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In 2002, visitor Nicholas Whitehead erected a road sign to an international airport outside Llandegley, Wales.
There is no such airport.
Flights of Fancy
Author: Greg Ross
Reflection
In September 1835, Stendhal wrote on the shore of Lake Albano the initials of the women he had loved: Virginie Kubly, Angela Pietragrua, Adèle Rebuffel, Mina de Griesheim, Mélanie Guilbert, Angelina Bereyter, Alexandrine Daru, Angela Pietragrua, Matilde Dembowski, Clémentine Curial, Giulia Rinieri, and Madame Azur-Alberthe de Rubempré.
“I dreamed deeply of these names, and of the astonishing follies and stupidities they made me commit,” he wrote. “The habitual condition of my life is that of an unhappy lover.”
(From his unfinished autobiography The Life of Henry Brulard, 1890.)
Portrait
A problem from Joseph Madachy’s Mathematics on Vacation (1966): If these statements are all true, what can we deduce about Major Perkins?
- Only bleary-eyed military men ever try to shave with a toothbrush.
- No bleary-eyed military men are at all musical.
- Men who never try to shave with a toothbrush never play golf.
- Major Perkins plays the tuba on Wednesdays.
- Only musical people who are golfers forget to change their socks.
Level-Headed
A puzzle by Russian mathematician Boris Kordemsky:
A house has 6 stories, each the same height. How many times as long is the ascent to the sixth floor as the ascent to the third?
Unquote
“A man doesn’t learn to understand anything unless he loves it.” — Goethe
“A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.” — Samuel Johnson
“We soon forget what we have not deeply thought about.” — Proust
Changed Men
Iranian hermit Amou Haji ate carrion, drank from puddles, lived in a hole, smoked dung, and died at 94, a few months after bathing for the first time in 60 years. He said he became a hermit due to “emotional setbacks” after a heartbreak.
English merchant Nathaniel Bentley became known as Dirty Dick when he stopped washing in his late 30s. His filthy shop became a tourist attraction. Interestingly, he too was said to have changed after a ruined love affair, allegedly after his fiancée died on the eve of their wedding. Charles Dickens knew of the story, which may have inspired that of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations.
The Same Boat
The Wikipedia article on the Ship of Theseus has changed entirely since its inception.
Math Notes
19 can be expressed as the sum of four perfect cubes:
19 = 333 + (-29)3 + (-25)3 + 163
So can 6941:
6941 = (-3476)3 + 30903 + 23173 + 3843
Can every integer be expressed in this way? It’s conjectured that the answer is yes, but no one has yet managed to prove it.
Plot Lines
Reading Maps plots the geographical course of hundreds of books and films, so you can see where and how events unfold on the earth’s surface. (Above is the track of the Pequod in Moby-Dick.)
Each narrative is followed to its conclusion, so beware of spoilers.
(Thanks, Sharon.)
Casting Call
I turn off the light when I leave the room and I turn it on again when I come back in a moment later. Is the shadow of the statue on the table the same one before and after the light is off? If we say it’s the same, then we accept the existence of strange, intermittent entities (in the same family as the flashing of the turn-signal light on a car). If we don’t like that idea, then we have to say that there are two different things: the shadow that was present before I turned off the light and the shadow present after I turn it on again. What’s different about them?
— Roberto Casati, The Shadow Club, 2003
(We might distinguish the two by observing that different photons are hitting the statue, but this seems to mean that a new shadow is produced every instant, and that doesn’t sound right either.)