All’s Fair

https://bibliophilly.library.upenn.edu/viewer.php?id=Oversize%20Ms.%20Codex%20109#page/276/mode/2up

The Feuer Buech, a 1584 treatise on munitions by Franz Helm, contains a startling illustration: a cat and a bird approaching a town, each bearing a lighted explosive.

The image accompanies a section titled “To set fire to a castle or city which you can’t get at otherwise”; Penn curator Mitch Fraas translates the relevant section:

Create a small sack like a fire-arrow … if you would like to get at a town or castle, seek to obtain a cat from that place. And bind the sack to the back of the cat, ignite it, let it glow well and thereafter let the cat go, so it runs to the nearest castle or town, and out of fear it thinks to hide itself where it ends up in barn hay or straw it will be ignited.

Fortunately it appears this was never carried into practice … though possibly birds have been used for this purpose in Russia.

In a Word

https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:Maps_Terms_of_Use#where-data
Image: OpenStreetMap

rarachose
adj. rare, unusual

selcouth
adj. extraordinary in appearance

cordate
adj. heart-shaped

trothplight
n. engagement to be married

The Croatian islet Galešnjak, in the Pašman Canal of the Adriatic Sea, is one of the few naturally occurring heart-shaped objects in the world.

It’s uninhabited, but the family that owns it provides facilities for engagements and weddings.

Target Practice

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ferenczy,_K%C3%A1roly_-_Archers_(1911).jpg

An arrow has a 1/4 chance of hitting its target. If four arrows are shot at one target, what’s the chance that the target will be hit?

Click for Answer

Migration

chessboard

Here’s a checkerboard. Suppose we put a checker on each of the nine squares in the lower left corner. And suppose that any checker can move in any direction by jumping over an adjacent checker, provided that the square beyond it is vacant. Is there some combination of moves by which we can transfer the nine checkers to the nine squares in the upper left corner of the board?

Click for Answer

Disinformation

https://books.google.com/books?id=OcCEAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA36

For myself, I must say that I find [Edward] Lear funniest when he is least arbitrary and when a touch of burlesque or perverted logic makes its appearance. … While the Pobble was in the water some unidentified creatures came and ate his toes off, and when he got home his aunt remarked:

‘It’s a fact the whole world knows,
That Pobbles are happier without their toes,’

which once again is funny because it has a meaning, and one might even say a political significance. For the whole theory of authoritarian governments is summed up in the statement that Pobbles were happier without their toes.

— George Orwell, “Nonsense Poetry,” 1945

Shop Talk

https://archive.org/details/sim_strand-magazine_january-june-1895_9/page/50/mode/2up

An odd little item from the New Zealand Police Gazette, Sept. 20, 1893:

Christchurch. — William Strange and Co. report that between the 2nd and 4th instant their premises were broken into, and a determined but unsuccessful attempt made to break open the safe, the words ‘No time and little room; bad luck’ being written thereon with a piece of candle by the offenders. Nothing stolen.

The Strand reported that the photograph was “taken by a burglar, and subsequently sent to the makers of the safe that resisted his efforts.”

Lament

Marjory Fleming (1803-1811) composed this uniquely terrible poem at age 8:

Three Turkeys fair their last have breathed,
And now this world for ever leaved,
Their Father and their Mother too,
Will sign and weep as well as you,
Mourning for their offspring fair,
Whom they did nurse with tender care.
Indeed the rats their bones have crunch’d,
To eternity are they launch’d;
Their graceful form and pretty eyes
Their fellow fowls did not despise,
A direful death indeed they had,
That would put any parent mad,
But she was more than usual calm
She did not give a single dam.
Here ends this melancholy lay:
Farewell poor Turkeys I must say.

See Precocious and “A Sonnet on a Monkey.”

Chronological Order

By Lee Sallows: If the letters BJFGSDNRMLATPHOCIYVEU are assigned to the integers -10 to 10, then:

J+A+N+U+A+R+Y     = -9+0-4+10+0-3+7     =  1
F+E+B+R+U+A+R+Y   = -8+9-10-3+10+0-3+7  =  2
M+A+R+C+H         = -2+0-3+5+3          =  3
A+P+R+I+L         = 0+2-3+6-1           =  4
M+A+Y             = -2+0+7              =  5
J+U+N+E           = -9+10-4+9           =  6
J+U+L+Y           = -9+10-1+7           =  7
A+U+G+U+S+T       = 0+10-7+10-6+1       =  8
S+E+P+T+E+M+B+E+R = -6+9+2+1+9-2-10+9-3 =  9
O+C+T+O+B+ER      = 4+5+1+4-10+9-3      = 10
N+O+V+E+M+B+E+R   = -4+4+8+9-2-10+9-3   = 11
D+E+C+E+M+B+E+R   = -5+9+5+9-2-10+9-3   = 12

Similarly, if -7 to 7 are assigned SROEMUNFIDYHTAW, then SUNDAY to SATURDAY take on ordinal values. See Alignment.

(David Morice, “Kickshaws,” Word Ways 24:2 [May 1991], 105-116.)

“Non Cogitant, Ergo Non Sunt”

Aphorisms of 18th-century German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg:

  • “There are people who think that everything one does with a serious face is sensible.”
  • “To read means to borrow; to create out of one’s readings is paying off one’s debts.”
  • “How close may our thoughts come at times to grazing on a great discovery?”
  • “I would often rather read what a famous author has cut from one of his works than what he has let stand.”
  • “A golden rule: one must judge men not by their opinions, but by what their opinions have made of them.”
  • “My body is that part of the world which my thoughts can change. Even imaginary illnesses can become real ones. In the rest of the world, my hypotheses cannot change the order of things.”
  • “It’s questionable whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel we aren’t lapsing into precisely the mistake of the child who hits the chair he bumps into.”
  • “What makes a prolific author is often not his great knowledge but rather that fortunate relation between his abilities and his taste, by virtue of which the latter always approves what the former have produced.”
  • “To make astute people believe that one is what one is not, is harder in most cases than actually to become what one wants to appear.”
  • “Indisputably, masculine beauty has not yet been portrayed enough by those hands which alone could do so — feminine hands.”

“There is a great difference between still believing something and believing it again. Still to believe that the moon affects the plants reveals stupidity and superstition, but to believe it again is a sign of philosophy and reflection.”