~feeds_feedburner_com | Bookmarks (190)
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The Territory - Futility Closet
Much blood has … been spilled on the carpet in attempts to distinguish between science fiction...
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Black and White - Futility Closet
“This seems to be my most ingenious two-mover,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov in 1970. He had composed...
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High and Dry - Futility Closet
Since much of the Netherlands is below sea level, Dutch farmers needed a way to leap...
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Board Walk - Futility Closet
Al writes the numbers 1, 2, …, 2n on a blackboard, where n is an odd...
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Misc - Futility Closet
To burn up is to burn down. Litotes is an anagram of T.S. Eliot. 1012658227848 ×...
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A Fistful of Scrawlers - Futility Closet
From an 1897 Strand article: The “typewriter glove” was “a contrivance of wash-leather, upon which were...
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Continuity - Futility Closet
In 1590 Emperor Rudolf II commissioned Flemish painter Joris Hoefnagel to illuminate the Mira calligraphiae monumenta,...
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Sousselier's Problem - Futility Closet
It appears that there was a club and the president decided that it would be nice...
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Illumination - Futility Closet
British artist Martin Creed introduced a controversial installation in 1995: an empty room in which the...
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Peak to Peak - Futility Closet
Pick any point in the interior of an equilateral triangle and draw a perpendicular to each...
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Self-Described - Futility Closet
Long-short-short, long-short-short Dactyls in dimeter, Verse form with choriambs (Masculine rhyme): One sentence (two stanzas) Hexasyllabically...
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Doppelgänger - Futility Closet
I don’t normally follow sports, but this seems worth remarking: Tonight Danny Jansen is set to...
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In a Word - Futility Closet
pluvial adj. relating to rainfall A little tap at the window, as though some missile had...
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Floating Faster - Futility Closet
A problem by Soviet physicist Viktor Lange: It’s not uncommon to see two ships traveling down...
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Off Schedule - Futility Closet
Mark Twain approaches the international date line, 1895: Sept. 8. To-morrow we shall be close to...
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Evidence - Futility Closet
It must, I think, be allowed, that if a very limited intelligence, whom we shall suppose...
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Ironically Apt - Futility Closet
In 2013, Japanese refrigeration company Fukushima Industries introduced a new mascot, a happy winged egg: “I...
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Catastrophe - Futility Closet
In Seven Types of Ambiguity (1949), William Empson describes a particularly inscrutable English newspaper headline: ITALIAN...
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Unquote - Futility Closet
Someone said to Socrates that a certain man had grown no better by his travels. ‘I...
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Nontransitive Tennis - Futility Closet
A problem from the 17th Irish Mathematical Olympiad, in 2004: In a tennis tournament, each player...
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Tense Trouble - Futility Closet
Sydney is 14 hours ahead of New York, so when it’s noon in Sydney it’s 10...
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Discernment - Futility Closet
The most successful critics are always scribbling things in their programs, largely because it gives them...
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To the Point - Futility Closet
In What a Word!, his 1936 examination of English usage, A.P. Herbert takes up a letter...