In 1917, W.S. Andrews inscribed a sphere with five circles of latitude and six of longitude.
Then he arranged the numbers 1 to 62 on the intersections such that each of the 11 circles bears 12 numbers totaling 378.
A Magic Globe
Author: Greg Ross
“Rebecca”
A Trick that everyone abhors
In Little Girls is slamming Doors.
A Wealthy Banker’s Little Daughter,
Who lived in Palace Green, Bayswater
(By name Rebecca Offendort),
Was given to the Furious Sport.
She would deliberately go
And Slam the door like Billy-Ho!
To make her Uncle Jacob start.
She was not really bad at heart,
But only rather rude and wild:
She was an aggravating child. …
It happened that a Marble Bust
Of Abraham was standing just
Above the Door this little Lamb
Had carefully prepared to Slam,
And Down it came! It knocked her flat!
It laid her out! She looked like that!
Her funeral Sermon (which was long
And followed by a Sacred Song)
Mentioned her Virtues, it is true,
But dwelt upon her Vices too,
And showed the Dreadful End of One
Who goes and slams the door for Fun.
The children who were brought to hear
The awful Tale from far and near
Were much impressed, and inly swore
They never more would slam the Door.
— As often they had done before.
— Hilaire Belloc
Worldly Wisdom
Maxims of Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián (1601-1658):
- When you counsel someone, you should appear to be reminding him of something he had forgotten, not of the light he was unable to see.
- To overvalue something is a form of lying.
- Do something well, and that is quickly enough.
- Many owe their greatness to their enemies. Flattery is fiercer than hatred, for hatred corrects the faults flattery had disguised.
- Those who want to look like hard workers give the impression that they aren’t up to their jobs.
- Complaints will always discredit you. … Once divulged to others, the offenses done to us seem to make others pardonable.
- Not believing others implies that you yourself are deceitful. The liar suffers twice: he neither believes nor is believed.
- Better to be cheated by the price than by the merchandise.
- Because the ignorant do not know themselves, they never know for what they are lacking. Some would be sages if they did not believe they were so already.
- Some die because they feel everything, others because they feel nothing. Some are fools because they suffer no regrets, and others because they do.
- Some marry the first information they receive, and turn what comes later into their concubine. Since deceit is always first to arrive, there is no room left for truth.
- To hear a prince’s secrets is not a privilege but a burden. Many smash the mirror that reminds them of their ugliness. They cannot stand to see those who saw them.
- Some people belong entirely to others. … They have not a day, not an hour to call their own, so completely do they give themselves to others. This is true even in matters of understanding. Some people know everything for others and nothing for themselves.
- Many pleasant things are better when they belong to someone else. … When things belong to others, we enjoy them twice as much, without the risk of losing them, and with the pleasure of novelty.
- Imagination travels faster than sight. Deceit comes in through the ears, but usually leaves through the eyes.
- Freedom is more precious than the gift that makes us lose it.
- Virtue alone is for real; all else is sham. Talent and greatness depend on virtue, not on fortune. Only virtue is sufficient unto herself. She makes us love the living and remember the dead.
“Honorable beginnings should serve to awaken curiosity, not to heighten people’s expectations. We are much better off when reality surpasses our expectations, and something turns out better than we thought it would. This rule does not hold true for bad things: when an evil has been exaggerated, its reality makes people applaud. What was feared as ruinous comes to seem tolerable.”
Looking Back
The last item in J.G. Ballard’s 1990 collection War Fever is a story in the shape of an index, purportedly the index to the unpublished autobiography of one Henry Rhodes Hamilton, an enigmatic Zelig who gallivanted around the 20th century rubbing shoulders with dozens of influential figures:
Harriman, Averell, 432
Harry’s Bar, Venice, 256
Hayworth, Rita, 311
Hemingway, Ernest, first African safari with HRH, 234; at Battle of the Ebro with HRH, 244; introduces HRH to James Joyce, 256; portrays HRH in The Old Man and the Sea, 453
Hiroshima, HRH observes atomic cloud, 258
Hitler, Adolf, invites HRH to Berchtesgaden, 166; divulges Russia invasion plans, 172; impresses HRH, 179; disappoints HRH, 181
What does it add up to? “Is the suppressed autobiography itself a disguised roman à clef, in which the fictional hero exposes the secret identities of his historical contemporaries?” asks Ballard in an editor’s note. “Perhaps the entire compilation is nothing more than a figment of the over-wrought imagination of some deranged lexicographer.” Any clues must be hiding in the piece itself.
Speed Limit
We think of light speed as dizzyingly fast, but it’s still disastrously slow given the roomy universe we find ourselves in. NASA astronomer James O’Donoghue designed these videos to illustrate. If we could bend it around Earth, light would orbit the planet in 0.13 seconds:
And it takes only 1.255 seconds to reach the moon:
But it takes fully 3 minutes to reach our neighboring planet Mars at its closest approach:
Light from the sun takes more than 8 minutes to reach Earth. To reach the closest star takes more than 4 years.
Unquote
“Books we want to have young people read should not be recommended to them but praised in their presence. Afterwards they will find them themselves.” — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, notebook, 1775-1779
Reflection
a man who is so dull
that he can learn only by personal experience
is too dull to learn
anything important by experience.
— Don Marquis, ‘archy on this and that’, Archy Does His Part, 1935
Kakuro
This logic puzzle is the numerical equivalent of a crossword. Each white cell in the diagram is to be filled with a digit from the range 1-9. The sum of each string of digits must match the “clue” given in the diagram. For example, the clue 29 above means that the four digits to its right must sum to that total. No digit may be duplicated within any entry. Can you complete the diagram?
Still Life
The programming language efghij is literally object-oriented — its logic is expressed by arranging ordinary items in meaningful tableaus:
In this example, the tray and the cutting board constitute code blocks. The oblong plate, however, has a clothes peg on it, which expresses a for loop. The fork is a local variable. The fork variable is initialized to 1 within the for loop’s initial-value expression. The sauce with the rubber band indicates that the number of iterations is equal to the function’s argument. The stuff on the cutting board is the loop body. Using a stapler, the fork is multiplied by the sauce and the result assigned to the fork using a drinking glass. A hammer decrements the sauce, which demonstrates that the function’s parameter can be used as a local variable too. Finally, the toilet roll indicates that the return value is the final value of the fork.
That produces a factorial. The program below outputs the phrase “Hello, world!” — it’s just a pillow bearing a piece of paper on which those words are written.
Self-Study
A puzzle from the October 1962 issue of Eureka, the journal of the Cambridge University Mathematical Society:
(a) At least two of these statements, apart from this one, are true.
(b) At least two of these statements, apart from this one, are false.
(c) At least one of these statements is false.
(d) x of these statements are true.
Given that, if you knew the value of x, you could determine uniquely which statements are true and which are false, determine the value of x.