Eating dead live fish has long inspired some people to some speculation about some incidents. This is further speculation about one of those incidents: “Bad Sushi or Bad Merchant? The ‘Dead Fish Poisoning Incident’ of 1852,” Hiraku Shimoda [pictured here], Modern Asian Studies, vol. 35, no. 3, July 2001, pp 513-531. The author, then at […]
Tag: history
Animal Fighters Speculation (c.1901)
“Supposing all the animals in the ‘Zoo’ at Regent’s Park [London] were to begin a fight to the death, who would be the ultimate victor?” – asked a syndicated item in The Mercury (Hobart, Tasmania) on Wednesday the 16th of January 1901. The article ran through the various fighting attributes of elephants, lions, tigers, deer, […]
The day engineers ceased to be boring (in Britain)
In August 1996, British civil engineers ceased to be officially boring. Glenda Browne, prompted by the appearance of the special Boring Machines issue the Annals of Improbable Research, alerts us to a report about that historic occasion. The AP wire service reported, in 1996: CIVIL ENGINEERS NO LONGER BORING — YELLOW PAGES SAYS SO DIRK BEVERIDGE , Associated Press […]
Simanek’s Perpetual Futility
Donald E. Simanek‘s “Perpetual Futility—A short history of the search for perpetual motion” is an introduction to the perhaps perpetual search for perpetual motion. It begins: Popular histories too often present perpetual motion machines as “freaks and curiosities” of engineering without telling us just how they were understood at the time. They also fail to inform […]