Bookmarks (174)

In 2015 Nature published an alarming article suggesting that dragons are real and had only gone to sleep during the Little Ice Age. A medieval document discovered “under a pile of rusty candlesticks” in the Bodleian Library showed that the creatures were once common but had entered a state of brumation when temperatures dropped and their traditional diet of knights began to thin. Rising...

In 1991, artist Michael Dennis installed his sculpture Reclining Figure in Vancouver’s Guelph Park. In 2012, prankster Viktor Briestensky erected the sign below at the park’s southwest corner. Park staff initially removed the sign, but when a petition gathered 1,800 signatures they replaced it in 2014. The city now recognizes it as an official public art installation.

“If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay — in solid cash — the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.” — Aldous Huxley

From a letter from English scholar Walter Raleigh to Mrs. F. Gotch, July 2, 1898: Doe you lyke my newe phansy in the matere of Spelynge? I have growen wery of Spelynge wordes allwaies in one waye and now affecte diversite. The cheif vertew of my reform is that it makes the spelynge express the moode of the wryter. Frinsns, if yew fealin frenly,...

Two sets of reversible faces by Rex Whistler, from 1930 — above, Mayor & Judge; below, Scotsman & Englishman.

English poet Winthrop Mackworth Praed was renowned for his charades — this one, published in the 1830s, has never been solved: Sir Hilary charged at Agincourt,– Sooth, ’twas an awful day! And though in that old age of sport The rufflers of the camp and court Had little time to pray, ’Tis said Sir Hilary mutter’d there Two syllables by way of prayer. My...

In 1979 Auberon Waugh was working as a columnist at Private Eye when his editor offered him a trip to Senegal to help celebrate the anniversary of the magazine’s sister publication. “All I would have to give in exchange was a short discourse in the French language on the subject of breast feeding.” The assignment struck Waugh as strange but not unaccountable — he’d...

Suppose you’re hiking in the woods and become lost. What’s the best path to follow to find the boundary? You know the forest’s shape and dimensions, but you don’t know where you are within it, nor which direction you’re facing. This has remained an open problem ever since mathematician Richard Bellman posed it in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society in 1956. The...

Much blood has … been spilled on the carpet in attempts to distinguish between science fiction and fantasy. I have suggested an operational definition: science fiction is something that could happen — but usually you wouldn’t want it to. Fantasy is something that couldn’t happen — though often you only wish that it could. — Arthur C. Clarke, foreword, The Collected Stories of Arthur...

“This seems to be my most ingenious two-mover,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov in 1970. He had composed it a year earlier in Montreux. White to mate in two moves.

Since much of the Netherlands is below sea level, Dutch farmers needed a way to leap waterways to reach their various plots of land. Over time this evolved into a competitive sport, known as fierljeppen (“far leaping”) in which contestants sprint to the water, seize a 10-meter pole, and climb it as it lurches forward over the channel. The winner is the one who...

Al writes the numbers 1, 2, …, 2n on a blackboard, where n is an odd positive integer. He then picks any two numbers a and b, erases them, and writes instead |a – b|. He keeps doing this until one number remains. Prove that this number is odd.

To burn up is to burn down. Litotes is an anagram of T.S. Eliot. 1012658227848 × 8 = 8101265822784 Three U.S. presidents died on July 4. “Grasp the subject, the words will follow.” — Cato the Elder

From an 1897 Strand article: The “typewriter glove” was “a contrivance of wash-leather, upon which were embossed a set of rubber types. ‘Caps’ were on the left hand. Small letters on the right. The ink was supplied by a couple of pads, fixed to the palms of the gloves; and the alternate opening and shutting [of] the hands was supposed to bring it in...

In 1590 Emperor Rudolf II commissioned Flemish painter Joris Hoefnagel to illuminate the Mira calligraphiae monumenta, an illustration of various scripts that had been begun 15 years earlier by court calligrapher Georg Bocskay. The book contains a tiny demonstration of Hoefnagel’s skill in trompe-l’œil. On one page he painted a Maltese cross, a type of flower, depicting it as though the plant’s stem passes...

It appears that there was a club and the president decided that it would be nice to hold a dinner for all the members. In order not to give any one member prominence, the president felt that they should be seated at a round table. But at this stage he ran into some problems. It seems that the club was not all that amicable...

British artist Martin Creed introduced a controversial installation in 1995: an empty room in which the lights turn on and off at 5-second intervals. Critic David Lee said, “Last year, the Tate was scraping the barrel. This year they are scraping the scrapings … A light being switched on and off is not a good work of art.” But when Creed submitted the work...

Pick any point in the interior of an equilateral triangle and draw a perpendicular to each of the three sides. The sum of these perpendiculars is the height of the triangle. That’s Viviani’s theorem. This visual proof is by CMG Lee: Choose point P and draw the three perpendiculars. Now draw three lines through P, each parallel to a side of the main triangle....

