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‘Suppose that a foolish man has seized hold of a plank from a sinking ship, shall a wise man wrest it away from him if he can?’ ‘No,’ says Hecaton; ‘for that would be unjust.’ ‘But how about the owner of the ship? Shall he take the plank away because it belongs to him?’ ‘Not at all; no more than he would be willing...

Golfers at the Aroostook Valley Country Club have to play carefully — a stray shot might leave the country. The club straddles the border between the United States and Canada — the course and clubhouse are in New Brunswick, and the parking lot and pro shop are in Maine. The club was launched in 1929, when enterprising founders built the clubhouse just feet inside...

Nearly every station in the London Underground contains an enamel plaque depicting a labyrinth. The collection were installed in 2013 by artist Mark Wallinger to mark the system’s 150th anniversary. Each of the 270 black and white designs is unique to its location, and all of them are posted in publicly accessible locations, so visitors can examine them directly, tracing the path with a...

The farmer leads no E Z life, The C D sows will rot, And when at E V rests from strife His bosom will A K lot. In D D has to struggle hard to E K living out, If I C frosts do not retard His crops, there’ll B A drought. The hired L P has to pay Are awful A Z too;...

Graffito, Paris, 2013. Below: In 2008, while anti-graffiti vigilante Fred Radtke was overpainting New Orleans street art with featureless gray, Banksy visited the city to leave an image of his own.

heuretic adj. of or relating to discovery or invention Sea travel is not kind to teapots, which tend to drip when pouring, tip over on tables, and chip in storage. Entrepreneur Robert Crawford Johnson solved all these problems by designing a pot in the shape of a cube, with the spout tucked into a corner. His invention, patented in 1917, was quickly adopted by...

Francis Galton was interested in communicating with Mars as early as 1892, when he wrote a letter to the Times suggesting that we try flashing sun signals at the red planet. At a lecture the following year he described more specifically a method by which pictures might be encoded using 26 alphabetical characters, which could then be transmitted over a distance in 5-character “words,”...

Stage actor Leo Reuss was just gaining fame in Berlin when the rising Nazi regime began to restrict the work of Jewish actors. So Reuss invented a new character. Retreating to a cabin in his native Austria, he grew out his beard, bathed in hydrogen peroxide to bleach his hair, studied the speech and mannerisms of farmers, and obtained new papers from a local...

When E flat made its entrée into the drawing-room, C and G considered it a third person. ‘It’s a dominant,’ thought A flat, while E natural cried out, ‘I recognize it: it’s my leading tone.’ … But the same holds here as in music where the chord of G sharp has not the same meaning, depending on whether you reach it by way of...

Mr. Smith goes to Atlantic City to gamble for a weekend. To guard against bad luck, he sets a policy at the start: In every game he plays, he’ll bet exactly half the money he has at the time, and he’ll make all his bets at even odds, so he’ll have an equal chance of winning and of losing this amount. In the end...

Under Roman law, subjects found guilty of patricide were subjected to poena cullei, the “penalty of the sack” — they were sewn into a leather sack with a snake, a cock, a monkey, and a dog and thrown into water. In his Life of Artaxerxes, Plutarch describes an ancient Persian method of execution known as scaphism in which vermin devour a victim trapped between...

In the 1970’s, a student of Maoist inclination asked [Columbia philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser] if he disagreed with Chairman Mao’s saying that a proposition can be true or false at the same time. Dr. Morgenbesser replied, ‘I do and I don’t.’ From Morgenbesser’s 2004 New York Times obituary.

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” — Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, 1980

Martin Gardner published this puzzle in his “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American in February 1979. You’re blindfolded and sitting before a lazy susan. On each corner is a glass. Some are right side up and some upside down. On each turn you can inspect any two glasses and, if you choose, reverse the orientation of either or both of them. After each turn...

Grip, the talking raven in Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge, was based on a real bird, a pet who lived in the family’s Marylebone home, where she buried items in the garden, terrorized the dog, bit the children, and tore at the family carriage. She died in 1841 after ingesting some lead-based paint, and Dickens wrote her into the novel, which appeared later that year. Interestingly,...

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Drill a hole straight through the center of a sphere, leaving a band in the shape of a napkin ring. Suppose the height of this band is h. Now take a sphere of a different size and drill a hole through that, contriving the hole’s width so that its depth is again h. Remarkably, the two napkin rings will have the same volume. As...

Just a striking image: German astronomer Johann Friedrich Julius Schmidt prepared a plaster moon for the Field Columbian Museum in 1898. From the Field Museum Library.

William Linkhaw sang so badly that a grand jury indicted him for disrupting his church’s services. At trial in August 1872, a witness imitated Linkhaw’s singing style and provoked “a burst of prolonged and irresistible laughter, convulsing alike the spectators, the Bar, the jury and the Court.” It was in evidence that the disturbance occasioned by defendant’s singing was decided and serious; the effect...

Students beginning with the compass learn to draw this rosette, sometimes called the Flower of Life. If the arcs and the circle have the same radius, a, then the area of one petal is and the unshaded area of the circle is Remarkably, though the area we sought is bounded entirely by the arcs of circles, the final expression is independent of π. Related:...

C.S. Kipping published this unusual problem in Chess Amateur in 1923. In each position, White is to mate in two moves.

Then there is the other secret. There isn’t any symbolysm. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know. A writer...