The Bristol Bridges Walk - Futility Closet
In the 18th century Leonhard Euler famously addressed the question whether it was possible to walk...
Companion - Futility Closet
Rinaldo Carnielo’s sculpture Tenax Vitae stands in the Galleria Rinaldo Carnielo in Florence. After meeting the...
Hard to Say - Futility Closet
A paradox by Columbia University logician Haim Gaifman: line 1: The sentence on line 1 is...
The Most Wonderful Time of the Year - Futility Closet
In the middle of winter when fogs and rains most abound they have a great festival...
Tableau - Futility Closet
A pleasing little detail: In Arthur C. Clarke’s 1946 story “Rescue Party,” a federation of aliens...
Operation Cornflakes - Futility Closet
To disrupt German morale during World War II, the Allies hatched a plan to send anti-Nazi...
Words and Pictures - Futility Closet
This just caught my eye: In his manuscripts and notebooks, Alexander Pushkin often sketched the characters...
The Heist - Futility Closet
A puzzle by Jared Z., Nicole H., and Benjamin E., mathematicians at the National Security Agency:...
In a Word - Futility Closet
condisciple n. a fellow student precariat n. people whose living standards are insecure scripturiency n. passion...
Orthography - Futility Closet
A right-handed writer named Wright In writing write always wrote rite When he meant to write...
Yajilin - Futility Closet
The goal of this logic puzzle is simple: to draw an orthogonally connected, non-intersecting loop that...
Misc - Futility Closet
Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu are roughly antipodal. WONDER is UNDERWAY in Pig Latin. By convention,...
Degrees of Variance - Futility Closet
In a 2008 essay, computer scientist Paul Graham offered a hierarchy of verbal disagreement: “The most...
An Enigmatic Letter - Futility Closet
In 1614, William Nealson, a trader in Japan for the British East India Company, wrote to...
To Be Clear - Futility Closet
Modern punctuation doesn’t always do the job, so writers have suggested various improvements. In the 1580s,...
Ghost Leg - Futility Closet
Ghost leg is a method of establishing random pairings between any two sets of equal size....
Magic Square Hereabouts - Futility Closet
From Lee Sallows: A feature common to many geomagic squares is that the set of shapes...
Unquote - Futility Closet
“It is one of the misfortunes of life that one must read thousands of books only...
Pastiche - Futility Closet
The Journal International de Médecine carried a startling article in 1987: “Mise en Évidence Expérimentale d’une...
Black and White - Futility Closet
A logic problem in the shape of a chess puzzle, by Éric Angelini. White has just...
Rule of Thumb - Futility Closet
Peter Nicholson’s Carpenter’s New Guide of 1803 contains an interesting technique: To find a right line...
"The Only Will Ever Written in Shorthand" - Futility Closet
An 1897 article on curious wills in the Strand describes this 1813 will by the Rev....
In the Fold - Futility Closet
Just found this on Wikimedia Commons — “Where Is the Fifth Pig?”, an anonymous puzzle created...
Also-Rans - Futility Closet
“The dogs are, by placing two lines upon them, to be suddenly aroused to life and...
Backward and Forward - Futility Closet
John Grant McLoughlin offered this problem in Crux Mathematicorum in April 2008: Every four-digit numerical palindrome...
A Beautiful Relic - Futility Closet
The River Welland used to split into two channels in the heart of Crowland, Lincolnshire, and...
Things to Come - Futility Closet
An intriguing photo caption from A Mind at Play, Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman’s 2017 biography...
Our Best Friend - Futility Closet
A Victorian illusion from Richard Wiseman’s blog: What is this?
Decisions - Futility Closet
‘Suppose that a foolish man has seized hold of a plank from a sinking ship, shall...
Fore! - Futility Closet
Golfers at the Aroostook Valley Country Club have to play carefully — a stray shot might...
Point to Point - Futility Closet
Nearly every station in the London Underground contains an enamel plaque depicting a labyrinth. The collection...
"The Farmer's Life" - Futility Closet
The farmer leads no E Z life, The C D sows will rot, And when at...
Commentary - Futility Closet
Graffito, Paris, 2013. Below: In 2008, while anti-graffiti vigilante Fred Radtke was overpainting New Orleans street...
In a Word - Futility Closet
heuretic adj. of or relating to discovery or invention Sea travel is not kind to teapots,...
Long Distance - Futility Closet
Francis Galton was interested in communicating with Mars as early as 1892, when he wrote a...
Star Turn - Futility Closet
Stage actor Leo Reuss was just gaining fame in Berlin when the rising Nazi regime began...
Relative - Futility Closet
When E flat made its entrée into the drawing-room, C and G considered it a third...
Smart Money - Futility Closet
Mr. Smith goes to Atlantic City to gamble for a weekend. To guard against bad luck,...
Two Dire Punishments - Futility Closet
Under Roman law, subjects found guilty of patricide were subjected to poena cullei, the “penalty of...
All Right Then - Futility Closet
In the 1970’s, a student of Maoist inclination asked [Columbia philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser] if he disagreed...
Unquote - Futility Closet
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the...
Four Glasses - Futility Closet
Martin Gardner published this puzzle in his “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American in February 1979....
Cameo - Futility Closet
Grip, the talking raven in Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge, was based on a real bird, a pet...
Noted - Futility Closet
Archives Select Month October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April...
Band Practice - Futility Closet
Drill a hole straight through the center of a sphere, leaving a band in the shape...
Passing Through - Futility Closet
Just a striking image: German astronomer Johann Friedrich Julius Schmidt prepared a plaster moon for the...
Flat Devotion - Futility Closet
William Linkhaw sang so badly that a grand jury indicted him for disrupting his church’s services....
A Pi Diet - Futility Closet
Students beginning with the compass learn to draw this rosette, sometimes called the Flower of Life....
"Through the Looking-Glass" - Futility Closet
C.S. Kipping published this unusual problem in Chess Amateur in 1923. In each position, White is...
Fish Story - Futility Closet
Then there is the other secret. There isn’t any symbolysm. The sea is the sea. The...