postation
n. the placing of one thing after another
consectaneous
adj. succeeding, following as by consequence
resiliating
adj. that resumes or causes to resume a former shape or position
finifugal
adj. shunning the end of something
Jason Allemann built this infinite LEGO domino ring in 2023. Sixty-four dominoes fall in a continuous loop, with a robot circulating perpetually opposite the cascade to restore the tiles to their standing state.
In his 1957 book A Testament, Frank Lloyd Wright described a skyscraper a mile high that he hoped to build in Chicago. Atomic-powered elevators would serve a net rentable area of more than 13 million square feet, with covered parking for 15,000 cars and landing decks for 150 helicopters.
Wright imaged it would be “more permanent than the pyramids,” but the plan was never realized. The 528-story building would have been nearly twice as tall as the Burj Khalifa and four times the height of the Empire State Building.
Occasionally, by coincidence, the gaps between words on a page of printed text will become aligned, producing “rivers” of white space that descend across multiple lines. These occur most commonly when the font is monospaced and justification is full. Because they’re distracting, these artifacts are generally discouraged; typographers sometimes view a printed page upside down in order to spot them.
In ordinary text long rivers are unlikely, but in 1988 Mark Isaak found the 12-line example above on page 277 of the Harvard Classics edition of Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (squint to see it).
Fritzi Striebel offered a small collection of unusual rivers at the end of this article in the May 1986 issue of Word Ways.
The September 1981 University Computing Center Newsletter at the University of Southern California included this recipe for “Famous Rum Cake,” written in Assembler by a systems programmer for the IBM 360:
RUMCAKE CSECT
* THIS INTRODUCES SOME NEW MNEMONICS
* MX MIX
* MXL MIX UNTIL LIGHT
* BSOP BEAT UNTIL SOFT PEAKS
* BSTP BEAT UNTIL STIFF PEAKS
* BKE BAKE (SECOND OPERAND IS NUMBER OF MINUTES)
PREHEAT BALR 12,0 350 DEGREES
USING *,12
BOWL1 L 3,FLOUR
A 3,BAKPOW
A 3,SALT
A 3,BSODA
BOWL2 L 4,BUTTER
MXL 4
A 4,SUGAR1
MX 4
A 4,ORIND
AR 4,3
A 4,MIXTURE
MX 4
A 4,EXTRACTS
BOWL3 L 5,WHITES
BSOP 5
A 5,SUGAR2
BSTP 5
AR 5,4
S 5,PANS
BKE PANS,=M'25'
SVC 3
*
* TYPES OF CONSTANTS ARE ALSO INTRODUCED:
* T TEASPOON
B TABLESPOON
C CUP
*
* NON-INTEGER LENGTHS ARE ALSO INTRODUCED
*
FLOUR DS CL2
BAKPOW DS TL2 BAKING POWDER
SALT DS TL.25
BSODA DS TL.25 BAKING SODA
BUTTER DS CL.5 NOT MARGARINE
SUGAR1 DS CL.75 GRANULATED
EGGS DS OF
WHITES DS HL2
YOLKS DS HL2
ORIND DS TL1 GRATED ORANGE RIND
MIXTURE DS 0CL.5
RUM DS BL3
OJ DS CL.5 ORANGE JUICE
EXTRACTS DS 0T
ALMOND DS TL.25
VANILLA DS TL.25
SUGAR2 DS CL.25
WALNUTS DS CL.5
PANS DC 2C'9INCH' GREASED AND LINED
END RUMCAKE COOL FOR TEN MINUTES, THEN ENJOY
The programmer who sent me this offered a translation:
Here are some definitions I found in an IBM Assembler book, which may help: L = load, A = add, DS = define storage, S = store, SVC = supervisor call (SVC 3 probably means “execute”), AR = add register (AR 5,4 means “add the contents of register 4 to those of register 5 and store the result in register 5”).
Notice that the program never refers to the egg yolks and the walnuts! I fed the egg yolks to my cat, and chopped the walnuts and threw them in at the end.
Rum Cake
2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup butter, not margarine
3/4 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs, separated
1 teaspoon grated orange rind
3 tablespoons rum
1/2 cup orange juice
1/4 teaspoon almond extract
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup chopped walnutsPreheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease two 9-inch cake pans, and line with waxed paper. Sift together the flour, baking powder, salt and baking soda. In another mixing bowl, cream the butter until light, add the 3/4 cup of sugar and mix well. Add the orange rind to the creamed mixture. Stir the orange juice and rum together, and add to the creamed mixture alternately with the dry ingredients. Add the almond and vanilla extracts and the walnuts. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until they form soft peaks. Add the 1/4 cup of sugar and beat until stiff peaks are formed. Fold the egg whites into the batter, pour into pans and bake for 25 minutes. Cool 10 minutes, then remove from the pans.
Notes: I used the peel from 1 whole orange, and juiced it to get the 1/2 cup of juice. There was no frosting recipe, so I made a half-recipe of this Cream Cheese Icing: cream together 8 ounces of softened cream cheese and 1/2 cup (1 cube) of softened butter of margarine. Sift a 16-ounce box of powdered sugar and add to the creamed mixture. Beat until light. Stir in 1 teaspoon of vanilla. Makes enough icing for a 3-layer cake. (This cake needed only 4 ounces cream cheese, 1/4 cup butter, 8 ounces of sugar, 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla.)
