Ode on a Blogosphere

If all the trees in all the woods were men,
And each and every blade of grass a pen;
If every leaf on every shrub and tree
Turned to a sheet of foolscap; every sea
Were changed to ink, and all earth’s living tribes
Had nothing else to do but act as scribes,
And for ten thousand ages, day and night,
The human race should write, and write, and write,
Till all the pens and paper were used up,
And the huge inkstand was an empty cup,
Still would the scribblers clustered round its brink
Call for more pens, more paper, and more ink.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Cacoëthes Scribendi”

January 26, 2008October 4, 2010 | Poems

Bird’s-Eye View

If you were planning to get rich by inventing chicken spectacles, you’re 100 years too late.

Andrew Jackson patented this pair in 1903 so that chickens could “be protected from other fowls that might attempt to peck them.”

January 25, 2008October 4, 2010 | Oddities · Technology

Q.E.D.

Nothing is heavier than lead.

Feathers are heavier than nothing.

Therefore feathers are heavier than lead.

January 25, 2008 | Science & Math

Setup Job

chessboard

From Henry Ernest Dudeney, Amusements in Mathematics (1917):

I have a single chessboard and a single set of chessmen. In how many different ways may the men be correctly set up for the beginning of a game? I find that most people slip at a particular point in making the calculation.

	Select Click for Answer
The White pawns may be arranged in 40,320 ways, the White rooks in 2 ways, the bishops in 2 ways, and the knights in 2 ways. Multiply these numbers together, and we find that the White pieces may be placed in 322,560 different ways. The Black pieces may, of course, be placed in the same number of ways. Therefore the men may be set up in 322,560 × 322,560 = 104,044,953,600 ways. But the point that nearly everybody overlooks is that the board may be placed in two different ways for every arrangement. Therefore the answer is doubled, and is 208,089,907,200 different ways.

Click for Answer

January 24, 2008January 16, 2013 | Puzzles

Unquote

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” — Charles Darwin

January 24, 2008 | Quotations · Science & Math

Zerah Colburn

Born in 1804, Zerah Colburn was thought to be mentally retarded until the age of 7, when his father overheard him solving multiplication problems for other children and discovered he was a prodigy. From the 1872 autobiography of Amos Kendall, with whom he boarded briefly:

He could multiply together any two numbers under a hundred in less than a minute. He could tell, apparently without thought, how many days there are in any number of years less than thirty, and in any number over thirty and up to a hundred upon a minute’s reflection. After being told the denominations of weights and measures, he would reduce one to another with the greatest readiness. He answered correctly the question, ‘How many gills are there in three barrels?’ The question, ‘How many are 25 × 25 + 35 × 35 +45 × 45?’ he answered correctly with little hesitation. He readily multiplied any number over a hundred by any number less. In less than a minute he answered correctly the question, ‘How many days are there in seventy-three years?’

“What rendered his performances more wonderful was, that he did not know a figure when written, and could not count more than fifty. How he knew the names of larger numbers was a mystery, and he was sometimes embarrassed in making his answers understood. After he had stated correctly the number of days in a given number of years, he was asked how many hours there were. He said he did not know the number of hours in a day. On being told it was twenty-four he immediately gave a correct answer.”

January 24, 2008January 21, 2008 | Oddities · Science & Math

The Patient’s Worry

A “snowball sentence” contrived by Dmitri Borgmann — each word is one letter longer than the last:

I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunications’ incomprehensibleness.

January 23, 2008October 4, 2010 | Language

No Way to Go

Marcus Garvey suffered a stroke in January 1940, woke up to read his obituary in the Chicago Defender, learned that he had been “broke, alone and unpopular,” suffered a second stroke, and died.

January 23, 2008 | Death

“A Snake’s Attachment for Home”

Lord Monboddo relates the following anecdote of a serpent: ‘I am well informed of a tame serpent in the East Indies, which belonged to the late Dr. Vigot, once kept by him in the suburbs of Madras. This serpent was taken by the French when they invested Madras, and was carried to Pondicherry in a close carriage. But from thence he found his way back to his old quarters, though Madras was above one hundred miles distant from Pondicherry.’

— Frank H. Stauffer, The Queer, the Quaint and the Quizzical, 1882

January 23, 2008 | Oddities

Encore!

One candidate for the world’s shortest play is The Exile, by Tristan Bernard.

The curtain rises on a mountaineer in a remote cabin. An exile knocks on the door.

EXILE: Whoever you are, have pity on a hunted man. There is a price on my head.

MOUNTAINEER: How much?

The curtain falls.

But shorter still may be Samuel Beckett’s 1969 play Breath, which lasts 35 seconds. As we view a bare, litter-strewn stage, we hear a baby’s cry, a person inhaling once and then exhaling, and then another cry. At the play’s West End debut, one audience member said, “I just want to put on record that I thought the whole evening was completely bogus and pretentious.”

(Thanks, Adam.)

January 22, 2008August 16, 2013 | Art · Trivia