Misc

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KnightsTemplarPlayingChess1283.jpg

  • The Dutch word for cease-fire negotiations is wapenstilstandsonderhandelingen.
  • Rearrange the letters in ONE THOUSAND KILOS and you get OH, SOUNDS LIKE A TON! (Hans-Peter Reich)
  • 1167882 + 3211682 = 116788321168
  • The Irish for chess, ficheall, derives from the Old Irish fidchell, “wood intelligence.”
  • “Life is a school of probability.” — Walter Bagehot

A tiny detail that I hope is true: In Time in World History (2019), historian Peter Stearns writes that before watches became affordable, some European soldiers “took their own roosters with them so they would wake up on time.”

| History · Language · Quotations · Science & Math

Unquote

“Politeness and a sense of honor have this advantage: we bestow them on others without losing a thing.” — Baltasar Gracián

“Be not niggardly of what costs thee nothing, as courtesy, counsel, & countenance.” — Ben Franklin

| Quotations

Skill

Letter to the Times, Oct. 23, 2001:

Sir, As a schoolboy in the 1940s I heard the late Sir Robert Wood, Principal of the (then) University College of Southampton, proclaim at a school speech day:

‘The advantage of a classical education is that it teaches you to do without the money it makes you unable to acquire.’

Yours faithfully,

Bill Kirkman
Willingham, Cambridge

| Quotations · Society

Insight

Advice in problem solving:

“You must always invert.” — Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi

“Whenever you can, count.” — Francis Galton

“Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems.” — Descartes

“By studying the masters, not their pupils.” — Niels Henrik Abel

“Truth is the offspring of silence and meditation. I keep the subject constantly before me and wait ’til the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.” — Isaac Newton

| Quotations · Science & Math

Unquote

“My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence. The more certitude one assumes, the less there is left to think about, and a person sure of everything would never have any need to think about anything and might be considered clinically dead under current medical standards, where the absence of brain activity is taken to mean that life has ended.” — Robert Anton Wilson

| Quotations