Set a monument for me,
built of sugar, in the sea.
It will melt, of course, and make
briefly a sweet-water lake;
meanwhile, fishes by the score
take surprised a sip or more.
They, in various ports, will then
be, in turn, consumed by men.
This way I will join the chain
of humanity again,
while, were I of stone or steel,
just some pigeon ungenteel,
or perhaps a Ph.D.
would discharge his wit on me.
— Christian Morgenstern
A puzzle by James M., an operations researcher at the National Security Agency:
Frosty the Snowman wants to create a small snowman friend for himself. The new snowman needs a base, torso, and a head, all three of which should be spheres. The torso should be no larger than the base and the head should be no larger than the torso.
For building material, Frosty has a spherical snowball with a 6-inch radius. Since Frosty likes to keep things simple, he also wants the radius of each of the three pieces to be a positive integer. Can Frosty accomplish this?
advigilate
v. to watch carefully; to keep vigil
cunctation
n. lateness; delay
vagarious
adj. roving; wandering; characterized by vagaries
mundivagant
adj. that roams around the world
Letter to the Times, Aug. 24, 2001:
Sir, Some years ago when I lived in Livingstone, Zambia, I received a letter from Lusaka, the capital, correctly addressed but weeks late.
Among the numerous back stamps the envelope had collected in its travels the last was Livingstone, Canada, with an inscription ‘Try Livingstone, Zambia’.
The letter had also visited Scotland and New Zealand.
Yours truly,
David H. Walton
Crowland, Peterborough
Drive east on Canusa Street and you’re in the United States, drive west and you’re in Canada. That’s because the street, part of Quebec Route 247, runs along the border — the yellow line dividing its lanes follows the 45th parallel.
Families who live on the south side are in Vermont, and those in the north are in Quebec — they can see one another but must present themselves at a border post before crossing the street.
But residents of both countries can freely visit the Haskell Free Library — where the main entrance is in America but the books are in Canada.
Names of the Mad Hatter in various translations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:
That last one’s in Middle Welsh. Though Lewis Carroll’s novel abounds in wordplay, rhymes, quotations, nonsense, homophones, logical twists, and Victorian allusions, it’s found its way into 174 languages and more than 9,000 editions around the world. Zongxin Feng of Tsinghua University in Beijing wrote, “Of all Western literary masterpieces introduced into China in the twentieth century, no other work has enjoyed such popularity.”
In an 1866 letter, Carroll had written, “Friends here [in Oxford] seem to think that the book is untranslatable.”
(Jon A. Lindseth, ed., Alice in a World of Wonderlands, 2015.)
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.”
Composer and bandleader Sun Ra insisted that he wasn’t Herman Blount of Birmingham, Alabama, but an alien from Saturn. In a visionary experience in 1936, he said, he’d learned that “I would speak [through music], and the world would listen. That’s what they told me.”
The story became part of his mystique. Late in life, filling out a hospital admission form, he listed Saturn as his place of birth. When worried nurses summoned help, the psychiatrist said, “This is Sun Ra — of course he’s from Saturn!”
(Ian Simmons, “Mothership Connections,” Fortean Times 244 [January 2009], 30–35, cited in Andrew May, The Science of Sci-Fi Music, 2020.)
A puzzle by N. Avilov, from the Russian science magazine Kvant. Prove that the shaded region of this pentagram takes up half its area.
“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
For the 1968 exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity in London, inventor Gordon Pask created a society of mobiles, two “males” and three “females” that had to learn to communicate, cooperate, and compete in order to satisfy their drives. The males could project light beams, and the females could, if they chose, reflect a beam back to the sending male, which he desired. The males had to compete with one another to find cooperative females, and the females competed to find males projecting suitably colored light.
Male I sends out an intermittent directional visual signal which serves to identify it as ‘male I’ and its desire as ‘O [orange] satisfaction.’ … Should the directional signal fall on the receptor of a female who is trying to cooperate, she produces an identifying sound in synchrony with the intermittent light signal. Male I detects the correlation between the female and his light signal and stops his motion (unless he is prevented from doing so by male II). At this point he triggers off an autonomous energetic event which consists in shining an intense orange light for at least a minimum interval in the direction of the located female. The immediate result is an increase of the O drive. However, male I anticipates reinforcement (which he will achieve if the female behaves appropriately and if the moving part, C, is appropriately positioned during at least some of this behaviour). Reinforcement, which substantially reduces the O drive, is obtained if the O goal is satisfied; that is if orange light falls on receptor C. Supposing reinforcement occurs, male I emits an identifying sound signal which is received by the cooperating female, the autonomous energetic event is prolonged and the O drive is decreased.
“The cooperative encounter terminates after a short time if reinforcement does not occur, or if it is externally disrupted. Otherwise it continues until the drive state of male I is modified so that he aims for a different goal.”
Pask stressed that the mobiles needed to learn from experience in order to satisfy their drives. The females had to learn how to position their reflectors to attract males, but the system encouraged them to find different strategies so that not all males demanded stimulation of the same receptor. Pask said, “Some may like O light on D and P [puce] light on C. She can learn that trick also.”
(From Paul Brown, et al., eds., White Heat Cold Logic: British Computer Art 1960-1980, 2008.)
