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When James Cameron was serving as second unit director on Galaxy of Terror (1981), he was asked to film an insert of a severed arm that’s being eaten by maggots. The team made a fake arm, covered it with mealworms, lit the shot, and rolled the camera, but the mealworms didn’t move. “They looked completely inert,” Cameron said. “So I thought, well, what would...

If your nose is close to the grindstone And you hold it there long enough In time you’ll say there’s no such thing As brooks that babble and birds that sing These three will all your world compose Just you, the stone and your poor old nose. — “From a two hundred-year-old stone in a country cemetery,” quoted in Christina Foyle, So Much Wisdom,...

Two rhapsodies on the name of French philosopher Michel Onfray, by Basile Morin. In the chain ambigram above, the first name is transfigured (at some point) into the last. In the tessellation ambigram below, the two names appear simultaneously as figure and ground.

From Pi Mu Epsilon Journal, November 1950: (1/2)3 < (1/2)2. Taking the logarithm to the base 1/2 of each member of the above inequality, we write 3 log1/2(1/2) < 2 log1/2(1/2). But logbb = 1. Therefore 3 < 2.

Back in 2017 I wrote about the Feynman ciphers, three coded messages that had been presented as challenges to Richard Feynman in the 1950s. Feynman couldn’t crack them, and even at the time of my post only the first of the three had been decoded — it turned out to be a transposition of the opening of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Middle English. But...

Smith College mathematician Jim Henle published this retrograde analysis puzzle in the Mathematical Intelligencer in 2018 as part of an appreciation of Raymond Smullyan. “After many moves, the chessboard appears as above. What were the last two moves?”

Several claimants have been put forth as the originators of the modern tropical cyclone ‘naming’ system. Australian weather meteorologist, Clement L. Wragge, is one of the best-established holders of the title. … Most ingeniously, he gained a measure of personal revenge by christening some of the nastiest storms with politicians’ names such as Drake, Barton, and Deakin. Modern hurricane researcher Chris Landsea noted that,...

In 1900, Louis Philip Perew of Tonawanda, New York, built a “gigantic man” of wood, rubber, and metal that “walks, talks, runs, jumps, [and] rolls its eyes.” Standing 7 foot 5 in size 13 1/2 shoes and clothed in white duck, the nameless man “walked smoothly, and almost noiselessly” at an exhibition for the Strand, circling the hall twice without stopping. Perew was cagey...

In 2005, Jeremy Winterson bought a bootleg copy of Revenge of the Sith in Shanghai and noticed something wrong with the English subtitles. The movie’s dialogue had been translated mechanically into Chinese and then translated back again into English, leaving it almost incomprehensible. (A similar disaster had befallen a Portuguese-French phrasebook in 1883.) Fans replaced the movie’s original audio dialogue with voice actors reading...

A Polish problem longlisted for the 19th International Mathematical Olympiad in Yugoslavia, July 1977: A room contains nine men. Among every three of them there are two who are mutually acquainted. Prove that four of them are mutually acquainted.

We have a strong intuition that it’s wrong to punish someone for a crime he hasn’t committed, but is this always the case? Algy, an Alaskan motorist, and Ben, a traffic policeman, both know reliably that Algy intends to speed on a remote, unpatrolled, but radar-surveyed highway at 10:31 tomorrow morning. They also know that, if this happens, police won’t be able to reach...

No, no; for my virginity, When I lose that, says Rose, I’ll die: Behind the elms last night, cried Dick, Rose, were you not extremely sick? — Matthew Prior Time magazine called this perhaps the only naughty verse that can’t be bowdlerized. (While we’re at it: In 1680 John Wilmot published a poem about premature ejaculation.)

This 1904 comic by Gustave Verbeek (click to enlarge) is a sort of visual palindrome — the first six panels are presented conventionally, and then they’re displayed again in reverse order and upside down to compose the story’s second half. Even the written messages change their meaning: why big buns am mad u! becomes in pew we sung big hym, and so on. Only...

Two leaps the water from its race Made to the brook below, The first leap it was curving glass, The second bounding snow. — William Allingham

Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. Thus, no animal is clever enough, when there is a drought, to imagine that the rain...

A problem by British puzzlist Hubert Phillips: In writing home about an examination, five schoolgirls each made one true statement and one untrue one. The relevant passages: Betty: Kitty was second in the examination. I was only third. Ethel: You’ll be glad to hear that I was top. Joan was second. Joan: I was third, and poor old Ethel was bottom. Kitty: I came...

It’s illegal to mispronounce Joliet. G.K. Chesterton left an unfinished poem titled Plakkopytrixphylisperadaulantiobatrix. Alms has no singular. The Spanish village Trasmoz has been cursed and excommunicated by the Catholic Church. “The wink was not our best invention.” — Ralph Hodgson An Irish riddle: Yonder he is through the stream, a man without a coat, a man without a belt, a man of hard slender...

vatic adj. relating to a prophet futurition n. future existence natalitial adj. of or relating to a person’s birth aporetic adj. inclined to raise objections In 2000, three sisters from Inverness bought a £1 million insurance policy to cover the cost of bringing up the infant Jesus Christ if one of them had a virgin birth. Simon Burgess, managing director of britishinsurance.com, told the...

Thou shalt have one God only; who Would be at the expense of two? No graven images may be Worshipped, except the currency; Swear not at all; for, for thy curse Thine enemy is none the worse: At church on Sunday to attend Will serve to keep the world thy friend: Honour thy parents; that is, all From whom advancement may befall; Thou shalt...

A puzzle from the November-December 1994 issue of Quantum: “If the brainteaser you solved before you solved this one was harder than the brainteaser you solved after you solved the brainteaser that you solved before you solved this one, was the brainteaser you solved before you solved this one harder than this one?”

In his 1985 commonplace book Michelangelo’s Snowman, George Herrick gives a notable mnemonic for the bones of the wrist: Some Lovers Try Positions That They Can’t Handle (scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform, trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate) Two more, from the r/Anatomy subreddit:

I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state? — Lord Byron, letter to Thomas Moore, July 5, 1821

In 1782, during a tour of Hampton Court, Hannah More encountered landscape architect Lancelot “Capability” Brown, who compared his art to literary composition: ‘Now there‘ said he, pointing his finger, ‘I make a comma, and there’ pointing to another spot, ‘where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view, a...