The Futility Closet

I have found a great new site called "Futility Closet" where they have interesting facts on a massive range of subjects. Also be sure to check out the games button. You can set up a personal profile of games to train your brain in any and all areas you think you need improvement.

Futility Closet

A couple of examples...

First from the humor section

Truth in Advertising

In 1866 Mark Twain embarked on a lecture tour in California. He wrote the handbills himself:

In Nevada City, he proposed to perform the following “wonderful feats of sleight of hand” after the lecture:

At a given signal, he will go out with any gentleman and take a drink. If desired, he will repeat this unique and interesting feat — repeat it until the audience are satisfied that there is no more deception about it.

At a moment’s warning, he will depart out of town and leave his hotel bill unsettled. He has performed this ludicrous feat many hundreds of times, in San Francisco, and elsewhere, and it has always elicited the most enthusiastic comments.

“The lecturer declines to specify any more of his miraculous feats at present,” he wrote, “for fear of getting the police too much interested in his circus.”

And another from the science section

The Tippe Top

The tippe top is a round top that, when spun, tilts to one side and leaps up onto its stem. This is perplexing, as the toy appears to be gaining energy — its center of mass rises with the flip.

How is this possible? The geometrical center of the top is higher than its center of mass. As the toy begins to topple to one side, friction with the underlying surface produces a torque that kicks it up onto its stem. It does gain potential energy, but it loses kinetic energy — in fact, during the inversion it actually reverses its direction of rotation.

Entire treatises have been written on the underlying physics, and the toy has occupied at least two Nobel Prize winners — below, Wolfgang Pauli and Niels Bohr play with one at the inauguration of the Institute of Physics at Lund, Sweden, in July 1954.

Thanks Op,
I wonder how many hours of my life will drain away in amusement thanks to your link.

Ps. I looooooooove odd little oddities like this