“We praise or blame as one or the other affords more opportunity for exhibiting our power of judgment.” — Nietzsche
High Roller
Here’s a tip for your next craps game. You can find the odds of rolling any number with two dice by subtracting the number from 7, ignoring the sign, and subtracting the result from 6. The remainder is the number of chances out of 36 that the number will appear.
For example, there are (6 – (7 – 5)) = 4 chances in 36, or 1 chance in 9, that you’ll roll a 5.
Letter Shift
Dedicated Line
David Contorno of Lemont, Ill., has had the same mobile telephone number for 24 years.
He bought an Ameritech AC140 from Ameritech Mobile Communications on Aug. 2, 1985, and he’s kept the same mobile operator and telephone number ever since.
Adrift
In October 1871, the American steamer Polaris began to leak, and 19 men, women, and children crowded onto an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean. The ship got away from them and, incredibly, they spent the whole of the arctic winter riding the melting floe down the Greenland coast. Excerpts from the journal of steward John Herron:
Oct. 15. … We remained shivering all night. Saved very little provisions.
Nov. 6. Joe caught a seal, which has been a godsend. … Mr. Meyer made a pack of cards from some thick paper, and we are now playing euchre.
Dec. 2. Boiled some seal-skin to-day and ate it–blubber, hair and tough skin. The men ate it; I could not.
April 14. Our small piece of ice is wearing away very fast; our provisions are nearly finished. Things look very dark; starvation very near.
April 25. … We are all soaking wet, in everything we have, and no chance of drying anything. … All is dark and dreary, but, please God, it will soon brighten up.
Finally, as hope was fading, they were picked up on April 30 by a Newfoundland sealer near Labrador. In six months they had drifted more than 1,440 miles — but all survived.
Pythagoras Disproved
We’re told that, in any right triangle, a2 + b2 = c2. But consider:
In the figure above, the total length of the red line is 2(a/2) + 2(b/2), or a + b. And again:
Here the red line’s length is 4(a/4) + 4(b/4), which is still a + b.
With each iteration, the red line more closely approximates c, but its length remains a + b. At the limit, then, it seems, a + b = c. Was Pythagoras mistaken?
Continuing Education
In 1952, a stray cat wandered into Elysian Heights Elementary School in Echo Park, Calif. He seemed to be about 7 years old, skinny but healthy, and he was apparently determined to live at the school. The students quickly adopted him, feeding him from their sandwiches, and he made a home in classroom 8, disappearing each night but turning up again in the morning.
The sandwiches must have been pretty good, because “Room 8” stayed at the school for 15 years, reappearing mysteriously at the end of each summer vacation. Thanks to widespread media coverage, including features in Time and Look, he’s said to have received 10,000 letters in that time, which the children dutifully answered. And every year his picture was taken with the graduating class of sixth graders.
Wherever he came from, it seems he’d found what he wanted. He died in August 1968, and his pawprints grace the sidewalk in front of the school.
… Flock Together
On Friday morning of the week before last, early risers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, witnessed a peculiar sight in the shape of a shower of birds that fell from a clear sky, literally cluttering the streets of the city. There were wild ducks, catbirds, woodpeckers, and many birds of strange plumage, some of them resembling canaries, but all dead, falling in heaps along the thoroughfares, the singular phenomenon attracting many spectators and causing much comment.
The most plausible theory as to the strange windfall is that the birds were driven inland by the late storm on the Florida coast, the force of the current of air and the sudden change of temperature causing the death of many of the little feathered creatures when they reached Baton Rouge. Some idea of the extent of the shower may be gathered from the estimate that out on National Avenue alone the children of the neighborhood collected as many as 200 birds.
— St. Louis newspaper, quoted in The Osprey, December 1896
“Dust Cover for Dog”
Well, maybe you’ll need one someday.
Seroun Kesh’s 1964 invention has a bonus application: You can attach a hair dryer to tube 21 “so that the same may be used to dry the dog after a bath.”
Tidy
DEAD-ENDEDNESSES contains one A, two Ns, three Ss, four Ds, and five Es.
TEMPERAMENTALLY can be separated into a single letter followed by words of 2, 3, 4, and 5 letters: T, EM, PER, AMEN, TALLY.