An optical illusion. The gray bars on the left appear lighter than those on the right, but in fact they’re the same color.
Pssst
Can praying improve your reasoning? I once questioned a student about his suspicious behavior during a logic examination. He confessed that he was praying for the correct answer. I felt this was cheating. Even if God did not give him the answer, the student was soliciting the answer from Someone Else.
— Dartmouth philosopher Roy Sorensen, in A Brief History of the Paradox, 2003
Black Widow
In 1902, 42-year-old Norwegian emigrant Belle Gunness bought an Indiana farm with $8,500 in insurance money she’d received when her husband and two children died. A second husband died after only nine months, and over the next six years a succession of prosperous suitors visited her farm and failed to return.
When the brother of one of these men grew suspicious, the farmhouse suddenly burned to the ground in April 1908. Firemen discovered the remains of four people stacked in the cellar: Three were Gunness’ children, but the fourth — an adult woman — was unidentifiable because its head was missing.
Investigation began to turn up butchered corpses buried around the property. Under questioning, farmhand Ray Lamphere said that Gunness would lure her victims to the farmhouse, drug them, kill them with an ax, and bury them in the hog pen or around the grounds.
It’s estimated that Gunness killed more than 40 people, making her one of America’s most prolific serial killers of either sex. Curiously, her own fate is uncertain — officially she was declared dead, but neighbors insisted the headless remains could not have been hers. Lamphere claimed she had staged her own death and absconded with $100,000 in stolen money. He may be right — there’s not enough surviving DNA to decide for certain.
Numbers Game
In 1938, Samuel Isaac Krieger of Chicago claimed he had disproved Fermat’s last theorem. He said he’d found a positive integer greater than 2 for which 1324n + 731n = 1961n was true — but he refused to disclose it.
A New York Times reporter quickly showed that Krieger must be mistaken. How?
Season’s Greetings
Comes Christmas merry? Hungry birds; no bright berries;
Rents high, not paid; long bills; empty barns, no peace and prosperity.
Read this backward and it becomes:
Prosperity and peace; no barns empty; bills long paid;
Not high rents; berries bright; no birds hungry; merry Christmas comes.
J.A. Lindon composed the following verse, in which the first line, the first word of each line, and the nth word of each nth line spell the same message:
A merry Christmas and a happy new year!
Merry, merry carols you’ll have sung us;
Christmas remains Christmas even when you are not here,
And though afar and lonely, you’re among us.
A bond is there, a bond at times near broken.
Happy be Christmas then, when happy, clear,
New heart-warm links are forged, new ties betoken
Year ripe with loving giving birth to year.
Next!
In 1900, evidently tired of initiating pledges by hand, Edmund and Ulysses de Moulin decided to automate the process.
With their “initiating device,” the applicant is blindfolded, placed in position, and told to pull the handles to test his strength. When he does so, the paddle spanks him and an electric shock passes through his arms, “making the sensation rather unique.”
You could turn this into a regular assembly line — or, using multiple machines, humiliate an entire freshman class at once.
In a Word
avetrol
n. a bastard
uzzard
n. a third-generation bastard
Carried Away
“We request that every hen lay 130 to 140 eggs a year. The increase cannot be achieved by the bastard hens (non-Aryan) which now populate German farmyards. Slaughter these undesirables and replace them.” — Nazi Party news agency, April 3, 1937
“Quite a number of people … describe the German classical author, Shakespeare, as belonging to English literature, because — quite accidentally born at Stratford-on-Avon — he was forced by the authorities of that country to write in English.” — New York National Socialist organ Deutscher Weckruf und Beobachter, quoted in The American Mercury, July 1940
“The rabbit, it is certain, is no German animal, if only for its painful timidity. It is an immigrant who enjoys a guest’s privilege. As for the lion, one sees in him indisputably German fundamental characteristics. Thus one could call him a German abroad.” — Gen. Erich Ludendorff in Am Quell Deutscher Kraft
“Proper breathing is a means of acquiring heroic national mentality. The art of breathing was formerly characteristic of true Aryanism and known to all Aryan leaders.” — Weltpolitische Rundschau, Berlin
Suicide
By Sam Loyd. In how few moves can White force Black to mate him?
The answer is to castle queenside:
Now every Black move is mate.
Match Game
More proof that women are better than men:
Kneel and place your elbows, arms, and hands together as if praying. Bend over and place your arms against the floor, with your elbows touching your knees. Have someone stand a matchbox on end on the floor at your fingertips. Now clasp your hands behind your back and try to knock over the matchbox with your nose.
Women manage this pretty gracefully, but men tend to fall over. A man’s center of mass is closer to his head.