Bookmarks (188)

Reponse of a 10-year-old child invited to write an essay about a bird and a beast: The bird that I am going to write about is the owl. The owl cannot see at all by day and at night is as blind as a bat. I do not know much about the owl, so I will go on to the beast which I am...

By Wikimedia user Efbrazil. Begin at the star. The number at your current position tells you the number of blocks that your next jump must span. All jumps must be orthogonal. So, for example, your first jump must take you to the 1 in the lower left corner or the 2 in the upper right. What sequence of jumps will return you to the...

In Bologna, the former convent of San Michele in Bosco contains a 162-meter hallway that’s “aimed” at the Asinelli tower 1,407 meters from the window. This produces an odd effect: As you move north along the hallway toward the window, you’re approaching the tower, yet it seems to shrink. This is because the retinal size of the window’s aperture increases enormously as you approach...

“The Great Matrimonial Admonisher and Pacificator,” a reversible lithograph published in Baltimore in 1861. Via the Library of Congress.

Excerpts from the literary notebooks of Thomas Hardy: “Loughborough used to say, ‘Do what you think right, & never think of what you are going to say to excuse it beforehand.’ — a good maxim.” “Bonaparte had not the patience requisite for defensive operations, said Wellington.” “Miracles, scriptural & ecclesiastical — how make a difference?” “Brahms – The individual character of his ideas. …...

Pat Ashforth and Steve Plummer make knitted illusions. When it’s viewed from the front, each piece presents only a series of unremarkable stripes, but when it’s viewed obliquely, an image emerges. Here’s an introduction to the technique, and here are some patterns.

Conventional stairs are somewhat extravagant: Because users alternate their steps (1), half of each tread goes unused. In close quarters, floor space can be conserved by omitting these unused portions (3), permitting a slope as high as 65 degrees without sacrificing the depth of the treads (2). Because each tread “overlaps” those that precede and follow it, an alternating staircase might require only half...

If nature be regarded as the teacher and we poor human beings as her pupils, the human race presents a very curious picture. We all sit together at a lecture and possess the necessary principles for understanding it, yet we always pay more attention to the chatter of our fellow students than to the lecturer’s discourse. Or, if our neighbor copies something down, we...

Raymond Smullyan presented this oddity in his Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes in 1980. Suppose we come upon this abandoned chess game. Can White mate in two moves? The answer seems to be yes. If Black can’t castle, then White can play 1. Ke6 and then promote his g-pawn, giving mate. If Black can castle, that means that neither his king nor his rook...

This is beautifully well done — a humiliating list of all the ways your brain can deceive you (click to enlarge). Designed by John Manoogian III.

This is a picture of a cow. If you can’t see it (I couldn’t), there’s an explanatory image on page 66 of John McCrone’s 1991 book The Ape That Spoke. The experience illustrates how the brain is able to construct a picture from limited data by relying on patterns and experience.

Thomas Jefferson to the Rev. Isaac Story, Dec. 5, 1801, on the afterlife: When I was young I was fond of the speculations which seemed to promise some insight into that hidden country, but observing at length that they left me in the same ignorance in which they had found me, I have for very many years ceased to read or to think concerning...

These are the punts of Trinity College, Cambridge, moored on the River Cam. What is the significance of their names?

Steaming from New York to the Azores in 1867, Mark Twain noted a curious companion overhead: We had the phenomenon of a full moon located just in the same spot in the heavens at the same hour every night. The reason of this singular conduct on the part of the moon did not occur to us at first, but it did afterward when we...

Reader J. William Hook submitted this curiosity to the Strand in August 1899. Holding the page level with the eyes foreshortens the characters and reveals a love poem: Art thou not dear unto my heart? Oh, I search that heart and see And from my bosom tear the part That beats not true to thee. But to my bosom thou art dear, More dear...

(Until William Herschel’s advances in telescopes, stars seemed to have “rays” or “tails.”) At a dinner given by Mr Aubert in the year 1786, William Herschel was seated next to Mr Cavendish, who was reputed to be the most taciturn of men. Some time passed without his uttering a word, then he suddenly turned to his neighbour and said: ‘I am told that you...

An art gallery with n walls will always be safe with n/3 guards — the guards will always be able arrange themselves to observe the whole gallery. That’s Chvátal’s art gallery theorem, discovered in 1973 by mathematician Václav Chvátal. Interestingly, it’s true only of two-dimensional floor plans — a three-dimensional gallery may not be safe even if you post a guard at every corner....

