Good Enough

The opening of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford, “It was a dark and stormy night,” has been held up as a model of bad writing for nearly two centuries. But it’s also the opening sentence of Madeleine L’Engle’s award-winning 1962 young adult science fantasy novel A Wrinkle in Time.

Apparently this was deliberate. L’Engle biographer Leonard Marcus writes, “With a wink to the reader, she chose for the opening line of A Wrinkle in Time, her most audaciously original work of fiction, that hoariest of clichés … L’Engle herself was certainly aware of the old warhorse’s literary provenance as … Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s much-maligned, much-parodied repository of Victorian purple prose, Paul Clifford.”

August 14, 2026August 13, 2026 | Literature

“Scripture Cake”

Contributed by Mrs. M.L. Dow to a cookbook compiled by the Ladies of Trinity Church, Claremont, N.H., 1899:

4 1/2 cups 1st Kings 4:22
1 1/2 cups Judges 5:25
2 cups Jeremiah 6:20
2 cups 1st Samuel 30:12
2 cups Nahum 3:12
1 cup Numbers 17:8
1/2 cup Judges 4:19
2 tablespoons of 1st Samuel 14:25
1 pinch of Leviticus 2:13
2 teaspoons of Amos 4:5
6 teaspoons Jeremiah 17:11

The first line calls for 4 1/2 cups of flour, because 1 Kings 4:22 reads “And Solomon’s provision for one day was thirty measures of fine flour, and threescore measures of meal.” In the same way, the rest refer respectively to butter, sugar, raisins, figs, almonds, milk, honey, salt, leaven, and eggs. No baking instructions are given.

August 14, 2026August 13, 2026 | Religion

CyberChance

A puzzle by National Security Agency applied research mathematician Nicholas R., from the agency’s October 2016 Puzzle Periodical:

Eddie, Layne, Kurt, and Chris are locked in a heated game of CyberChance which only one of them will win. Their fans are on the edge of their seats: everyone knows that in CyberChance, things can change at any moment. One fan, who prefers Kurt or Chris, is feeling worried since there is only a 4-in-10 chance that one of them will win. An Eddie fan brags that Eddie is twice as likely as Layne to come out on top. Another Eddie fan concurs, and adds the following observation: Chris is Eddie’s main competition. He figures that, given that Chris doesn’t win, Eddie has a 4-in-7 chance of winning. A Kurt fan has been quietly standing in the corner, listening to all the other fans, and wonders: What chance does Kurt have of winning CyberChance?

	Select Click for Answer
Let E, L, K, and C be the chances that Eddie, Layne, Kurt, and Chris win the game, respectively. There is a 100% chance that one of them will win, so E + L + K + C = 100%. We know that K + C, the probability that Kurt or Chris will win, is 40%. This tells us that E + L = 100% – 40% = 60%. Now, we also know that the probability that Eddie will win is twice the probability that Layne will win. In numbers, this means that E = 2L, i.e. E – 2L = 0%. Knowing these two facts lets us find out what Eddie’s chance of winning is: add the equation E + L = 60% twice to the equation E – 2L = 0%. This tells us that 3E = 120%. Therefore E = 40%. We are almost there. We know that the conditional probability that Eddie wins, given that Chris loses, is 40%/70%. This probability is equal to the probability that Eddie wins and Chris loses, divided by the probability that Chris loses. But notice: CyberChance has only one winner, so the probability that Eddie wins and Chris loses is the same as the probability that Eddie wins. Also notice that the probability that Chris loses equals the probability that anybody else wins. In numbers, the probability that Chris loses is 100% – C. So we have the following equation: 40%/70% = E / (100% – C) = 40% / (100% – C) Solving for C tells us that C = 30%. Recall that K + C = 40%. Therefore K = 10%. So Kurt has a measly 10% chance of winning CyberChance. No wonder the Kurt fan was sulking in the corner!

Click for Answer

August 13, 2026August 12, 2026 | Puzzles

Point of Order

“Mr. Chairman, before we put the motion ‘That the motion be now put,’ should we not first put the motion ‘That the motion “That the motion be now put” be now put’?” — Punch, 1952

August 13, 2026August 12, 2026 | Humor · Science & Math

Polchinski’s Paradox

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Grandfather_paradox_billiard_ball.svg — Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 1990, physicist Joseph Polchinski described a puzzling situation: Suppose a billiard ball were sent through a traversable wormhole into the past, where it knocked its earlier self off course, away from the wormhole. This is a version of the famous grandfather paradox: How can we explain the ball’s presence where it seems to have prevented its own arrival?

Fortunately, Caltech students Fernando Echeverria and Gunnar Klinkhammer found that self-consistent solutions exist in which the older ball imparts only a glancing blow to its younger self, one that sends it through the hole at just the right angle to deliver a similarly glancing blow to its own forebear, and so on, sparing us from the paradox. (In 1991 the students and Kip Thorne reported that they’d failed to find any initial conditions in which such self-consistent solutions were unavailable, so it’s plausible that they exist for every possible initial trajectory. But this hasn’t been proven.)

Another pleasing possibility is that the older ball knocks the younger out of the way and itself enters the wormhole again. This creates an infinite loop, and some existential bewilderment, but no paradox.

August 12, 2026August 11, 2026 | Oddities · Science & Math

Tile Swap

You’re tiling a floor with 4×1 and 2×2 tiles when you accidentally break one. A tile of the other shape is available. Show that it’s not possible to cover the floor by rearranging the tiles.

	Select Click for Answer
Color the tiles as shown. Now every 4×1 tile must cover 0 or 2 black squares, and every 2×2 tile must cover one black square. So we can’t successfully exchange one for the other. From Arthur Engel’s excellent Problem-Solving Strategies, 1998.

August 12, 2026August 11, 2026 | Puzzles

Level Best

“To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.” — Max Beerbohm

“[These foolish remarks] show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study.” — Oscar Wilde

August 11, 2026 | Literature

Black and White

khanyan chess puzzle

Alexey Khanyan devised this “no-brainer” in 2008. Black is in check. His only legal response is to interpose one of his knights, which then checks White, who must capture the knight, and so on. The whole ensuing 22-ply bloodbath unfolds mechanically, always reaching the same conclusion.

Via Tim Krabbé’s chess diary. Krabbé writes, “As it is a no-brainer, I feel free not to give the moves.” See The Sure Thing.

August 11, 2026August 10, 2026 | Puzzles

Postal Inspector

In 1897, to help inaugurate New York City’s new pneumatic mail system, officials sent a live black cat in a canister from the Produce Exchange Post Office on Bowling Green to the General Post Office on Park Row, a distance of 3,750 feet.

“How it could live after being shot at terrific speed from Station P in the Produce Exchange Building, making several turns before reaching Broadway and Park Row, I cannot conceive, but it did,” recalled postal supervisor Howard Wallace Connelly. “It seemed to be dazed for a minute or two but started to run and was quickly secured and placed in a basket that had been provided for that purpose.”

At its peak the system would carry 95,000 letters a day through 27 miles of tubes connecting 23 post offices. It was discontinued in 1953, outmoded by the growing volume of mail and the advent of the automobile.

August 10, 2026August 9, 2026 | Oddities · Technology