The sun went down like a bale of dull fire, in the midst of smearing clouds of red-currant jam. The wind began to whistle worse than any of the lowest orders of society in a shilling gallery. … The cords of the ship snapped like bad stay-laces. No best Genoa velvet was ever blacker than the firmament, and not even the voices of the ladies calling for the stewardess were heard above the orchestral crashing of the elements.
— Douglas Jerrold, “A Young Lady’s Description of a Storm at Sea,” 1858
In 1885, Cecilia Garrett Smith and a friend were experimenting with automatic writing using a primitive Ouija board on which a planchette was guided by a visiting “spirit.”
“We got all sorts of nonsense out of it, sometimes long doggerel rhymes with several verses,” but the prophecies they asked for were rarely answered. When they asked who the guiding spirit was, the planchette wrote that his name was Jim and that he had been Senior Wrangler at Cambridge. Intrigued, they asked Jim to write the equation describing the heart-shaped planchette they were using, and they received this response:
This they interpreted as 
, which J.W. Sharpe later graphed thus:
“I am quite sure that I had never seen the curve before, and therefore the production of the equation could not have been an act of unconscious memory on my part,” Smith wrote later. “Also I most certainly did not know enough mathematics to know how to form an equation which would represent such a curve, or to know even of what type the equation must be.”
One wonders what Jim thought of all this. They never got any further math out of him.
If there will be a sea battle tomorrow, then that fact is true today and has always been true. Our future is thus inevitable. What freedom is left to us?
On the other hand, if statements about the future are neither true nor false today, then how can God have perfect foreknowledge of the future?
A logic puzzle from Mathematical Circles (Russian Experience), a collection of problems for Soviet high school math students:
During a trial in Wonderland the March Hare claimed that the cookies were stolen by the Mad Hatter. Then the Mad Hatter and the Dormouse gave testimonies which, for some reason, were not recorded. Later on in the trial it was found out that the cookies were stolen by only one of these three defendants, and, moreover, only the guilty one gave true testimony. Who stole the cookies?
The key to the Bastille resides at Mount Vernon.
The Marquis de Lafayette had served under George Washington during the American Revolution, and when the French political prison fell in 1790 he sent the key to his former commander.
“Give me leave, my dear General,” he wrote, “to present you with a picture of the Bastille, just as it looked a few days after I had ordered its demolition,–with the main key of the fortress of despotism. It is a tribute, which I owe, as a son to my adoptive father, as an Aide-de-Camp to my General, as a Missionary of liberty to its Patriarch.”
A favorite problem of Lewis Carroll involves a customer trying to complete a purchase using pre-decimal currency. He wants to buy 7s. 3d. worth of goods, but he has only a half-sovereign (10s.), a florin (2s.), and a sixpence. The shopkeeper can’t give him change, as he himself has only a crown (5s.), a shilling, and a penny. As they’re puzzling over this a friend enters the shop with a double-florin (4s.), a half-crown (2s. 6d.), a fourpenny-bit, and a threepenny-bit. Can the three of them negotiate the transaction?
Happily, they can. They pool their money on the counter, and the shopkeeper takes the half-sovereign, the sixpence, the half-crown, and the fourpenny-bit; the customer takes the double-florin, the shilling, and threepenny-bit as change; and the friend takes the florin, the crown, and the penny.
“There are other combinations,” writes John Fisher in The Magic of Lewis Carroll, “but this is the most logistically pleasing, as it will be seen that not one of the three persons retains any one of his own coins.”
Related: From Henry Dudeney, a magic square:
(Strand, December 1896)
A shop in Herne Bay, Kent, advertised this specialty through the whole of the summer 1906 holiday season.
Reader John Day sent this photo to The Strand. “Herne Bay trippers are evidently careless of what they eat.”
Interleave the letters in LUG and ONE and you get LOUNGE. Similarly:
SOT + PUS = SPOUTS
SHOE + COLD = SCHOOLED
CANES + HILT = CHAINLETS
CLIPS + ALOE = CALLIOPES
FETES + LENS = FLEETNESS
TINILY + RENAL = TRIENNIALLY
And three words can be merged to produce a fourth:
DOT + ERE + CAD = DECORATED
LET + ARE + CAD = LACERATED
LET + IRE + BAD = LIBERATED
MET + ORE + DAD = MODERATED
SAT + ERE + PAD = SEPARATED
SIR + ILL + MAY = SIMILARLY
TUT + ALE + BAD = TABULATED