Though once a puppy, and though Fop by name,
Here moulders one, whose bones some honour claim;
No sycophant, although of spaniel race,
And though no hound, a martyr to the chase.
Ye squirrels, rabbits, leverets, rejoice!
Your haunts no longer echo to his voice;
This record of his fate exulting view,
He died, worn out with vain pursuit of you.
“Yes” — the indignant shade of Fop replies —
“And worn with vain pursuit man also dies.”
— William Cowper, 1792
From Henry Dudeney’s Perplexities column, Strand, March 1911:
“Here is a pretty little chess puzzle, made some years ago by Mr. F. S. Ensor. White has to checkmate the Black king without ever moving a queen off the bottom row, on which they at present stand. It is not difficult. As the White king is not needed in this puzzle, His Majesty’s attendance is dispensed with. His three wives can dispose of the enemy without assistance — in seven moves.”
This puzzle, by T.E. Maw of the Luton Public Library, appeared in the Strand in April 1911:
“Take fifteen matches and place them as shown in the diagram, then take away three, change the position of one, and the result will be the word showing what matches are made of.”
New Zealand has a wizard. Born in London in 1932, Ian Channell invented the role at the University of New South Wales when a teaching fellowship ended. “I’ve invented a wizard out of nowhere,” he told CNN. “There were no wizards when I arrived in the world, except in books.”
After a stint as an unpaid “cosmologer, living work of art, and shaman” at Melbourne University, he settled in Christchurch in the 1970s and began speaking on a ladder in Cathedral Square. The city council opposed him at first, but his profile rose. In 1982, the New Zealand Art Gallery Directors Association declared him a living work of art; in 1988 he performed a rain dance in the town of Waimate to break a drought; and in 1990 Prime Minister Mike Moore invited him to become Wizard of New Zealand (“No doubt there will be implications in the area of spells, blessings, curses, and other supernatural matters that are beyond the competence of mere Prime Ministers”).
In 1998 the Christchurch City Council engaged him to “provide acts of wizardry and other wizard-like-services as part of promotional work for the city of Christchurch” for 16,000 New Zealand dollars a year. He helps to promote local events and tourism and welcome dignitaries and delegations to the city. In 2009 he received the Queen’s Service Medal, one of the country’s highest honors (“I couldn’t believe it, I thought it would never happen”).
Now 88 years old, Channell is cultivating an apprentice, Ari Freeman, who may take over when he steps down. “I want the wizard phenomenon to continue,” Freeman said, “and I will totally fulfill that role.”
A problem submitted by the United States and shortlisted for the 16th International Mathematical Olympiad, Erfurt-Berlin, July 1974:
Alice, Betty, and Carol took the same series of examinations. There was one grade of A, one grade of B, and one grade of C for each examination, where A, B, C are different positive integers. The final test scores were
Alice: 20
Betty: 10
Carol: 9If Betty placed first in the arithmetic examination, who placed second in the spelling examination?
This is interesting: In 1585, Italian mathematician Giovanni Battista Benedetti devised a piece of music in which a precise application of the tuning mathematics causes the pitch to creep upward.
Avoiding this phenomenon requires an adjustment — a compromise to the dream of mathematically pure music.
A problem from the 1949 problems drive of the Archimedeans, the mathematical society of Cambridge University:
A farmer lives in a cottage 4/17 of a mile from a main road. There is a lane leading from his farm to the nearest point Q on the road. The road is straight running north and south, and there is a village two miles south of Q at which he keeps a bicycle. He wishes to go to a town on the road four miles north of Q. He can walk across the fields surrounding the roads at 1 1/2 miles per hour, but along the roads he can walk at 3 1/2 miles per hour. He can cycle at 14 miles per hour. Should he collect his bicycle in order to get to the town from his farm as quickly as possible?
The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 is remembered for its destructive intensity and terrible death toll. But the scale of the disaster can mask some remarkable personal stories. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe the experiences of some of the survivors, which ranged from the horrific to the surreal.
We’ll also consider a multilingual pun and puzzle over a deadly reptile.
Suppose that there’s no correlation between talent and attractiveness in the general population (left). A person who studies only celebrities might infer that the two traits are negatively correlated — that attractive people tend to lack talent and talented people tend to lack attractiveness (right). But this is deceiving: People who are neither attractive nor talented don’t typically become celebrities, and that large group of people aren’t represented in the sample. Celebrities tend to have one trait or the other but (unsurprisingly) rarely both.
The phenomenon was studied by Mayo Clinic statistician Joseph Berkson; this example is by CMG Lee.
In June 2006, Iowa paralegal Jane Wiggins looked out the window of her Cedar Rapids office and saw a cloud unlike any she’d seen before. “It looked like Armageddon,” she told the Associated Press. “The shadows of the clouds, the lights and the darks, and the greenish-yellow backdrop. They seemed to change.”
Wiggins sent a photo to the Cloud Appreciation Society, a weather-watching group founded by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, author of The Cloudspotter’s Guide. Other sightings were registered around the world (this one appeared over Tallinn, Estonia), and eventually Pretor-Pinney nominated it as an entirely new type.
The 2017 edition of the World Meteorological Organisation’s International Cloud Atlas included asperitas in a supplementary feature. The name is Latin for “roughen” or “agitate” — “not necessarily gentle or steady, but quite violent-looking, turbulent, almost twisted in its appearance,” Pretor-Pinney said.
It’s not new, really — such clouds have always been up there — but it’s the first formation added to the atlas since 1951. “We like to believe that just about everything that can be seen has been,” Society executive director Paul Hardaker said. “But you do get caught once in a while with the odd, new, interesting thing.”
