A “prayer to the local deities” offered by Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus:
Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as a temperate man and he only can bear and carry.
“Anything more? The prayer, I think, is enough for me.”
In 1865, Iowa lithographer W.H. Pratt wrote out the text of the Emancipation Proclamation in carefully varied density to produce this result.
How is it with those who imagine that there are antipodes opposite to our footsteps? Do they say anything to the purpose? Or is there any one so senseless as to believe that there are men whose footsteps are higher than their heads? Or that the things which with us are in a recumbent position, with them hang in an inverted direction? That the crops and trees grow downwards? That the rains, and snow, and hail fall upwards to the earth? And does any one wonder that hanging gardens are mentioned among the seven wonders of the world, when philosophers make hanging fields, and seas, and cities, and mountains?
— Lactantius, Institutiones Divinae, 303
“Erotic Temple,” an etching from Giovanni Battista Bracelli’s Oddities of Various Figures, 1624.
From the National Gallery of Art.
In 2016, University of Buenos Aires computer science student Gonzalo Ciruelos worked out that the roundest country in the world is Sierra Leone, with a roundness index of 0.934 on a scale of 0 to 1.
He’d been inspired by David Barry, who’d found that the world’s most rectangular country is Egypt (0.955 on the same scale).
Metropolitan France is known as the Hexagon. I suppose each country has its claim to fame.
(Gonzalo Ciruelos, “What Is the Roundest Country?”, Math Horizons 26:3 [February 2019], 26-27.)
“I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether the things are so.” — Montaigne
From Lee Sallows:
(Thanks, Lee!)
When I am going out for an evening I arrange the fire in my stove so that I do not fail to find a good one when I return, though it would have engaged my frequent attention present. So that, when I know I am to be at home, I sometimes make believe that I may go out, to save trouble. And this is the art of living, too, — to leave our life in a condition to go alone, and not to require a constant supervision. We will then sit down serenely to live, as by the side of a stove.
— Thoreau, Journal, Feb. 20, 1841
anfractuous
adj. having many windings and turnings
loof
n. the palm of the hand
penetralia
n. the innermost recesses of a building
swither
n. a state of perplexity
It’s commonly said that you can defeat a hedge maze by placing one hand on a wall and carefully maintaining that contact as you advance. If the hedges are all connected, this method will reliably lead you to the center of the maze (and, indeed, to every other part of it before you return to the entrance).
The maze at Chevening House, in Kent, was designed deliberately to thwart this technique. Its center is concealed in an “island” of hedges distinct from the outer wall, so following either a left- or a right-hand rule will return you to the entrance without ever passing the goal. It was designed by mathematician Earl Stanhope, one of at least three hedge mazes he produced in the 1820s in the first serious application of mathematics to maze design.
At the time of its completion under Hadrian, the Pantheon in Rome had the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome.
It still does. It’s held that record for nearly 2,000 years.
