The Pentagon has a detailed strategy for surviving a zombie apocalypse.
CONOP 8888, “Counter-Zombie Dominance,” arose when military planners needed to create a planning document that the public could not mistake for a real scenario. They imagined a “clearly impossible” emergency in which planners needed to “undertake military operations to preserve ‘non-zombie’ humans from the threats posed by a zombie horde.”
“The document is identified as a training tool used in an in-house training exercise where students learn about the basic concepts of military plans and order development through a fictional training scenario,” spokeswoman Pamela Kunze told Foreign Policy. “This document is not a U.S. Strategic Command plan.” But, a disclaimer reads, “this plan was not actually designed as a joke.”
Strange imports come from Hungary:
Count Dracula, and ZsaZsa G.,
Now Erno Rubik’s Magic Cube
For PhD or country rube.
This fiendish clever engineer
Entrapped the music of the sphere.
It’s sphere on sphere in all 3D —
A kinematic symphony!
Ta! Ra! Ra! Boom De Ay!
One thousand bucks a day.
That’s Rubik’s cubic pay.
He drives a Chevrolet.
Forty-three quintillion plus
Problems Rubik posed for us.
Numbers of this awesome kind
Boggle even Sagan’s mind.
Out with sex and violence,
In with calm intelligence.
Kubrick’s “Clockwork Orange” — no!
Rubik’s Magic Cube — Jawohl!
Ta! Ra! Ra! Boom De Ay!
Cu-bies in disarray?
First twist them that-a-way,
Then turn them this-a-way.
Respect your cube and keep it clean.
Lube your cube with Vaseline.
Beware the dreaded cubist’s thumb,
The callused hand and fingers numb.
No borrower nor lender be.
Rude folks might switch two tabs on thee,
The most unkindest switch of all,
Into insolubility.
In-sol-u-bility.
The cruelest place to be.
However you persist
Solutions don’t exist.
Cubemeisters follow Rubik’s camp —
There’s Bühler, Guy and Berlekamp;
John Conway leads a Cambridge pack
(And solves the cube behind his back!).
All hail Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw,
A mayor with fast cubic draw.
Now Dave Singmaster wrote THE BOOK.
One more we must not overlook —
Singmaster’s office-mate!
Programming potentate!
Alg’rithmic heavyweight!
Morwen B. Thistlethwaite!
Rubik’s groupies know their groups:
(That’s math, not rock, you nincompoops.)
Their squares and slices, tri-twist loops,
Plus mono-swaps and supergroups.
Now supergroups have smaller groups
Upon their backs to bite ’em,
And smaller groups have smaller still,
Almost ad infinitum.
How many moves to solve?
How many sides revolve?
Fifty two for Thistlethwaite.
Even God needs ten and eight.
The issue’s joined in steely grip:
Man’s mind against computer chip.
With theorems wrought by Conway’s eight
‘Gainst programs writ by Thistlethwait.
Can multibillion-neuron brains
Beat multimegabit machines?
The thrust of this theistic schism —
To ferret out God’s algorism!
CODA:
He (hooked on
Cubing)
With great
Enthusiasm:
Ta! Ra! Ra! Boom De Ay!
Men’s schemes gang aft agley.
Let’s cube our life away!
She: Long pause
(having been
here before):
—————OY VEY!
In 1901, two English academics met a succession of strange characters during a visit to Versailles. They came to believe that they had strayed somehow into the mind of Marie Antoinette in the year before her execution. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe the Moberly-Jourdain affair, a historical puzzle wrapped in a dream.
We’ll also revisit Christmas birthdays and puzzle over a presidential term.
“Climate is your personality; weather is your mood.” — J. Marshall Shepherd, past president, American Meteorological Society, quoted in Andrew Revkin and Lisa Mechaley, Weather: An Illustrated History, 2018
When the steamship Princess May was grounded in 1910 near Sentinel Island in Alaska’s Lynn Canal, the tide was high and the ship’s momentum forced it well up onto the rocks. There it perched at an angle of 23 degrees for photographer William Case at the height of its extremity.
Happily there was no loss of life, and the vessel was eventually refloated and returned to service.
Only one castrato made solo recordings — Alessandro Moreschi performed for the Gramophone & Typewriter Company in 1902 and 1904, when he was in his mid-40s. For 30 years he had sung as first soprano in the Sistine Chapel Choir, but in 1903 Pius X ordered that the remaining castrati be replaced by boys. He died in 1922 and lies in Rome.
In 1926, while working as a schoolteacher in Otterthal, Austria, Ludwig Wittgenstein is alleged to have struck an 11-year-old schoolboy, Josef Haidbauer, so that he collapsed unconscious. The incident was reported to the police, and a judge ordered a psychiatric report, but nothing more is known about the case. Ten years later Wittgenstein appeared in the village to ask the forgiveness of children he had hurt. He wrote in a notebook, “Last year with God’s help I pulled myself together and made a confession. This brought me into more settled waters, into a better relation with people, and to a greater seriousness.”