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Suppose you have a collection of gears pinned to a wall (disks in the plane). When is it possible to wrap a conveyor belt around them so that the belt touches every gear, is taut, and does not touch itself? This problem was first posed by Manuel Abellanas in 2001. When all the gears are the same size, it appears that it’s always possible...

MIT computer scientist Gerald Sussman offered this example to show the importance of sophisticated planning algorithms in artificial intelligence. Suppose an agent is told to stack these three blocks into a tower, with A at the top and C at the bottom, moving one block at a time: It might proceed by separating the goal into two subgoals: Get A onto B. Get B...

In 1896 the letter above arrived at the New York post office. As there was no Goat Street in New York, the office marked it misdirected and sent it on to Washington, where clerks eventually opened it, looking for further clues. They found this: Dear Santa, — When I said my prayers last night I told God to tell you to bring me a...

As a footnote to the above, I would like to say that I am getting very tired of literary authorities, on both the stage and the screen, who advise young writers to deal only with those subjects that happen to be familiar to them personally. It is quite true that this theory probably produced A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but the chances are it...

nimiety n. superfluity brachylogy n. a condensed expression scrimption n. a very small amount or degree perficient adj. that accomplishes something; effectual Leonard Bernstein conducts the Vienna Philharmonic without using his hands, 1984:

This is a variation on a perpetual motion machine proposed by the Indian mathematician Bhāskara II around 1150. Each of the wheel’s tilted spokes is filled with a quantity of sand. As the tubes descend on the right, the sand within them shifts outward, exerting greater torque in the clockwise direction and thus keeping the wheel turning forever. Unfortunately the same design ensures that...

In 1956, ornithologist Chandler Robbins tagged a wild female Laysan albatross at the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge in the North Pacific. The bird, dubbed Wisdom, went on to a stunning career, flying more than 3 million miles, equivalent to 120 trips around the Earth. She has been seen at the atoll as recently as last December, making her, at 72, the the oldest...

Steven Novak uses a laser to transfer a scene to the interior of a hemisphere. The completed painting then presents an “accurate” perspective to a viewer looking about from the center. Dick Termes creates the same impression (via a perceptual illusion) by painting on the convex exterior of a full sphere.

Dmitri Shostakovich’s first opera was a setting of Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 story “The Nose.” This scene is from the Royal Ballet & Opera’s 2016 staging. (Thanks, Randy.)

The 45-letter pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is often cited as one of the longest words in English — it’s been recognized both by Merriam-Webster and by the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED Supplement traced it to a 1936 puzzle book by Frank Scully called Bedside Manna, defining it as “a disease caused by ultra-microscopic particles of sandy volcanic dust.” But in fact it had appeared first in...

For his 1959 work Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle, Yves Klein sold the ownership of empty space. In its 1967 Air-Conditioning Show, English conceptual collaborative Art & Language presented an empty room containing two air conditioning units; the artwork was “what is felt and said about it.” James Lee Byars’ 1969 work The Ghost of James Lee Byars consisted of the emptiness and darkness...

Suppose we drop a glass rod and it breaks into three pieces. What is the probability that the pieces can form a triangle? Mathematician D.C. Johnson found this elegant geometric solution. In order to form a triangle, none of the three pieces can be longer than the other two combined. Now consider an equilateral triangle whose altitude equals the length of the glass rod...

“A footnote is like running downstairs to answer the doorbell during the first night of marriage.” — John Barrymore

This is a variation on an old puzzle by Martin Gardner. This desk calendar currently displays the date Monday, April 25. If the six cubes are capable of displaying any day of the week and any date from January 01 to December 31, what characters appear on the unseen faces in the picture? Gardner wrote, “It is a bit trickier than one might expect.”

South Carolina poet J. Gordon Coogler (1865-1901) was widely mocked for this terrible couplet: Alas! for the South, her books have grown fewer — She never was much given to literature. He complained, Oh you critics! — If an author errs in a single line, That line you’ll surely quote, And will give it as a sample fair Of all he ever wrote. But...

When his wife died in 1893, Brooklyn retiree Jonathan Reed had a tomb built in Evergreens Cemetery, where for 10 years he kept her company. “The Reed mausoleum was furnished just like a living room in a fine house,” read his New York Times obituary, “all the usual articles of furniture being provided. It was warmed with a fine oil stove manufactured specially for...

From Lee Sallows: As the reader can check, the English number names less than “twenty” are composed using 16 different letters of the alphabet. We assign a distinct integral value to each of these as follows: E F G H I L N O R S T U V W X Z 3 9 6 1 -4 0 5 -7 -6 -1 2 8...

When we read type we imagine that we read the whole of the type — but that is not so; we only notice the upper half of each letter. You can easily prove this for yourself by covering up the upper half of the line with a sheet of paper (being careful to hold the paper exactly in the middle of the letters), and...

The village of Hensbroek in North Holland takes its name from the personal name Hein and the Dutch cognate of brook, i.e., “Henry’s brook.” Magnificently, the municipal coat of arms interprets it instead as “hen’s breeches” — and depicts a chicken wearing trousers.

Ancient Athenians would sometimes encounter a remarkable sculpture on roads and in public places: The bearded head of the god Hermes set on a squared pillar of stone, with male genitals carved at the appropriate height. Hermes had been a phallic god before becoming a guardian of merchants and travelers, and so was associated with fertility, luck, roads, and borders. The hermae served as...

A Statesman who attended a meeting of a Chamber of Commerce rose to speak, but was objected to on the ground that he had nothing to do with commerce. ‘Mr. Chairman,’ said an Aged Member, rising, ‘I conceive that the objection is not well taken; the gentleman’s connection with commerce is close and intimate. He is a commodity.’ — Ambrose Bierce, Fantastic Fables, 1899

One summer afternoon in 1932, William Faulkner and his wife Estelle were sitting on the side porch of their home in Oxford, Mississippi. She said, “Does it ever seem to you that the light in August is different from any other time of the year?” He said, “That’s it!”, disappeared into the house, and returned a moment later. “What he had done was to...