World War II ended in 1990.
When the Reich surrendered in 1945, there was no single German state for the Allies to negotiate with. So officially the war continued for 45 more years; the final treaty was signed when Germany reunified.
See also Burying the Hatchet.
In 1986 The Mathematical Intelligencer published this story about devising a mnemonic for a famous constant:
For a time I stood pondering on circle sizes. The large computer mainframe quietly processed all of its assembly code. Inside my entire hope lay for figuring out an elusive expansion. Value: pi. Decimals expected soon. I nervously entered a format procedure. The mainframe processed the request. Error. I, again entering it, carefully retyped. This iteration gave zero error printouts in all–success. Intently I waited. Soon, roused by thoughts within me, appeared narrative mnemonics relating digits to verbiage! The idea appeared to exist but only in abbreviated fashion–little phrases typically. Pressing on I then resolved, deciding firmly about a sum of decimals to use–likely around four hundred, presuming the computer code soon halted! Pondering these ideas, words appealed to me. But a problem of zeros did exist. Pondering more, solution subsequently appeared. Zero suggests a punctuation element. Very novel! My thoughts were culminated. No periods, I concluded. All residual marks of punctuation = zeros. First digit expansion answer then came before me. On examining some problems unhappily arose. That imbecilic bug! The printout I possessed showed four nine as foremost decimals. Manifestly troubling. Totally every number looked wrong. Repairing the bug took much effort. A pi mnemonic with letters truly seemed good. Counting of all the letters probably should suffice. Reaching for a record would be helpful. Consequently, I continued, expecting a good final answer from computer. First number slowly displayed on the flat screen–3. Good. Trailing digits apparently were right also. Now my memory scheme must probably be implementable. The technique was chosen, elegant in scheme: by self reference a tale mnemonically helpful was ensured. An able title suddenly existed–“Circle Digits”. Taking pen I began. Words emanated uneasily. I desired more synonyms. Speedily I found my (alongside me) Thesaurus. Rogets is probably an essential in doing this, instantly I decided. I wrote and erased more. The Rogets clearly assisted immensely. My story proceeded (how lovely!) faultlessly. The end, above all, would soon joyfully overtake. So, this memory helper story is incontestably complete. Soon I will locate publisher. There a narrative will I trust immediately appear, producing fame. THE END.
The text explains itself: Count the letters in each word (a punctuation mark other than a period counts as a 0, and a digit stands for itself), and you’ll get the first 402 digits of π.
From The World of Wonders, 1883:
“There was a widow [Anne] and her daughter [Jane], and a man [George] and his son [Henry]. The widow married the son, and the daughter married the father. The widow was therefore mother [in law] to her husband’s father, and grandmother to her own husband. By this husband she had a son [David], to whom she was also great-grandmother. Now, the son of a great-grandmother must be grandfather or grand-uncle to the person to whom his mother was great-grandmother; but Anne was great-grandmother to him [David]. Therefore David is his own grandfather.”
Hood’s Magazine (1846) adds, “This was the case with a boy at a school at Norwich.”
Composed in 390 B.C., Aristophanes’ play Ecclesiazusae concludes with the name of a dish on which the characters plan to feast.
The word is lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimupotrimmatosilphioliparomelitoaktakexhumeno-kichlepikossuphophattoperisteralektruonoptopiphallidokinklopeleioplagoosiraiobaphetragalopterugon. At 169 letters, it’s still the longest word in the Greek language.
“That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest.” — Thoreau
In 1891, Sybell Corbet took this photograph in the library of Combermere Abbey in Cheshire. The abbey’s owner, Lord Combermere, had just died after a London accident and was being buried that day in the family vault a few miles away.
Members of the family felt the figure in the chair was very like the dead man. But physicist William Barrett, noting that it was distinct only from the waist up, suggested that perhaps a manservant had sat down briefly during the 15 minutes that Corbet had left the shutter open.
Barrett had just published an article with these particulars in the Westminster Gazette when he received a letter from a Combermere relative. She shared his doubts, she said, but wanted to correct one error in the article. “You say he had not lost his legs,” she wrote, “but he died from an accident in which they were so much injured, he could never have used them again. He was run over by a wagon at Knightsbridge, crossing the street, and only lived a few weeks.”
A sentence composed entirely of contractions taken from Robert Burns poems:
E’en th’ flow’rs afiel’ ha’e fac’t heav’n wi’ th’ rightfu’, shinin’ blessin’ that’s prevail’d i’ th’ min’ o’ th’ faithfu’ servan’ an’ th’ mournfu’, wand’ring craz’d o’ th’ worl’: heav’n’s pray’rs ha’e honour’d th’ cheerfu’ an’ th’ gen’rous ‘gainst t’other worl’s glib-tongu’d, wither’d pow’r.
When the English poet laureate Alfred Austin unveiled a statue of Burns in 1896, Punch proposed some remarks for him.
“Ye ken I canna mak’ ye a lang speech, bein’ mair a wanchansie mon, ram-feezled wi’ writin’, than a skirlin’, tapetless glib-gabbet,” he was to say. “Burns was nae feckless gowk, sae it’s a pleasure tae me tae unveil this sonsie statue.”
Astronomers have the light-year, but nuclear physicists need an analogous unit for measuring tiny distances.
Happily, they have one: The Physics Handbook for Science and Engineering defines the “beard-second” as the length the average physicist’s beard grows in one second, or about 5 nanometers.
Google will even make the conversion for you — type 1 inch in beard-seconds into your search box and see what you get.
dentiloquy
n. speech through gritted teeth
Was James Fenimore Cooper a great writer? His fellow authors didn’t think so. Mark Twain counted 114 literary offenses on a single page of The Deerslayer, including an “airy, complacent, monkey-with-a-parasol” style that Bret Harte parodied:
Judge Tompkins: ‘Genevra, the logs which compose yonder fire seem to have been incautiously chosen. The sibilation produced by the sap, which exudes copiously therefrom, is not conducive to composition.’
Genevra: ‘True, father, but I thought it would be preferable to the constant crepitation which is apt to attend the combustion of more seasoned ligneous fragments.’
Of Cooper’s characters, James Russell Lowell wrote, “The women he draws from one model don’t vary / All sappy as maples and flat as a prairie.”
“Cooper wrote about the poorest English that exists in our language,” Twain concluded, “and … the English of Deerslayer is the very worst that even Cooper ever wrote.” Perhaps they were jealous.