Six Choices

On a multiple-choice test, one of the questions is illegible, but the choice of answers is listed clearly below. What’s the right answer?

(a) All of the below.
(b) None of the below.
(c) All of the above.
(d) One of the above.
(e) None of the above.
(f) None of the above.

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(a) implies that both (b) and (f) are right, which is a contradiction, so (a) can’t be right. And (c) claims that (a) is right, so (c) can’t be right either. We’ve eliminated (a) and (c). That means that if (b) is a correct statement then (d) is accurate. But (b) contradicts (d), so (b) must be false. And since (a), (b), and (c) are all false, then (d) is false as well. Now we’re down to (e) and (f). (f) can’t be true, because it implies simultaneously that statements (a) through (d) are false and that (e), which agrees with this, is also false, another contradiction. That leaves (e), whose truth is confirmed by the falsity of statements (a) through (d).

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March 24, 2012February 1, 2013 | Puzzles

Inspiration

John Dryden agreed to serve as judge in an impromptu poetry competition among a group of friends, including the Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Rochester, and Lord Dorset.

All the contestants worked thoughtfully at their entries except for Lord Dorset, who wrote two or three lines and passed them to Dryden almost immediately.

When everyone had finished, Dryden reviewed their submissions, and he smiled when he reached Dorset’s. “I must acknowledge,” he said, “that there are abundance of fine things in my hands, and such as do honor to the personages who wrote them, but I am under the indispensable necessity of giving the highest preference to Lord Dorset. I must request you will hear it yourselves, gentlemen, and I believe each and every one of you will approve my judgment:

I promise to pay John Dryden,
or order on demand,
the sum of five hundred pounds.
Dorset.

“I must confess that I am equally charmed with the style and the subject,” Dryden said. “This kind of writing exceeds any other, whether ancient or modern.”

March 24, 2012March 23, 2012 | Poems

Black and White

From Stratagems of Chess, 1817. White to mate in two moves.

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1. Rd8+ and the queen will mate.

March 23, 2012February 1, 2013 | Puzzles

Time and Motion

It’s impossible to trisect an angle using a compass and a straightedge, but in 1947 Leo Moser showed how to do it with a pocketwatch. At noon align the watch’s hands with one side of the angle (above, XII), then wait until the minute hand has crossed to the other side (III). At that point the hour hand will have measured one-twelfth of the angle. Double that twice and you have your trisection.

“Now you can trisect an angle anytime, anyplace, for anyone who asks,” writes Underwood Dudley in A Budget of Trisections. “But no one ever will.”

March 23, 2012March 23, 2012 | Science & Math

“Continence”

In writing the first edition of Scouting for Boys in 1908, Robert Baden-Powell planned to include a section on self-abuse.

“You all know what it is to have at times a pleasant feeling in your private parts,” he wrote, “and there comes an inclination to work it up with your hand or otherwise. It is especially likely to happen when you see a dirty picture or hear dirty stories and jokes. Well, lots of fellows from not knowing any better, please themselves in this way until it often becomes a sort of habit with them which they cannot get out of.”

“The result of self-abuse is always — mind you, always — that the boy after a time becomes weak and nervous and shy, he gets headaches and probably palpitation of the heart, and if he still carries it on too far he very often goes out of his mind and becomes an idiot. A very large number of the lunatics in our asylums have made themselves ill by indulging in this vice although at one time they were sensible cheery boys like any one of you.”

Baden-Powell had consulted with his mother as to whether to include the section. He removed it at the strong advice of his publisher.

March 23, 2012March 23, 2012 | Oddities