For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner. It is not a mechanical routine but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I cannot think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not its only meaning for...

renitence n. unwillingness, resistance to persuasion subdolous adj. cunning, crafty, sly autoschediasm n. something done on the spur of the moment or without preparation legerity n. physical or mental quickness FDR’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull, was famously unforthcoming, concealing his plans and emotions with the skill of a poker player. When Hull was a legislator in Tennessee, one of his friends bet that...

Julius Caesar thought that elk have no knees. Duke Ellington’s first piano teacher was named Marietta Clinkscales. Orizabus subaziro, a rhinoceros beetle, has a palindromic species name. POSSESSIONLESSNESSES has 9 S’s. “Books are companions even if you don’t open them.” — Disraeli

From Martin Geldart’s Guide to Modern Greek, 1883: Here we are (arrived) at the station. What luggage have you, sir? I have two trunks, a travelling-bag, and a hat-box, for the luggage van. These I wish to register. My other luggage I will take with me. That is to say — a foot-wrapper, a stick, three or four parcels, a gun, a lap-dog, two...

In September 1931 the Weekend Review pointed out the “regrettable omission of any reference to tooth-brushing in the description of Adam and Eve retiring for the night” in Book IV of Paradise Lost. It challenged its readers to improve Milton’s text; polymath Edward Marsh inserted these lines: [… and eas’d the putting off These troublesome disguises which wee wear,] Yet pretermitted not the strait...

Who’s Who invites its contributors to list their recreations. Some responses are unusual: Charles Causley: “Playing the piano with expression.” John Faulkner: “Intricacies and wildernesses.” John Fowles: “Mainly Sabine.” Bevis Hillier: “Awarding marks out of ten for suburban front gardens.” James Kirkup: “Standing in shafts of sunlight.” (In old age he changed this to “Standing in shafts of moonlight.”) Edward Lucie-Smith: “Walking the dog;...

Gulliver’s Travels describes a device by which “the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study”: He then led me to the frame, about the sides whereof all his pupils stood in ranks. It was twenty feet square, placed in...

In 1955, the editor of a Michigan high school newspaper wrote to E.E. Cummings, asking his advice for students who wanted to follow in his footsteps. He sent this reply: A Poet’s Advice to Students A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words. This may sound easy. It isn’t. A lot of people think or believe or know they...

A problem from Cambridge mathematician J.E. Littlewood’s Miscellany (1953): Is it possible to pack a cube with a finite number of smaller cubes, no two of which are the same size?

Song of a neighborhood nightingale transcribed in 1868 by German naturalist Johann Matthäus Bechstein: Tioû, tioû, tioû, tioû. Spe, tiou, squa. Tiô, tiô, tiô, tiô, tio, tio, tio, tix. Coutio, coutio, coutio, coutio. Squô, squô, squô, squô. Tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzi. Corror, tiou, squa pipiqui. Zozozozozozozozozozozozo, zirrhading! Tsissisi, tsissisisisisisisis. Dzorre, dzorre, dzorre, dzorre, hi. Tzatu, tzatu, tzatu, tzatu,...

In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), Giorgio Vasari notes that in January 1494, while Michelangelo was working on his first full-scale stone figure, “there was a heavy snowfall in Florence and Piero de’ Medici, Lorenzo’s eldest son … wanting, in his youthfulness, to have a statue made of snow in the middle of his courtyard, remembered and sent...

If all the good people were clever, And all clever people were good, The world would be nicer than ever We thought that it possibly could. But somehow ’tis seldom or never The two hit it off as they should, The good are so harsh to the clever, The clever, so rude to the good! So friends, let it be our endeavour To make...

Reader William Walkington devised this “hollow” cube of order 4, each of whose faces is a magic square that draws on numbers from 1 to 56. The lines of four numbers in each row, column, long diagonal, and even some of the broken diagonals, produce the magic sum 114. Further, remarkably, when the figure is “scrambled” like a Rubik’s cube, the result is often...

“Description of things and atmosphere” from the notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The island floated, a boat becalmed, upon the almost perceptible curve of the world.” “The first lights of the evening were springing into pale existence. The Ferris wheel, pricked out now in lights, revolved leisurely through the dusk; a few empty cars of the roller coaster rattled overhead.” “Farther out in the...

The second stanza of this poem is an anagram of the first: A girl once kept a tiny sheep, Widely famed for whiteness: This pet would dog her every step, No certain sign of brightness. ‘Twas viewed, the pest, one day in class By impish children there; Kids laugh to see pets, goofing off, Weren’t trying — open, err! Composed by James Rambo of...

