A puzzle from the November-December 1994 issue of Quantum:
“If the brainteaser you solved before you solved this one was harder than the brainteaser you solved after you solved the brainteaser that you solved before you solved this one, was the brainteaser you solved before you solved this one harder than this one?”
I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?
— Lord Byron, letter to Thomas Moore, July 5, 1821
In 1782, during a tour of Hampton Court, Hannah More encountered landscape architect Lancelot “Capability” Brown, who compared his art to literary composition:
‘Now there‘ said he, pointing his finger, ‘I make a comma, and there’ pointing to another spot, ‘where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view, a parenthesis; now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.’
From a letter to her sister, December 31, 1782.
According to Frank M. Chapman’s Color Key to North American Birds (1912), the hooded warbler sings You must come to the woods, or you won’t see me.
Between 1741 and 1760, when a baby was left at London’s Foundling Hospital, the staff encouraged the mother to provide some token that could be used as an identifying record — a note, a letter, or some other small object. Usually a piece of fabric was provided by the mother or cut from the child’s clothing, and these were attached to registration forms and then bound into ledgers.
Altogether about 5,000 babies received such tokens. The example above bears the message “This Silver Ribbon is desired to be preserved as the child’s mark of distinction.” (Ribbons were recognized symbols of love, especially in circumstances of loss and separation.) Today these pieces of fabric form the largest collection of everyday textiles surviving in Britain from the 18th century.
On the occasion of an exhibition of the surviving swatches at the hospital in 2010, University of Hertfordshire historian John Styles said, “The textiles are both beautiful and poignant, embedded in a rich social history. Each swatch reflects the life of a single infant child. But the textiles also tell us about the clothes their mothers wore, because baby clothes were usually made up from worn-out adult clothing. The fabrics reveal how working women struggled to be fashionable in the eighteenth century.”
A maze by Eric Fisk. Following the arrows, find a path that leads away from the star and back to it.
Ohm’s law states that V = IR, where V is the voltage measured across a conductor, I is the current through the conductor, and R is the conductor’s resistance. In the image mnemonic at left (easily remembered by the word “viral”), covering any of the unknowns gives the formula in terms of the remaining parameters: V = IR, I = V/R, R = V/I.
Wikimedia user CMG Lee has devised other mnemonics in the same style for high-school physics students (right). For example, F = ma, m = F/a, a = F/m. In the corresponding SVG file you can hover over a symbol to see its meaning and formula.
In Venice, on a small peninsula formed by the meeting of two canals, stands the church of Santa Maria della Salute, bearing a statue of the Virgin Mary. Further out stand statues of Atlas and Fortune. And on the very tip of the point there used to stand a solitary cast-iron lamppost, on whose base was inscribed the legend FONDERIA DI FERRO IN VENEZIA DI THEODOR E HASSELQUIST. This tableau inspired John Sparrow, former Warden of All Souls College, to write a memorable poem:
See the Saviour Queen on high,
Crowned with stars against the sky!
Poised in her appointed place
Gravely she dispenses grace,
While, the pattern to repeat,
From the dome beneath her feet
Flows the marble, fold on fold,
Convoluted, white and cold.
Close at hand a patient pair
On their backs the planet bear;
Atlas bends beneath the strain,
Fortune flaunts her golden vane:
Lucid in the moonlight pale,
Gleams the globe and shifts the sail.
While aloft in ranks serene,
Serving their celestial queen,
Countless constellations bright
Circumnavigate the night,
Two poor earth-bound slaves below
Where the sea-fogs settle slow,
Stationed on the shadowy ledge
That defines the water’s edge,
Lift their lantern through the mist —
Theodor and Hasselquist.
Air and water, sky and stone,
Need foundations not their own:
How can they subsist alone?
I, their structure to sustain,
Recompose them in my brain
Endlessly, but all in vain.
Air and water, stone and sky,
No less mortal they than I,
Human Atlas, doomed to die.
Yet there stirs within my breast
Something not to be suppressed,
Reaching out beyond my reach,
Inexpressible in speech,
Dumb presentiment of prayer
To the Queen of night and air:
When the globe dissolves for me
And the land is lost in sea,
When I cross the last lagoon
Starless, and without a moon,
Faithful still beneath the dome
Be they there to light me home,
Shining from the farther shore —
Hasselquist and Theodor.
(Via John Julius Norwich, More Christmas Crackers, 1990.)
“A man who has not read Homer is like a man who has not seen the ocean. There is a great object of which he has no idea.” — Walter Bagehot
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