Bookmarks (187)

“A man who has not read Homer is like a man who has not seen the ocean. There is a great object of which he has no idea.” — Walter Bagehot

Proverbs from around the world: “Opportunities come but do not linger.” — Nepalese “If you buy what you don’t need, you steal from yourself.” — Swedish “Happy nations have no history.” — Belgian “An old error has more friends than a new truth.” — Danish “Nothing is difficult if you’re used to it.” — Indonesian “The one being carried does not realize how far...

The Chief Defect of Henry King Was chewing little bits of String. At last he swallowed some which tied Itself in ugly Knots inside. Physicians of the Utmost Fame Were called at once; but when they came They answered, as they took their Fees, “There is no Cure for this Disease. “Henry will very soon be dead.” His Parents stood about his Bed Lamenting...

Writing in the Wall Street Journal about long sentences in literature, Laurie Winer offered her thoughts in a single sentence of 854 words: In order to credit William Faulkner — as the Guinness Book of World Records does — with the longest sentence in literature, one must include, when counting the words in Faulkner’s erratically punctuated, loosely defined ‘sentences,’ lengthy italicized passages that echo...

On hearing that Watership Down was a novel about rabbits written by a civil servant, Craig Brown wrote, “I would rather read a novel about civil servants written by a rabbit.”

I stole through the dungeons, while everyone slept, Till I came to the cage where the Monster was kept. There, locked in the arms of a Giant Baboon, Rigid and smiling, lay … Mrs. RAVOON! I climbed the clock-tower in the first morning sun And ’twas midday at least ere my journey was done; But the clock never sounded the last stroke of noon,...

“Lady Dillon told Sir F. Chantrey that English women were more buxom than Italian women. The delicate way she put it was, ‘you will find that Italian women can sit much closer to a wall than English.'” — George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book, 2002

A surprising detail from Duke Ellington’s childhood, from his 1973 autobiography Music Is My Mistress: There were many open lots around Washington then, and we used to play baseball at an old tennis court on Sixteenth Street. President Roosevelt would come by on his horse sometimes, and stop and watch us play. When he got ready to go, he would wave and we would...

An illusion by University of Texas engineer David Novick: All the spheres have the same light-brown base color (RGB 255,188,144). The intervening foreground stripes seem to impart different hues. See this Twitter thread for the same image with the foreground stripes removed.

Have the love and fear of God ever before thine eyes; God confirm your faith in Christ and that you may live accordingly, Je vous recommende a Dieu. If you meet with any pretty insects of any kind keep them in a box. — Sir Thomas Browne, letter to his son, 1661

“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

After the Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington was constantly asked to describe his adventures on that day. Eventually he insisted that all his stories had been told, but during a visit to the Marchioness of Downshire, he said, “Well, I’ll tell you one that has not been printed.” In the middle of the battle of Waterloo he saw a man in plain...

If you’re driving on the highway and pass a car traveling in the opposite direction, the frequency of its engine noise seems to drop. In 1980, Liverpool Polytechnic mathematician J.M.H. Peters realized that this pitch drop might be used to estimate the speed of the passing vehicle. Pleasingly, he discovered that each semitone in the interval corresponds to 21 miles per hour (to within...

The classic, of course, is the story that tells how Mrs. Webster once accidentally walked into a room and found her husband kissing the maid. ‘Noah!’ she exclaimed, ‘I’m surprised.’ Noah, ever the verbalist, was nonplussed. ‘No, my dear,’ he corrected. ‘It is I who am surprised. You are astonished.’ — Evan Esar, Humorous English, 1961

In March 1985, Science Digest published four pangrams composed by its readers — each 26-letter sentence uses every letter in the English alphabet: Shiv cwm lynx, fjord qutb, zap keg. (Randall Kryn) “A powerful Islamic saint (qutb) who lives in a fjord is told first to knife a troublesome lynx that lives in a mountain hollow (cwm) and then to celebrate by awesomely attacking...

From Good-Bye to All That, poet Robert Graves’ 1929 account of his experiences in World War I: Beaumont had been telling how he had won about five pounds’ worth of francs in the sweepstake after the Rue du Bois show: a sweepstake of the sort that leaves no bitterness behind it. Before a show, the platoon pools all its available cash and the survivors...

From the Strand, May 1899: Our next photograph is a facsimile of an address on a letter that found its way from Spain to the G.P.O., St. Martin’s-le-Grand. Remarkable as it may seem, this specimen of handwriting was deciphered by ‘the blind man of St. Martin’s,’ and the letter safely reached its destination. It is addressed to the ‘Spanish Ambassador (or Embassy), London.’ (The...

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...

Every positive integer can be represented uniquely as the sum of one or more distinct Fibonacci numbers in such a way that the sum does not include any two consecutive Fibonacci numbers. Above, 51 = 34 + 13 + 3 + 1. Discovered in 1952 by Dutch mathematician Gerrit Lekkerkerker (and remarked 20 years later by Edouard Zeckendorf).

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).

scribacious adj. fond of writing moiler n. a toiler; a drudge demiss adj. downcast; humble; abject guerdon n. a reward, recompense, or requital By the end of the 1960s, William Gaddis had secured an advance and an NEA grant that allowed him to work full-time on the novel J R. “Even then, however, Gaddis would be so in need of money that he would...

