~feeds_feedburner_com | Bookmarks (190)
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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...
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Pithy - Futility Closet
Mark Antony’s funeral oration rendered in Scrabble tiles, by Pete Stickland: COUNTRYMEN, I AM TO BURY,...
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Roll Call - Futility Closet
Unusual personal names collected in Oklahoma by onomastician Thomas Pyles in the 1940s: A. Noble Ladd...
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Shorthand - Futility Closet
The so-called four-field approach in anthropology divides the discipline into four subfields: archaeology, linguistics, physical anthropology,...
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Sharp Practice - Futility Closet
Talking of shaving the other night at Dr. Taylor’s, Dr. Johnson said, ‘Sir, of a thousand...
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Stature - Futility Closet
Venice’s Museo Correr exhibits a pair of wooden implements whose use isn’t immediately clear — they’re...
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Cube Route - Futility Closet
A centered hexagonal number is a number that can be represented by a hexagonal lattice with...
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Reflections - Futility Closet
Epigrams of poet Ralph Hodgson: Oaths in anguish rank with prayers. The wink was not our...
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Liberty - Futility Closet
Reader Derek Christie sent in this surprising curiosity after Wednesday’s post about Borromean rings: Both the...
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Step by Step - Futility Closet
“Rules for the direction of the mind,” from an unfinished treatise by René Descartes: The aim...
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Temper - Futility Closet
It is time to bury the nonsense of the ‘incomplete animal.’ As Julian Huxley, the eminent...
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Misc - Futility Closet
Vatican City has 2.27 popes per square kilometer. Skylab was fined for littering. Five-syllable rhyming words...
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All Together Now - Futility Closet
German scientist Gaspar Schott’s 1657 Magia universalis naturæ et artis includes a description of “the music...
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In a Word - Futility Closet
rarissima n. extremely rare books, manuscripts, or prints In The Book Hunter (1863), John Hill Burton...
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The Champ - Futility Closet
Proposed cabinet of Dizzy Gillespie, who ran for president in 1964: Secretary of State: Duke Ellington...
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Dis-Connected - Futility Closet
These circles display an odd property — the three are linked, but no two are linked....
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Keeping Up - Futility Closet
Scotland’s Paisley Abbey updated its gargoyles in 1991.
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Hunting - Futility Closet
In 1975 British biologist Peter Scott proposed dubbing the Loch Ness Monster Nessiteras rhombopteryx after a...
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Footwork - Futility Closet
Dion is a person, a whole man. Theon is that part of Dion that does not...
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Zoology - Futility Closet
Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language defines lizard as “an animal resembling a serpent,...
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Unquote - Futility Closet
“Three blokes walk into a pub. One of them is a little bit stupid, and the...