(Thanks, Dorothy.)
On April 1, 1990, an anonymous verse was posted to the comp.lang.perl newsgroup on Usenet. It was written in the programming language Perl 3:
BEFOREHAND: close door, each window & exit; wait until time.
open spellbook, study, read (scan, select, tell us);
write it, print the hex while each watches,
reverse its length, write again;
kill spiders, pop them, chop, split, kill them.
unlink arms, shift, wait & listen (listening, wait),
sort the flock (then, warn the "goats" & kill the "sheep");
kill them, dump qualms, shift moralities,
values aside, each one;
die sheep! die to reverse the system
you accept (reject, respect);
next step,
kill the next sacrifice, each sacrifice,
wait, redo ritual until "all the spirits are pleased";
do it ("as they say").
do it(*everyone***must***participate***in***forbidden**s*e*x*).
return last victim; package body;
exit crypt (time, times & "half a time") & close it,
select (quickly) & warn your next victim;
AFTERWORDS: tell nobody.
wait, wait until time;
wait until next year, next decade;
sleep, sleep, die yourself,
die at last
Because of the large number of English words that are used in the Perl language, the poem can actually be compiled as legal code and executed as a program. (It exits on line one, reaching the function exit, producing no output.)
The poem was attributed to “a person who wishes to remain anonymous,” but new “Perl poems” are regularly submitted to the programming community at PerlMonks.
In 1900, Louis Philip Perew of Tonawanda, New York, built a “gigantic man” of wood, rubber, and metal that “walks, talks, runs, jumps, [and] rolls its eyes.”
Standing 7 foot 5 in size 13 1/2 shoes and clothed in white duck, the nameless man “walked smoothly, and almost noiselessly” at an exhibition for the Strand, circling the hall twice without stopping. Perew was cagey as to its inner workings, saying only that its aluminum skin concealed a steel framework.
When a large block of wood was placed in its path, “it stopped, rolled its eyes in the direction of the obstacle, as if calculating how it could surmount it. It then deliberately raised the right foot, placed it upon the object, and stepped down on the other side. The motion seemed uncannily realistic. You almost feel like shrinking from before those rolling eyes. The visionless orbs are operated by means of clock-work situated within the head.”
When the robot announced, “I am going to walk from New York to San Francisco,” Perew acknowledged that the team planned to send it across the continent drawing a light wagon bearing two men. He claimed it could cover 20 miles in an hour.
I don’t know any more about it. This isn’t the first mechanical man we’ve encountered — a steam-powered robot had been proposed as early as 1868. But neither seems to have gone anywhere.
03/23/2025 UPDATE: Readers Kendra Colman, Justin Hilyard, and Hans Havermann point out that Cybernetic Zoo has a whole summary on the “Electric Man” and its history, including Perew’s original 1894 patent and various news articles (with additional photos) from 1895 up to 1914. Apparently the effect is deceiving — the man doesn’t actually pull the wagon, the wagon pushes the man. Many thanks to everyone who’s written in about this.
“The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” — Voltaire
“It has been said that this Minister [the Lord Privy Seal] is neither a Lord, nor a privy, nor a seal.” — Sydney D. Bailey
“Television is a medium, so called because it is neither rare nor well done.” — Ernie Kovacs
A striking technology described in Strand, April 1899: The speck is a bundle of hay descending along a wire over a lake in Western Norway.
The Norwegians, who live for weeks and months in the summer on the great heights on either side of their beautiful valleys, send down milk, cheese, hay, etc. to the farms below by suspending them on inclined wires fastened at one end firmly to the ground and at the other to some point on the rocks above.
The snap-shot shows a bundle of hay on its way from a great height on one side of the lake to the farm on the other side. It sped along, the friction causing it to shed sparks in all directions, and was timed to take forty-four seconds.
The editors add: “If the bundle be closely examined the constriction caused by the cord holding it together is distinctly visible.”
Illusion Diffusion uses Stable Diffusion to produce illusion artwork.
The image above was produced by uploading an image of the Mona Lisa and specifying the prompt “colour photograph of an Italian city in the Renaissance” (illusion strength 1 and seed 0).
Below is Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring modified with the prompt “Amsterdam canals in 17th century” (illusion strength 1.8 and seed 0).
Conventional stairs are somewhat extravagant: Because users alternate their steps (1), half of each tread goes unused. In close quarters, floor space can be conserved by omitting these unused portions (3), permitting a slope as high as 65 degrees without sacrificing the depth of the treads (2).
Because each tread “overlaps” those that precede and follow it, an alternating staircase might require only half the horizontal space of conventional stairs, and users can face forward when descending, where a ladder would require them to turn. The disadvantage is that they’re steep, and users must take care to begin each traverse with the correct foot. For that reason these stairs may not be safe for children or the elderly.
Below: In the Orange Tower, built in Carpentras at the start of the 14th century, builders set alternate risers at a diagonal to achieve an ascending slope of 45 degrees. “We will recognize that it is never subtlety that our medieval architects lack. But these latter examples only provide service stairs.”
(Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionary of French Architecture from 11th to 16th Century, 1856.)
