~feeds_feedburner_com | Bookmarks (201)

Every unjust act is inexpedient; No unjust act is expedient; No expedient act is unjust; Therefore every expedient act is just. — Ralph L. Woods, How to Torture Your Mind, 1969

He was prettily and fantastically troubled, who, having used to put his trust in dreams, one night dreamed that all dreams were vain; for he considered, if so, then this was vain, and then dreams might be true for all this: but if they might be true, then this dream might be so upon equal reason: and then dreams were vain, because this dream...

This curious epitaph is found at Martham Church in Norfolk: Here Lyeth the Body of Christr. Burraway, who departed this Life ye 18 day of October, Anno Domini 1730. Aged 59 years. And there Lyes ☞ Alice who by his Life Was my Sister, my mistress My mother and my wife. Dyed Feb. ye 12. 1729 Aged 76 years. According to Thomas Joseph Pettigrew...

The Moscow Radio announced that five million Russians filed past Josef Stalin’s bier in 72 hours. That means, according to the calculations of Frank Baker, a Mangum, Okla., accountant, that the mourners, two abreast, three and one third feet apart, ran past the bier at 22 miles an hour. Twenty-two miles an hour is 9.3 seconds a hundred yards, which is the world’s record...

“If the northern hemisphere were land, and all the southern hemisphere water, ought we to call the northern hemisphere an island, or the southern hemisphere a lake?” — Augustus De Morgan

A “simple but pretty little puzzle” by Henry Dudeney: If this flag measures 4 feet by 3 feet and presents equal areas of red and white bunting, how wide are the cross’s arms?

The French phrase ouate de phoque (“seal’s cotton wool”) sounds like what the fuck in English. For whatever that’s worth. Listen to the pronunciation file here.

Because it depends partly on the phase of the moon, the date of Easter Sunday can vary by as much as 35 days. In 1928, the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed an act that would establish its date as the Sunday following the second Saturday in April (and thus always falling between April 9 and 15). Though passed and enacted, the act has...

A puzzle by Russian mathematician Sergei Berlov: Here are two decagons. Suppose that a positive integer is written at each of the 20 vertices such that the sum of the numbers around each decagon is 99. Prove that it’s possible to mark some number of successive vertices on each decagon so that the two sums of marked numbers are equal. (The marked segment on...

I just found this in a 1950 issue of Pi Mu Epsilon Journal: Question: How many legs has a horse? Answer: Twelve; two in front, two behind, two on each side, and one in each corner. Later in the same volume, Marlow Sholander shows that in fact every horse has an infinite number of legs. That’s to say nothing of color. And see Chasing...

Suppose your dog eats the ace of spades and you’re forced to play poker with a 51-card deck. Does this make it more or less likely that you’ll be dealt a two-pair hand? The answer is not immediately clear. The loss of the ace means that fewer two-pair hands are possible, but the total universe of possible five-card hands is also reduced. Surprisingly, the...

Demetri Martin composed this palindromic poem as part of a project for a fractal geometry class at Yale in spring 1993. The first two and last two lines are palindromes, the middle line (“Be still if I fill its ebb”) minus its last letter is a palindrome, and the entire poem is a palindrome: Dammit I’m mad Evil is a deed as I live....

An odd incident from the memoir of Lt. John Worsham of the 21st Virginia Infantry — during the Battle of Saunders Field in May 1864, two opposing soldiers found themselves in a gully and agreed to a fistfight to decide which had captured the other: Then they decided that they would go into the road and have a regular fist and skull fight, the...

These verses can be interpreted to support either the Stuarts or the Hanovers, according as they’re read. If each is addressed separately, from top to bottom, they’ll seem to support the Hanoverian regime; read together, right across the page, they declare for the Stuarts: From Reuben Percy, Relics of Literature, 1823.

In this conundrum by Mitsunobu Matsuyama, when four congruent quadrilaterals are rotated about their centers, their area seems to increase. What has become of the red square? The answer is that each side of the large square is slightly shorter after the rotation. If θ is the angle between two opposing sides in each quadrilateral, then the ratio of the areas of the two...

J. Bryan III used to challenge his friends to think of an English word that contains either of the following strings of letters: ILIL ILIW “I’ve never played the game with anyone who could solve either of these combinations.” Can you?

“Improprieties in pronunciation” among the people of New England in 1808, collected by Caleb Bingham and published in The Child’s Companion: afraid: afeard apron: apun audacious: outdacious bonfire: burnfire brittle: brickle cards: cairds caught: cotch coin: quine cucumber: cowcumber dictionary: dixonary drain: dreen earth: airth fanciful: fancical five pence: fippence gown: gound grasshopper: hoppergrass jaundice: janders musician: musicianer poplar: popple quart: quairt quotient: coshun...

How can we make sense of this passage, composed by Willard R. Espy? The Optic Reed has a Haste Harm. It Hose, one assumes, not to be Lever; it neither Heats the Ripple, nor Hides the Razed sinner for his Rude Rime; it is not Old. Then Leave to it; ere thy grave Loses, thou mayst find here the Hart to the Rest thou...

A circle is divided into six sectors, into which are written (say, counterclockwise) these numbers: 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0 You can increase any two neighboring numbers by 1. By doing this repeatedly, is there a way to make all six numbers equal?

A problem by Nikolai Rozov: “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?”

This remarkable phenomenon was discovered by Cambridge mathematician James Grime. Number five six-sided dice as follows: A: 2, 2, 2, 7, 7, 7 B: 1, 1, 6, 6, 6, 6 C: 0, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5 D: 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 9 E: 3, 3, 3, 3, 8, 8 Now, on average: A beats B beats C beats D beats E beats...

Excerpts from letters received by the British pensions office, quoted in George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book, 2002: Mrs R. has no clothes, has not had any for many years. The clergy have been visiting her. In reply to your letter, I have already cohabited with your officers, so far without any result. You have changed my little boy to a little girl. Will this make...