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British artist Martin Creed introduced a controversial installation in 1995: an empty room in which the lights turn on and off at 5-second intervals. Critic David Lee said, “Last year, the Tate was scraping the barrel. This year they are scraping the scrapings … A light being switched on and off is not a good work of art.” But when Creed submitted the work...

Pick any point in the interior of an equilateral triangle and draw a perpendicular to each of the three sides. The sum of these perpendiculars is the height of the triangle. That’s Viviani’s theorem. This visual proof is by CMG Lee: Choose point P and draw the three perpendiculars. Now draw three lines through P, each parallel to a side of the main triangle....

Long-short-short, long-short-short Dactyls in dimeter, Verse form with choriambs (Masculine rhyme): One sentence (two stanzas) Hexasyllabically Challenges poets who Don’t have the time. — Roger L. Robison

I don’t normally follow sports, but this seems worth remarking: Tonight Danny Jansen is set to become the first baseball player to play for both teams in the same game. Jansen was in the lineup for the Toronto Blue Jays when they faced Boston on June 26, a game that was suspended because of rain and scheduled to be made up on Monday. In...

pluvial adj. relating to rainfall A little tap at the window, as though some missile had struck it, followed by a plentiful, falling sound, as light, though, as if a shower of sand were being sprinkled from a window overhead; then the fall spread, took on an order, a rhythm, became liquid, loud, drumming, musical, innumerable, universal. It was the rain. — Proust, Swann’s...

A problem by Soviet physicist Viktor Lange: It’s not uncommon to see two ships traveling down a river at different velocities — this is due to differences in design and engine power. “But why can rafts which have no engines float down the river with different velocities, too? It has been even noticed that the heavier the raft the higher its velocity. Why is...

Mark Twain approaches the international date line, 1895: Sept. 8. To-morrow we shall be close to the center of the globe … And then we must drop out a day — lose a day out of our lives, a day never to be found again. We shall all die one day earlier than from the beginning of time we were foreordained to die. We...

It must, I think, be allowed, that if a very limited intelligence, whom we shall suppose utterly unacquainted with the universe, were assured, that it were the production of a very good, wise, and powerful Being, however finite, he would, from his conjectures, form beforehand a different notion of it from what we find it to be by experience; nor would he ever imagine,...

In 2013, Japanese refrigeration company Fukushima Industries introduced a new mascot, a happy winged egg: “I fly around on my awesome wings, patrolling supermarket showcases and kitchen refrigerators. I can talk to vegetables, fruit, meat, and fish and can check on their health! I was born in a Fukushima refrigerator! I love eating and I’m full of curiosity. I think of myself as kind,...

In Seven Types of Ambiguity (1949), William Empson describes a particularly inscrutable English newspaper headline: ITALIAN ASSASSIN BOMB PLOT DISASTER Bomb and plot, you notice, can be either nouns or verbs, and would take kindly to being adjectives, not that they are anything so definite here. One thinks at first that there are two words or sentences, and a semicolon has been left out...

Someone said to Socrates that a certain man had grown no better by his travels. ‘I should think not,’ he said; ‘he took himself along with him.’ — Montaigne, Essays

A problem from the 17th Irish Mathematical Olympiad, in 2004: In a tennis tournament, each player played one match against each of the others. If each player won at least one match, show that there’s a group of three players A, B, C in which A beat B, B beat C, and C beat A.

Sydney is 14 hours ahead of New York, so when it’s noon in Sydney it’s 10 p.m. the previous day in New York. Suppose you were broadcasting to the U.S. on a news-service hook-up from Sydney, and wanted to tell the American public about an explosion that occurred at 2:30 A.M. in a factory in Sydney. Would you say ‘There will be an explosion...

The most successful critics are always scribbling things in their programs, largely because it gives them an important and industrious air. Also, it is interesting to try to figure out what you’ve written afterward. Last week, for instance, I made a very helpful note during the second act of a drama called ‘They Walk Alone.’ ‘Lanchstr get face stuck 1 these nights awful if,’...

In What a Word!, his 1936 examination of English usage, A.P. Herbert takes up a letter written in “officese”: Madam, We are in receipt of your favour of the 9th inst. with regard to the estimate required for the removal of your furniture and effects from the above address to Burbleton, and will arrange for a Representative to call to make an inspection on...

Mark Antony’s funeral oration rendered in Scrabble tiles, by Pete Stickland: COUNTRYMEN, I AM TO BURY, NOT EULOGIZE, CAESAR; IF EVIL LIVES ON, BEQUEATHING INJURY, GOOD OFT EXPIRES: A PALSIED, AWKWARD DEATH! The tiles can also spell: QUEASY RADIOMAN WEPT: GOT TO EYE FEROCIOUS BLAZE OF VIVID AERIAL EXPLOSION, CREMATING WILTED HINDENBURG AT LAKEHURST, N.J.

Unusual personal names collected in Oklahoma by onomastician Thomas Pyles in the 1940s: A. Noble Ladd Beverage Porter Bunker Hill Charming Fox Erie Lake France Paris Gunga Dean Harness Upp Harry Baer Ima Goose Jack Frost Johnny Steele Casebeer Liberty Bond Pansy Leafe Pearl Button Rose Bush Safety Reuel First Winter Frost Ima Foster and Ura Foster, possibly twin sisters, both received master’s degrees...

The so-called four-field approach in anthropology divides the discipline into four subfields: archaeology, linguistics, physical anthropology, and cultural anthropology. Students call these “stones, tones, bones, and thrones.”

Talking of shaving the other night at Dr. Taylor’s, Dr. Johnson said, ‘Sir, of a thousand shavers, two do not shave so much alike as not to be distinguished.’ I thought this not possible, till he specified so many of the varieties in shaving; — holding the razor more or less perpendicular; — drawing long or short strokes; — beginning at the upper part...

Venice’s Museo Correr exhibits a pair of wooden implements whose use isn’t immediately clear — they’re chopines, a type of platform shoe popular in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. Worn under a woman’s skirt they could add up to 20 inches to her height, giving her an impressive eminence but an uncertain gait. Shakespeare mocked the trend in Hamlet’s greeting to a visiting...

A centered hexagonal number is a number that can be represented by a hexagonal lattice with a dot in the center, like so: Starting at the center, successive hexagons contain 1, 7, 19, and 37 dots. The sequence goes on forever. The sum of the first n centered hexagonal numbers is n3, and there’s a pretty “proof without words” to show that this is...

Epigrams of poet Ralph Hodgson: Oaths in anguish rank with prayers. The wink was not our best invention. When crises pall, humdrum is sensational. But Woman — in whose image made? A sparrow in a snowstorm with a feather in his bill: that is Faith. Forget the slush, but keep the snow / Of Christmasses of long ago. Anniversary: Familiarity breeds content. Some things...

Reader Derek Christie sent in this surprising curiosity after Wednesday’s post about Borromean rings: Both the ring and the karabiner clip are attached to the cord and can’t be removed. Now complicate matters by clipping the karabiner onto the ring: Quite unexpectedly, the cord can now be just pulled away: (Thanks, Derek.) (A related perplexity: The Prisoners’ Release Puzzle.)