‘The letters in this curious alphabet are all wood, chiefly twisted roots of the blue gum, and have not been altered in any way from their original growth; three girls collected them in their daily walks or rides for a period of six months, and the specimens were found in various places; frequently one was carried home on horseback for many miles. All are about two feet high. The “B” was the last found, and when the young ladies had almost despaired of ever getting one it was found in a heap of driftwood caught against a tree in the river.’ — Miss Cave, Vergemont, Clontreagh, Co. Dublin
isolato
n. a person who is physically or spiritually isolated from their times or society
hebetate
v. to make dull or obtuse
suspiration
n. a long, deep sigh
Drawn from the last line of a 1951 poem by Pierre Béarn, the French phrase métro, boulot, dodo describes the monotony of workday life: Métro refers to a subway commute, boulot is an informal word for work, and dodo is baby talk for sleep.
Anna Kaloustian wrote in the Yale Herald, “No English expression manages to quite grasp its prosaic implication, its banality.”
When two or more buses are scheduled at regular intervals on the same route, planners may expect that each will make the same progress, pausing at each stop for the same interval (1). But if Bus B is delayed by traffic congestion (2), it incurs a penalty: Because it arrives late to the next stop, it will pick up some passengers who’d planned to take Bus C (3). Accommodating these passengers delays Bus B even longer, putting it even further behind schedule. Meanwhile, Bus C begins to make unusually good progress (4), as it now arrives at each stop to find a smaller crowd than expected.
As the workload piles up on the foremost bus and the one behind it catches up, eventually the result (5) is that the two buses run in a platoon, arriving together at each stop. Sometimes Bus C even overtakes Bus B.
What to do? Planners can set minimum and maximum amounts of time to be spent at each stop, and buses might even be told to skip certain stops during crowded runs. Passengers might be encouraged to wait for a following bus, with the inducement that it’s less crowded. Northern Arizona University improved its service by abandoning the idea of a schedule altogether and delaying buses at certain stops in order to maintain even spacing. One thing that doesn’t work: adding vehicles to the route — which might, at first blush, have seemed the obvious solution.
One could not think of Aristotle or Beethoven multiplying 3,472,701 by 99,999 without making a mistake, nor could one think of him remembering the range of this or that railway share for two years, or the number of ten-penny nails in a hundred weight, or the freight on lard from Galveston to Rotterdam. And by the same token one could not imagine him expert at billiards, or at grouse-shooting, or at golf, or at any other of the idiotic games at which what are called successful men commonly divert themselves. In his great study of British genius, Havelock Ellis found that an incapacity for such petty expertness was visible in almost all first rate men. They are bad at tying cravats. They do not understand the fashionable card games. They are puzzled by book-keeping. They know nothing of party politics. In brief, they are inert and impotent in the very fields of endeavour that see the average men’s highest performances, and are easily surpassed by men who, in actual intelligence, are about as far below them as the Simidae.
A problem by Russian mathematician Viktor Prasolov:
On a piece of graph paper, is it possible to paint 25 cells so that each of them has an odd number of painted neighbors? (“Neighboring” cells have a common side.)
Let nk be the number of painted cells with exactly k painted neighbors, and let N be the number of common sides of painted cells. Each common side belongs to exactly two painted cells, so
Since N is an integer, n1 + n3 is even and thus can’t be 25.
In 1600, a woman named Mary Deane was imprisoned for adultery in London’s Bridewell Prison, where she communicated with her lover in a secret code she’d learned from her mother. Unable to break the cipher, the prison authorities arranged for her to be whipped and deported to Scotland.
I’ve confirmed just enough of this to be sure it happened, but I can’t find many more details, including (as I’d hoped) the code. Still, it’s a striking story.
This worrying result was first published by German mathematician Oskar Schlömilch in 1868. (The discrepancy is explained by minute gaps in the diagonals, as explained here.)
Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) seems to have been taken with the paradox — his papers show that between 1890 and 1893 he was working to determine all the squares that might similarly be converted into rectangles with a “gain” of one unit of area, apparently unaware that V. Schlegel had carried out the same task much earlier.
(Warren Weaver, “Lewis Carroll and a Geometrical Paradox,” American Mathematical Monthly 45:4 [April 1938], 234-236.)
Mr. Pincus wagers $10 that “I can show you a two-move problem with three different lines of play which you would have to solve whether you wanted to or not.”
Brown accepts. After studying the board for 10 minutes, he says, “It’s a humbug, a confounded silly swindling humbug, but I am beat.” Here’s the position:
This bookcase, in Bologna’s International Music Museum and Library, is itself a work of art — the doors are paintings depicting shelves of music books, rendered by Baroque artist Giuseppe Crespi.
Below: In 2014, designer József Páhy devised this bookish façade for a housing estate in Kazincbarcika, Northern Hungary. That’s a teddy bear on the bottom shelf.
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