Future Tense

When he wasn’t inventing logarithms, John Napier took a keen interest in military affairs. In 1596 he composed a list of war machines that “by the grace of God and worke of expert craftsmen” he hoped to produce “for defence of this Iland.” These included a piece of artillery that could “clear a field of four miles circumference of all living creatures exceeding a foot of height,” a chariot like “a moving mouth of mettle” that would “scatter destruction on all sides,” and “devises of sayling under water, with divers and other strategems for harming of the enemyes.”

No one knows whether Napier built his machines, but by World War I they were certainly realities — he had foreseen the machine gun, the tank, and the submarine.

| Oddities · Science & Math · Technology

The Bronx Calendar Twins

Born in 1939, George and Charles Finn were both retarded, with IQs around 60. But each twin could remember nearly every event that had ever befallen him, including the weather: “On April 15, 1956, Dr. Williams came to visit me and to ask me questions about dates. It was rainy and windy in the morning, but the sun came out in the middle of the afternoon.”

Both could also almost instantly tell the day of the week for every day on a 40,000-year calendar — and could answer such complex questions as “During what years between 1780 and 1795 did the 7th of August fall on a Wednesday?”

Thus they could have calculated the birthday of Daniel McCartney — who was doing the same thing a century earlier.

| Oddities

Connected

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Al_Capone%27s_Cell_In_Eastern_State_Penitentiary.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Al Capone’s jail cell, Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia. High-level gangsters retained amazing power even inside maximum-security penitentiaries. Visiting Frank Costello in prison in the 1950s, lawyer Edward Bennett Williams mentioned that he’d been unable to get tickets to My Fair Lady that evening. “Mr. Williams,” the Luciano boss upbraided him, “You should have told me. Maybe I could have helped.” Williams thought no more about it and returned to his hotel, where shortly there was a knock at the door. A broad-shouldered man handed him four tickets to that evening’s performance and silently walked away.

| Crime

Unquote

“It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in five years.”

— John von Neumann, 1949

| Quotations · Technology

Peshtigo

The deadliest fire in U.S. history swept through Wisconsin on Oct. 8, 1871, consuming more than a million acres and killing 1,500 people:

Groups of dead bodies were found within a stone’s-throw of the water. Families rushing down for a breathing place, had been blown upon by the rushing blast and struck lifeless. The ghastly throng huddled, shrieking and bewailing, about the flaring embers, and the terrible roll of the missing was soon called from end to end of the ashen waste. … In a great many instances the human remains were distinguished from animals by the teeth alone. One horror-struck relative recognized the relics of his nephew by a pen-knife imbedded in an oblong mound of ashes.

So why haven’t you heard of it? Because, by a bizarre coincidence, the Great Chicago Fire occurred on the same day.

| Oddities

Satan’s Awful Majesty

Now the means usually employed by a witch to possess his victims with a devil is to offer them some sort of food; and I have remarked that he most often uses apples. In this Satan continually rehearses the means by which he tempted Adam and Eve in the earthly Paradise. And in this connection I cannot pass over what happened at Annecy in Savoy in the year 1585. On the edge of the Hasli Bridge there was seen for two hours an apple from which came so great and confused a noise that people were afraid to pass by there, although it was a much-used way. Everybody ran to see this thing, though no one dared to go near to it; until, as is always the case, at last one man more bold than the rest took a long stick and knocked the apple into the Thiou, a canal from the lake of Annecy which passes under the bridge; and after that nothing more was heard. It cannot be doubted that this apple was full of devils, and that a witch had been foiled in an attempt to give it to someone.

— Henry Boguet, Examen of Witches, 1590

| Religion · Society

Quiet!

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CharlesBabbage.jpg

Charles Babbage hated organ grinders. Calling them the worst of the “thousand nuisances” that made it “impossible for the householder to enjoy any quiet,” he claimed that such “instruments of torture” had cost him a quarter of his working life. At one point he tallied 165 “nuisances” in 90 days.

“It is difficult to estimate the misery inflicted upon thousands of persons,” he wrote, “and the absolute pecuniary penalty imposed upon multitudes of intellectual workers by the loss of their time, destroyed by organ-grinders and other similar nuisances.”

He spent £170 on a soundproof room in his Cheyne Row house to protect him from “vile yellow Italians”; it didn’t work. When a magistrate asked if he really believed that listening to a hand organ could impair a man’s brain, he replied, “Certainly not, for the obvious reason that no man having a brain ever listened to street musicians.”

Sadly, he was as much renowned for this crusade as for his scientific accomplishments — his 1871 obituary in the London Times notes that he lived to be almost 80 “in spite of organ-grinding persecutions.”

| Science & Math · Society

Catálogo

A self-inventorying Spanish sentence, discovered/invented by Miguel Lerma of the Universidad Politecnica of Madrid:

Esta frase contiene exactamente doscientas treinta y cinco letras: veinte a’s, una b, dieciseis c’s, trece d’s, treinta e’s, dos f’s, una g, una h, diecinueve i’s, una j, una k, dos l’s, dos m’s, veintidos n’s, catorce o’s, una p, una q, diez r’s, treinta y tres s’s, diecinueve t’s, doce u’s, cinco v’s, una w, dos x’s, cuatro y’s, y dos z’s.

See also The Quick Brown Fox, Bills of Lading, and Inventory.

| Language