Caprices of Oxford dons, recounted in Maurice Bowra’s Memories: 1898-1939: “In his quiet way [Wadham College Warden Joseph Wells] had an impressive authority, and it was told that once, when he heard a fearful row in the back quad, he walked up in the dark and said, ‘If you don’t stop at once, I shall light a match.’ They stopped.” “[Oxford administrator Benjamin Parsons]...

In judging others we can see too well Their grievous fall, but not how grieved they fell; Judging ourselves, we to our minds recall, Not how we fell, but how we grieved to fall. — George Crabbe, “Boys at School,” 1819

Dante’s 1577 essay “De vulgari eloquentia” contains a 27-letter word, sovramagnificentissimamente, “supermagnificently.” Life Savers candies were invented by Hart Crane’s father. (Colin Rose) RETROSUSCEPTION is an anagram of COUNTERRIPOSTES. “Of all the reciprocals of integers, the one that I best like is 1/0 for it is a titan amongst midgets.” — Sam Linial Lord David Cecil called Samuel Johnson “an outstanding example of the...

Visiting Orchomenus, Greece, in 1810, Lord Byron discovered this entry in the travelers’ book: Fair Albion, smiling, sees her son depart To trace the birth and nursery of art: Noble his object, glorious is his aim; He comes to Athens, and he — writes his name. Beneath this Byron wrote: The modest bard, like many a bard unknown, Rhymes on our names, but wisely...

Visual proofs of the formulas for the difference (left) and sum (right) of two cubes. By CMG Lee.

“When I stop drinking tea and eating bread and butter I say, ‘I’ve had enough.’ But when I stop reading poems or novels I say, ‘No more of that, no more of that.'” — Chekhov

In the church of St. Mary Magdalen in Mulbarton, Norfolk, is mounted a copper diptych, a memorial to resident Sarah Scargill, who died in 1680. The left panel remembers Scargill as “a Person of unimitable Devotion, of a most nice and tender Conscience, of sweet Behaviour, and in all Things so faithfull a Servant of God, that I dare contest the Divine Goodness to...

Two evenings spent at La Scala, Milan, one of them standing up, the other sitting down. On the first evening, I was continuously conscious of the existence of the spectators who were seated. On the second evening, I was completely unconscious of the existence of the spectators who were standing up (and of those who were seated also). — Simone Weil, quoted in W.H....

Describing this fish (Holocanthus Alternaus), which was caught off Zanzibar, a correspondent of the ‘Times of India’ wrote: ‘… On the one side of the tail are the words, La-ilaha-illa Allah’ — ‘There is no God but God.’ On the other side, ‘Shan Allah’ — ‘God’s Work,’ or ‘An Act of God.’ … Many of our readers who know Arabic will be able to...

Palindromes submitted by correspondent Henry Campkin to Notes and Queries in 1873: A milksop jilted by his lass, or wandering in his wits, Might murmer STIFF, O DAIRYMAN, IN A MYRIAD OF FITS! A limner, by Photography dead beat in competition, Thus grumbled: NO IT IS OPPOSED, ART SEES TRADE’S OPPOSITION! A nonsense-loving nephew might his soldier-uncle dun, With NOW STOP, MAJOR GENERAL, ARE...

In Eric Cross’ 1942 book The Tailor and Ansty, Irish tailor and storyteller Timothy Buckley recounts the wisdom held by the old Irish, before “the people got too bloodyful smart and educated, and let the government or anyone else do their thinking for them.” They had a way of reckoning time that advances from the lifespan of a rail, a type of small bird,...

A phonetic mnemonic for the first 32 U.S. presidents, by Edwin C. Silvey: I don’t know where this first appeared, but every source I can find faithfully credits the composer.

In 1999, a letter in New Scientist noted that randomizing letters in the middle of words has little or no effect on readers’ ability to understand text. Noam D. Plum responded with a poem: The suggetsoin taht chrilden slhuod laern how to sepll Is a tmie-watse we ohgut to rjeect. Sicne a jlumbe of leertts raeds pertlecfy wlel If the frist and the lsat...

In 1899 the Strand invited 13 British celebrities to draw a pig with their eyes closed. Field Marshal Frederick Sleigh Roberts: Judge Sir Francis Jeune: Mary Jeune, Baroness St Helier: Hugh Jermyn, Bishop of Brechin: Astronomer Sir Robert Ball: Chemist William Ramsay: Stage actor Henry Irving: Illustrator Sir John Tenniel: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Novelist Walter Besant: Organist Sir Frederick Bridge: Inventor Hiram Maxim:...