Long-short-short, long-short-short Dactyls in dimeter, Verse form with choriambs (Masculine rhyme): One sentence (two stanzas) Hexasyllabically Challenges poets who Don’t have the time. — Roger L. Robison

I don’t normally follow sports, but this seems worth remarking: Tonight Danny Jansen is set to become the first baseball player to play for both teams in the same game. Jansen was in the lineup for the Toronto Blue Jays when they faced Boston on June 26, a game that was suspended because of rain and scheduled to be made up on Monday. In...

pluvial adj. relating to rainfall A little tap at the window, as though some missile had struck it, followed by a plentiful, falling sound, as light, though, as if a shower of sand were being sprinkled from a window overhead; then the fall spread, took on an order, a rhythm, became liquid, loud, drumming, musical, innumerable, universal. It was the rain. — Proust, Swann’s...

A problem by Soviet physicist Viktor Lange: It’s not uncommon to see two ships traveling down a river at different velocities — this is due to differences in design and engine power. “But why can rafts which have no engines float down the river with different velocities, too? It has been even noticed that the heavier the raft the higher its velocity. Why is...

Mark Twain approaches the international date line, 1895: Sept. 8. To-morrow we shall be close to the center of the globe … And then we must drop out a day — lose a day out of our lives, a day never to be found again. We shall all die one day earlier than from the beginning of time we were foreordained to die. We...

It must, I think, be allowed, that if a very limited intelligence, whom we shall suppose utterly unacquainted with the universe, were assured, that it were the production of a very good, wise, and powerful Being, however finite, he would, from his conjectures, form beforehand a different notion of it from what we find it to be by experience; nor would he ever imagine,...

In 2013, Japanese refrigeration company Fukushima Industries introduced a new mascot, a happy winged egg: “I fly around on my awesome wings, patrolling supermarket showcases and kitchen refrigerators. I can talk to vegetables, fruit, meat, and fish and can check on their health! I was born in a Fukushima refrigerator! I love eating and I’m full of curiosity. I think of myself as kind,...

In Seven Types of Ambiguity (1949), William Empson describes a particularly inscrutable English newspaper headline: ITALIAN ASSASSIN BOMB PLOT DISASTER Bomb and plot, you notice, can be either nouns or verbs, and would take kindly to being adjectives, not that they are anything so definite here. One thinks at first that there are two words or sentences, and a semicolon has been left out...

Someone said to Socrates that a certain man had grown no better by his travels. ‘I should think not,’ he said; ‘he took himself along with him.’ — Montaigne, Essays

A problem from the 17th Irish Mathematical Olympiad, in 2004: In a tennis tournament, each player played one match against each of the others. If each player won at least one match, show that there’s a group of three players A, B, C in which A beat B, B beat C, and C beat A.

Sydney is 14 hours ahead of New York, so when it’s noon in Sydney it’s 10 p.m. the previous day in New York. Suppose you were broadcasting to the U.S. on a news-service hook-up from Sydney, and wanted to tell the American public about an explosion that occurred at 2:30 A.M. in a factory in Sydney. Would you say ‘There will be an explosion...

The most successful critics are always scribbling things in their programs, largely because it gives them an important and industrious air. Also, it is interesting to try to figure out what you’ve written afterward. Last week, for instance, I made a very helpful note during the second act of a drama called ‘They Walk Alone.’ ‘Lanchstr get face stuck 1 these nights awful if,’...

In What a Word!, his 1936 examination of English usage, A.P. Herbert takes up a letter written in “officese”: Madam, We are in receipt of your favour of the 9th inst. with regard to the estimate required for the removal of your furniture and effects from the above address to Burbleton, and will arrange for a Representative to call to make an inspection on...

Mark Antony’s funeral oration rendered in Scrabble tiles, by Pete Stickland: COUNTRYMEN, I AM TO BURY, NOT EULOGIZE, CAESAR; IF EVIL LIVES ON, BEQUEATHING INJURY, GOOD OFT EXPIRES: A PALSIED, AWKWARD DEATH! The tiles can also spell: QUEASY RADIOMAN WEPT: GOT TO EYE FEROCIOUS BLAZE OF VIVID AERIAL EXPLOSION, CREMATING WILTED HINDENBURG AT LAKEHURST, N.J.

Unusual personal names collected in Oklahoma by onomastician Thomas Pyles in the 1940s: A. Noble Ladd Beverage Porter Bunker Hill Charming Fox Erie Lake France Paris Gunga Dean Harness Upp Harry Baer Ima Goose Jack Frost Johnny Steele Casebeer Liberty Bond Pansy Leafe Pearl Button Rose Bush Safety Reuel First Winter Frost Ima Foster and Ura Foster, possibly twin sisters, both received master’s degrees...