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN WILL NOT, AND OTHERS MUST NOT, PICK THE FLOWERS. — Notice, Woodenbridge Hotel garden, County Wicklow, Ireland, 1919

Once a woman, speaking to me of love’s delight, said: It begins with a thrill like that of a hot bath, delicious; but we desire a deeper intensity, and there comes a feeling of melting as if all the knots were loosening, and this is followed by a tearing till soul and body are about to part. We know not whether it be pain...

Master of Number, a collage by Gianni Sarcone presented at the Museum of Illusions in Kuala Lumpur in 2001.

Sydney Smith said that Henry Luttrell’s idea of heaven was eating pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets. “My idea of paradise is a perfect automobile going thirty miles an hour on a smooth road to a twelfth-century cathedral.” — Henry Adams “Perhaps in the next eggzi stens you and I and My lady may be able to sit for placid hours...

Raymond Queneau’s 1947 book Exercises in Style tells the same story in 99 different ways, from telegram to ode: Narrative: “One day at about midday in the Parc Monceau district, on the back platform of a more or less full S bus (now No. 84), I observed a person with a very long neck who was wearing a felt hat which had a plaited...

From Wikimedia user Cmglee: If the history of the universe were recounted backward in a 138-page book, with 100 lines on each page and 100 letters in each line, written human history would occupy half a letter. Everything involving humans would lie on the first line; the dinosaurs would die out on the first page; and by page 10 the most complex lifeforms would...

Reponse of a 10-year-old child invited to write an essay about a bird and a beast: The bird that I am going to write about is the owl. The owl cannot see at all by day and at night is as blind as a bat. I do not know much about the owl, so I will go on to the beast which I am...

By Wikimedia user Efbrazil. Begin at the star. The number at your current position tells you the number of blocks that your next jump must span. All jumps must be orthogonal. So, for example, your first jump must take you to the 1 in the lower left corner or the 2 in the upper right. What sequence of jumps will return you to the...

In Bologna, the former convent of San Michele in Bosco contains a 162-meter hallway that’s “aimed” at the Asinelli tower 1,407 meters from the window. This produces an odd effect: As you move north along the hallway toward the window, you’re approaching the tower, yet it seems to shrink. This is because the retinal size of the window’s aperture increases enormously as you approach...

“The Great Matrimonial Admonisher and Pacificator,” a reversible lithograph published in Baltimore in 1861. Via the Library of Congress.

Excerpts from the literary notebooks of Thomas Hardy: “Loughborough used to say, ‘Do what you think right, & never think of what you are going to say to excuse it beforehand.’ — a good maxim.” “Bonaparte had not the patience requisite for defensive operations, said Wellington.” “Miracles, scriptural & ecclesiastical — how make a difference?” “Brahms – The individual character of his ideas. …...

Pat Ashforth and Steve Plummer make knitted illusions. When it’s viewed from the front, each piece presents only a series of unremarkable stripes, but when it’s viewed obliquely, an image emerges. Here’s an introduction to the technique, and here are some patterns.

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...

If nature be regarded as the teacher and we poor human beings as her pupils, the human race presents a very curious picture. We all sit together at a lecture and possess the necessary principles for understanding it, yet we always pay more attention to the chatter of our fellow students than to the lecturer’s discourse. Or, if our neighbor copies something down, we...

Raymond Smullyan presented this oddity in his Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes in 1980. Suppose we come upon this abandoned chess game. Can White mate in two moves? The answer seems to be yes. If Black can’t castle, then White can play 1. Ke6 and then promote his g-pawn, giving mate. If Black can castle, that means that neither his king nor his rook...

This is beautifully well done — a humiliating list of all the ways your brain can deceive you (click to enlarge). Designed by John Manoogian III.

This is a picture of a cow. If you can’t see it (I couldn’t), there’s an explanatory image on page 66 of John McCrone’s 1991 book The Ape That Spoke. The experience illustrates how the brain is able to construct a picture from limited data by relying on patterns and experience.

Thomas Jefferson to the Rev. Isaac Story, Dec. 5, 1801, on the afterlife: When I was young I was fond of the speculations which seemed to promise some insight into that hidden country, but observing at length that they left me in the same ignorance in which they had found me, I have for very many years ceased to read or to think concerning...

These are the punts of Trinity College, Cambridge, moored on the River Cam. What is the significance of their names?

Steaming from New York to the Azores in 1867, Mark Twain noted a curious companion overhead: We had the phenomenon of a full moon located just in the same spot in the heavens at the same hour every night. The reason of this singular conduct on the part of the moon did not occur to us at first, but it did afterward when we...

Reader J. William Hook submitted this curiosity to the Strand in August 1899. Holding the page level with the eyes foreshortens the characters and reveals a love poem: Art thou not dear unto my heart? Oh, I search that heart and see And from my bosom tear the part That beats not true to thee. But to my bosom thou art dear, More dear...

(Until William Herschel’s advances in telescopes, stars seemed to have “rays” or “tails.”) At a dinner given by Mr Aubert in the year 1786, William Herschel was seated next to Mr Cavendish, who was reputed to be the most taciturn of men. Some time passed without his uttering a word, then he suddenly turned to his neighbour and said: ‘I am told that you...

An art gallery with n walls will always be safe with n/3 guards — the guards will always be able arrange themselves to observe the whole gallery. That’s Chvátal’s art gallery theorem, discovered in 1973 by mathematician Václav Chvátal. Interestingly, it’s true only of two-dimensional floor plans — a three-dimensional gallery may not be safe even if you post a guard at every corner....

For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner. It is not a mechanical routine but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I cannot think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not its only meaning for...