Zeno once caught a slave stealing and began to beat him.
Knowing the philosopher’s penchant for paradoxes, the slave cried, “But it was fated that I should steal!”
Zeno said, “And that I should beat you.”
Kaprekar’s Constant
Choose four distinct digits and arrange them into the largest and smallest numbers possible (e.g., 9751 and 1579). Subtract the smaller from the larger to produce a new number (9751 – 1579 = 8172) and repeat the operation.
Within seven iterations you’ll always arrive at 6174.
With three-digit numbers you’ll aways arrive at 495.
Strange Neighbors
The border between Delaware and Pennsylvania is a perfect curve.
It’s the arc of a circle centered on the cupola of the courthouse at New Castle.
It’s the only such boundary in the territorial United States.
Unquote
“We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable.” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Naturally
Someone once asked Jean Cocteau, “Suppose your house were on fire and you could remove only one thing. What would you take?”
Cocteau considered, then said, “I would take the fire.”
Veiled Symbolism
Finland’s national painting is Hugo Simberg’s The Wounded Angel.
Simberg refused to explain its meaning … but it was his favorite work.
Gifted
‘Did you hear the story of the extraordinary precocity of Mrs. Perkins’s baby that died last week?’ asked Mrs. Allgood. ‘It was only three months old, and lying at the point of death, when the grief-stricken mother asked the doctor if nothing could save it. “Absolutely nothing!” said the doctor. Then the infant looked up pitifully into its mother’s face and said—absolutely nothing!’
‘Impossible!’ insisted Mildred. ‘And only three months old!’
— Henry Ernest Dudeney, Amusements in Mathematics, 1917
The Two Cultures
James McNeill Whistler failed his West Point chemistry exam.
“If silicon had been a gas,” he said later, “I should have been a major general.”
Inventory
In this sentence there are sixteen words, eighty-one letters, one hyphen, four commas, and one period.
Jefferson’s Commandments
A “decalogue of canons for observation in practical life,” sent by Thomas Jefferson to the new father of a baby boy:
- Never put off till tomorrow what you can do to-day.
- Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.
- Never spend your money before you have it.
- Never buy what you do not want, because it is cheap; it will be dear to you.
- Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst and cold.
- We never repent of having eaten too little.
- Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly.
- How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened.
- Take things always by their smooth handle.
- When angry, count ten, before you speak; if very angry, an hundred.
It’s not clear what a smooth handle is. Possibly it refers to a saying by Epictetus: “Everything has two handles, one by which it can be borne, another by which it cannot.” Or possibly Jefferson was referring to the need for civil discourse.
See also Ben Franklin’s “13 virtues” and Poor Richard’s lesser-known maxims.