In 1938 Guy Stewart Callendar published a paper titled “The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide and Its Influence on Temperature.” “It may be said that the combustion of fossil fuel…is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways,” concluded Callendar. “The small increases of mean temperature would be important on the northern margin of cultivation, and the growth of favorably situated plants is directly proportional to the carbon dioxide pressure. In any case, the return of the deadly glaciers should be delayed indefinitely.”
Archive
Miscellany
Archaeologists found in a Utah cave as many as seventeen thousand carved sticks, canes, and bone pieces—gambling items used in the thirteenth century by ancestors of the Apache and Navajo. “Seventy to eighty percent of dice games were for women only,” one researcher said about the find, which may have been America’s first casino. “So what do we have here? Women who knew the games of other women.”
Mark Twain was born on November 30, 1835—two weeks after the perihelion of Halley’s Comet. “I came in with Halley’s Comet,” Mark Twain commented in 1909. “It is coming again next year. The Almighty has said, no doubt, ‘Now there are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’” He died on April 21, 1910—one day after the comet had once again reached its perihelion.
The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah may have been caused by an earthquake that occurred through the Great Rift Valley around 1900 bc. The “brimstone and fire” described in the Bible would have been due to petroleum and gases present in the area igniting the cities.
Southern women during the Civil War chewed on newspapers, believing an ingredient in the ink whitened their faces.
Home to an estimated eight hundred languages, the New York City borough of Queens has been called the “Noah’s ark of languages” by linguist Daniel Kaufman, an expert in endangered tongues. Most of the world’s last remaining speakers of Gottscheerish, a critically endangered Germanic dialect, live in the neighborhood of Ridgewood, while Vlashki, a dialect of Istro-Romanian, is believed to be more commonly spoken in Astoria than in Europe.
When asked why he didn’t use intelligence agents, Alp Arslan, sultan of the Seljuq Empire in the 1060s, replied that his favored subjects would trust the spies, while his opponents would curry favor and bribe them; he’d end up hearing damaging reports about his friends and positive ones about his enemies. “Reports good and bad are like arrows,” Arslan said. “If you shoot enough of them, at least one will hit the target.”
“If people would think more of fairies, they would soon forget the atom bomb,” Walt Disney quipped in 1948. President Dwight D. Eisenhower agreed: public fear of the atom bomb was growing, and in 1953 he assured Americans in his “Atoms for Peace” speech that war was not imminent and that nuclear technology had enormous potential for peacetime activity as well. Eisenhower then recruited Disney to produce a television program promoting the “peaceful atom.” In 1957, “Our Friend the Atom” aired on ABC, featuring animated cartoons and narration by Heinz Haber, a scientist who had worked in Nazi Germany and later became a technical consultant for Disney’s Tomorrowland theme park.
“The contempt of risk and the presumptuous hope of success are in no period of life more active than at the age at which young people choose their professions,” wrote Adam Smith in 1776. “How little the fear of misfortune is then capable of balancing the hope of good luck.”
According to sixth-century-bc Greek poet Hipponax of Colophon, in times of drought, famine, or plague an ugly or deformed person was chosen by the community to be pharmakós, or scapegoat. After being fed figs, barley cake, and cheese, he would be struck on the genitals with the bulbs and twigs of wild plants, led on a procession accompanied by flute, and burned on a pyre. His ashes were thrown into the sea. It is believed that Hipponax, whom Pliny the Elder once called “notoriously ugly,” may have been exaggerating the ritual.
“When the maids are beautiful and the concubines charming, this is not a blessing,” warns Confucian master Zhu Bolu in a seventeenth-century work of household advice. “For servants,” his next maxim advises, “don’t employ handsome boys.”
François-Auguste-René de Chateaubriand complained late in life that he was going deaf. When someone mentioned the malady to Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, he remarked, “He only thinks he is deaf because he can no longer hear anyone talking about him.”
Asked whether it was night or day that first emerged when the universe came into existence, sixth-century-bc Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus replied, “Night, earlier by a day.”
On November 22, 1963, Aldous Huxley, bedridden and dying, requested on a writing tablet that his wife Laura give him a 100 microgram dose of LSD. As she went to get the drug from the medicine cabinet, Laura was perplexed to see the doctor and nurses watching TV. She gave him a second dose a few hours later, and by 5:20 p.m. he had died. Laura later learned that the TV had been showing coverage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, who had been pronounced dead at 1:00 p.m. that day.
First documented in the Divine Farmer’s Materia Medica Classic of the first or second century, the bark of the mimosa tree, known as he huan pi (“collective happiness bark”), is thought to harmonize the emotions and render a person worry-free. The manual advises that “protracted taking may make the body light, brighten the eyes,” and induce one to feel “as if one had acquired whatever one desired.” Modern practitioners sometimes call it “herbal Prozac.”