“Fish die belly upward, and rise to the surface. It’s their way of falling.” — André Gide, Journals
(Thanks, Macari.)
Author: Greg Ross
Prayer Vigil
A puzzle by F. Nazarov from the May-June 1996 issue of Quantum:
On a certain familiar island, some residents always lie, and the others always tell the truth. The total population is 100. Each resident worships one of three gods, the sun god, the moon god, or the Earth god. One day a visitor asks each resident three questions:
- Do you worship the sun god?
- Do you worship the moon god?
- Do you worship the Earth god?
Sixty residents answer yes to the first question, 40 to the second, and 30 to the third. How many residents are liars?
Literary
For a story on library cutbacks in a certain Essex town, the Telegraph chose the headline BOOK LACK IN ONGAR.
(Apparently apocryphal, but entertaining.)
Groundwork
Like its predecessor, our present civilization may be no more than one of those crops farmers sow to improve their land by the fixation of nitrogen from the air; it may have grown only that, accumulating certain traditions, it may be ploughed into the soil again for better things to follow.
— H.G. Wells, The Outline of History, 1920
Descent
Bycocket is an obsolete word for a kind of cap or headdress. Its entry in the Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains this woeful note:
Through a remarkable series of blunders and ignorant reproductions of error, this word appears in modern dictionaries as ABACOT. In Hall’s Chron. a bicocket appears to have been misprinted abococket, which was copied by Grafton, altered by Holinshed to abococke, and finally ‘improved’ by Abraham Fleming to abacot (perhaps through an intermediate abacoc); hence it was again copied by Baker, inserted in his Glossarium by Spelman, and thence copied by Phillips, and so handed down through Bailey, Ash, Todd, etc., to 19th century dictionaries (some of which provide a picture of the ‘abacot’), and even inserted in dictionaries of English and foreign languages.
The OED defines abacot as a “variant of bycocket”.
Accommodation
An arresting sentence from poet George Barker’s 1950 novel The Dead Seagull:
“They cut down elms to build asylums for people driven mad by the cutting down of elms.”
The Perko Pair
How many distinct knots have exactly 10 crossings? By the late 20th century, mathematicians believed the number to be 166.
Then, in 1973, New York attorney and part-time mathematician Kenneth A. Perko Jr. discovered that two of these were essentially the same knot.
The correspondence had gone unnoticed for 75 years.
A Curious Letter
In 1768, Benjamin Franklin proposed a new alphabet, warning that without a phonetic scheme to stabilize spelling and pronunciation, “our writing will become the same with the Chinese as to the difficulty of learning and using it.” He composed this letter as a sample of his idea:
He explains everything (and answers the imagined objections above) in this essay.
Concise
Spotted on the r/linguisticshumor subreddit:
Forefather
A problem from the Third Penguin Problems Book, 1946:
“Flutterby’s grandfather died in 1872. Flutterby died one hundred and thirty-one years after his grandfather was born. Their ages add up to one hundred and five years. When was Flutterby born?”