage becomes rather to live than to die. — Vittorio Alfieri
It is almost a definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts pain. — Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University Defined (1873)
One owes respect to the living; but to the dead one owes nothing but the truth. — Voltaire
The triumph of wicked men is always short-lived. — Honore de Balzac, The Black Sheep
(Form of oath-taking among Shoshone Indians is:) The earth hears me. The sun hears me. Shall I lie?
Conrad wrote that life sometimes made him feel like a cornered rat waiting to be clubbed.
Nobody knows what kind of government it is who has never been in prison. — Leo Tolstoy
Leve fit, quod bene fertur onus. (A burden becomes lightest when it is well borne.)
To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself. — Sun Tzu
Verba volant, scripta manent. (The spoken word flees; the written word remains.) — Ancient Roman adage
(Peter Ustinov explains why he reads so much:) “If you’re going to be the prisoner of your own mind, the least you can do is to make sure it’s well furnished.”
To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness. — Bertrand Russell
Altogether “Kathy” compiled seven notebooks over 26 years, drawing not just on his study materials and smuggled newspapers but on 5,000 books donated to the prison library by a Cape Town bookstore. Finally released in 1989, he went on to become a member of Parliament after South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994 and served as President Nelson Mandela’s parliamentary counsellor until 1999.
One of his former warders, Christo Brand, told him, “I was supposed to be your master, but instead you became my mentor.”
(Sahm Venter, ed., Ahmed Kathrada’s Notebook From Robben Island, 2005.)