The so-called four-field approach in anthropology divides the discipline into four subfields: archaeology, linguistics, physical anthropology, and cultural anthropology. Students call these “stones, tones, bones, and thrones.”

Talking of shaving the other night at Dr. Taylor’s, Dr. Johnson said, ‘Sir, of a thousand shavers, two do not shave so much alike as not to be distinguished.’ I thought this not possible, till he specified so many of the varieties in shaving; — holding the razor more or less perpendicular; — drawing long or short strokes; — beginning at the upper part...

Venice’s Museo Correr exhibits a pair of wooden implements whose use isn’t immediately clear — they’re chopines, a type of platform shoe popular in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. Worn under a woman’s skirt they could add up to 20 inches to her height, giving her an impressive eminence but an uncertain gait. Shakespeare mocked the trend in Hamlet’s greeting to a visiting...

A centered hexagonal number is a number that can be represented by a hexagonal lattice with a dot in the center, like so: Starting at the center, successive hexagons contain 1, 7, 19, and 37 dots. The sequence goes on forever. The sum of the first n centered hexagonal numbers is n3, and there’s a pretty “proof without words” to show that this is...

Epigrams of poet Ralph Hodgson: Oaths in anguish rank with prayers. The wink was not our best invention. When crises pall, humdrum is sensational. But Woman — in whose image made? A sparrow in a snowstorm with a feather in his bill: that is Faith. Forget the slush, but keep the snow / Of Christmasses of long ago. Anniversary: Familiarity breeds content. Some things...

Reader Derek Christie sent in this surprising curiosity after Wednesday’s post about Borromean rings: Both the ring and the karabiner clip are attached to the cord and can’t be removed. Now complicate matters by clipping the karabiner onto the ring: Quite unexpectedly, the cord can now be just pulled away: (Thanks, Derek.) (A related perplexity: The Prisoners’ Release Puzzle.)

“Rules for the direction of the mind,” from an unfinished treatise by René Descartes: The aim of our studies must be the direction of our mind so that it may form solid and true judgments on whatever matters arise. We must occupy ourselves only with those objects that our intellectual powers appear competent to know certainly and indubitably. As regards any subject we propose...

It is time to bury the nonsense of the ‘incomplete animal.’ As Julian Huxley, the eminent British biologist, once observed concerning human toughness, man is the only creature that can walk twenty miles, run two miles, swim a river, and then climb a tree. Physiologically, he has one of the toughest bodies known; no other species could survive weeks of exposure on the open...

Vatican City has 2.27 popes per square kilometer. Skylab was fined for littering. Five-syllable rhyming words in English: vocabulary, constabulary 8767122 + 3287682 = 876712328768 “We die only once, and for such a long time!” — Molière Above is the only known film footage of Mark Twain, shot at Twain’s Connecticut home in 1909. The women are thought to be his daughters Clara and...

German scientist Gaspar Schott’s 1657 Magia universalis naturæ et artis includes a description of “the music of donkeys”: “the trick, according to Schott, lay in using male donkeys of particular natural pitches and stimulating them to bray with the urine of a female donkey, which will induce the males to make ‘most contented’ noises that the generous might construe as a kind of music.”...

rarissima n. extremely rare books, manuscripts, or prints In The Book Hunter (1863), John Hill Burton identifies five types of “persons who meddle with books”: “A bibliognoste, from the Greek, is one knowing in title-pages and colophons, and in editions; the place and year when printed; the presses whence issued; and all the minutiae of a book.” “A bibliographe is a describer of books...

Proposed cabinet of Dizzy Gillespie, who ran for president in 1964: Secretary of State: Duke Ellington Director of the CIA: Miles Davis Secretary of Defense: Max Roach Secretary of Peace: Charles Mingus Librarian of Congress: Ray Charles Secretary of Agriculture: Louis Armstrong Ambassador to the Vatican: Mary Lou Williams Travelling Ambassador: Thelonious Monk Attorney General: Malcolm X He said his running mate would be...

These circles display an odd property — the three are linked, but no two are linked. A.G. Smith exhibited this curious variant in Eureka in 1967: “I leave it to the reader the problem of finding whether Knotung is knotted, and if so, whether it is equivalent to the Borromean Rings, with which it shares the property that cutting any one loop releases the...

In 1975 British biologist Peter Scott proposed dubbing the Loch Ness Monster Nessiteras rhombopteryx after a blurry underwater photograph seemed to show one of the creature’s fins. He’d intended the name to mean “monster of Ness with diamond-shaped fin,” but the Daily Telegraph pointed out that its letters could be rearranged to spell “Monster hoax by Sir Peter S.” American lawyer Robert Rines, who...

Dion is a person, a whole man. Theon is that part of Dion that does not include the left foot. Theon is a “proper part” of Dion — he’s part of Dion but not identical with him. Now suppose we remove Dion’s left foot. What has happened? Do we now have two numerically different objects composed of the same matter and occupying the same...