Worldly Wisdom

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Graci%C3%A1n_Graus.jpg

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.”

| Literature · Quotations · Society

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.

| Literature

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.

| Science & Math

Kakuro

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

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?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Still Life

https://esolangs.org/wiki/File:Efghij_%E2%80%94_BelMandel_function.jpg

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.

https://esolangs.org/wiki/File:Efghij_hello_world.jpg

| Science & Math

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.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

“Ballade of Soporific Absorption”

Ho! Ho! Yes! Yes! It’s very all well,
You may drunk I am think, but I tell you I’m not,
I’m as sound as a fiddle and fit as a bell,
And stable quite ill to see what’s what.
I under do stand you surprise a got
When I headed my smear with gooseberry jam;
And I’ve swallowed, I grant, a beer of lot —
But I’m not so think as you drunk I am.

Can I liquor my stand? Why, yes, like hell!
I care not how many a tossed I’ve pot,
I shall stralk quite weight and not yutter an ell,
My feech will not spalter the least little jot:
If you knownly had own! — well, I gave him a dot,
And I said to him, ‘Sergeant, I’ll come like a lamb —
The floor it seems like a storm in a yacht,
But I’m not so think as you drunk I am.”

For example, to prove it I’ll tale you a tell —
I once knew a fellow named Apricot —
I’m sorry, I just chair over a fell —
A trifle — this chap, on a very day hot —
If I hadn’t consumed that last whisky of tot! —
As I said now, this fellow, called Abraham —
Ah? One more? Since it’s you! Just a do me will spot —
But I’m not so think as you drunk I am.

Envoi

So, Prince, you suggest I’ve bolted my shot?
Well, like what you say, and soul your damn!
I’m an upple litset by the talk you rot —
But I’m not so think as you drunk I am.

— J.C. Squire

| Poems

Speak, Memory

A puzzling passage from Vladimir Nabokov’s 1957 novel Pnin:

Pnin’s birthday … fell on February 3, by the Julian calendar into which he had been born in St. Petersburg in 1898. He never celebrated it nowadays, partly because, after his departure from Russia, it sidled by in a Gregorian disguise (thirteen — no, twelve days late), and partly because during the academic year he existed mainly on a motuweth frisas basis.

This describes the novelist’s own confusing situation. He’d been born in Saint Petersburg on April 10, 1899, in the Julian calendar, which corresponds to April 22, 1899, in the Gregorian. (Russia didn’t adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1918.) The turn of the century added a further wrinkle: The offset between the two calendars increased from 12 to 13 days for dates occurring after February 1900. Properly this had no effect on earlier dates, so Nabokov’s birthday should always have been reckoned April 22, but some confused writers began to give it as April 23, and eventually that’s when he began to celebrate it himself — as he told interviewers, it meant he now shared a birthday with both William Shakespeare and Shirley Temple.

(Though he nowhere explains it, “motuweth frisas” refers to the days of the week, the most familiar rhythm of an academic’s life.)

| Literature