If your nose is close to the grindstone
And you hold it there long enough
In time you’ll say there’s no such thing
As brooks that babble and birds that sing
These three will all your world compose
Just you, the stone and your poor old nose.
— “From a two hundred-year-old stone in a country cemetery,” quoted in Christina Foyle, So Much Wisdom, 1984
Two rhapsodies on the name of French philosopher Michel Onfray, by Basile Morin.
In the chain ambigram above, the first name is transfigured (at some point) into the last.
In the tessellation ambigram below, the two names appear simultaneously as figure and ground.
From Pi Mu Epsilon Journal, November 1950:
(1/2)3 < (1/2)2.
Taking the logarithm to the base 1/2 of each member of the above inequality, we write
3 log1/2(1/2) < 2 log1/2(1/2).
But logbb = 1. Therefore
3 < 2.
Back in 2017 I wrote about the Feynman ciphers, three coded messages that had been presented as challenges to Richard Feynman in the 1950s.
Feynman couldn’t crack them, and even at the time of my post only the first of the three had been decoded — it turned out to be a transposition of the opening of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Middle English. But in May 2023 David Vierra solved the other two — one turns out to be an excerpt from A.E. Housman’s 1896 poem “Terence, This is Stupid Stuff,” and the other is the start of Feynman’s 1953 paper “Atomic Theory of the λ Transition in Helium,” from The Physical Review.
Who was the “fellow scientist” who had devised these challenges? Nick Pelling thinks the most likely candidate is Paul Olum, who had been Feynman’s officemate at Los Alamos in the 1940s, but hard evidence is lacking. More at Cipher Mysteries.
(Thanks to reader Peter Dawyndt for the tip.)
Smith College mathematician Jim Henle published this retrograde analysis puzzle in the Mathematical Intelligencer in 2018 as part of an appreciation of Raymond Smullyan. “After many moves, the chessboard appears as above. What were the last two moves?”
Several claimants have been put forth as the originators of the modern tropical cyclone ‘naming’ system. Australian weather meteorologist, Clement L. Wragge, is one of the best-established holders of the title. … Most ingeniously, he gained a measure of personal revenge by christening some of the nastiest storms with politicians’ names such as Drake, Barton, and Deakin. Modern hurricane researcher Chris Landsea noted that, by using such a personal naming system, Wragge could publicly describe a politician (say one who was less than generous with weather-bureau appropriations) as ‘causing great distress’ or ‘wandering aimlessly about the Pacific.’
— Randy Cerveny, Freaks of the Storm, 2006
In 1900, Louis Philip Perew of Tonawanda, New York, built a “gigantic man” of wood, rubber, and metal that “walks, talks, runs, jumps, [and] rolls its eyes.”
Standing 7 foot 5 in size 13 1/2 shoes and clothed in white duck, the nameless man “walked smoothly, and almost noiselessly” at an exhibition for the Strand, circling the hall twice without stopping. Perew was cagey as to its inner workings, saying only that its aluminum skin concealed a steel framework.
When a large block of wood was placed in its path, “it stopped, rolled its eyes in the direction of the obstacle, as if calculating how it could surmount it. It then deliberately raised the right foot, placed it upon the object, and stepped down on the other side. The motion seemed uncannily realistic. You almost feel like shrinking from before those rolling eyes. The visionless orbs are operated by means of clock-work situated within the head.”
When the robot announced, “I am going to walk from New York to San Francisco,” Perew acknowledged that the team planned to send it across the continent drawing a light wagon bearing two men. He claimed it could cover 20 miles in an hour.
I don’t know any more about it. This isn’t the first mechanical man we’ve encountered — a steam-powered robot had been proposed as early as 1868. But neither seems to have gone anywhere.
03/23/2025 UPDATE: Readers Kendra Colman, Justin Hilyard, and Hans Havermann point out that Cybernetic Zoo has a whole summary on the “Electric Man” and its history, including Perew’s original 1894 patent and various news articles (with additional photos) from 1895 up to 1914. Apparently the effect is deceiving — the man doesn’t actually pull the wagon, the wagon pushes the man. Many thanks to everyone who’s written in about this.
In 2005, Jeremy Winterson bought a bootleg copy of Revenge of the Sith in Shanghai and noticed something wrong with the English subtitles.
The movie’s dialogue had been translated mechanically into Chinese and then translated back again into English, leaving it almost incomprehensible. (A similar disaster had befallen a Portuguese-French phrasebook in 1883.)
Fans replaced the movie’s original audio dialogue with voice actors reading the mistranslated subtitles, and the result is Star War the Third Gathers: Backstroke of the West (highlights above).
A Polish problem longlisted for the 19th International Mathematical Olympiad in Yugoslavia, July 1977:
A room contains nine men. Among every three of them there are two who are mutually acquainted. Prove that four of them are mutually acquainted.
We have a strong intuition that it’s wrong to punish someone for a crime he hasn’t committed, but is this always the case? Algy, an Alaskan motorist, and Ben, a traffic policeman, both know reliably that Algy intends to speed on a remote, unpatrolled, but radar-surveyed highway at 10:31 tomorrow morning. They also know that, if this happens, police won’t be able to reach the scene of the offense until several hours after it’s been committed.
Algy radios Ben with an offer: If Ben issues a ticket for this crime before it occurs, Algy will pay the fine. If Ben doesn’t issue the ticket until after the offense has occurred, then Algy will flee the country to avoid paying the fine. Ben thinks about this, then issues the ticket now, writing in tomorrow’s date. He delivers the ticket to Algy’s address, where Algy’s wife gives him Algy’s check for the fine, which Ben cashes immediately. At 10:31 tomorrow, Algy exceeds the speed limit as described.
University of Hong Kong philosopher Christopher New writes, “If this example is valid, it suggests that there may be room in our moral thought for the notion of prepunishment [punishment before an offense is committed], and that it may be only epistemic, rather than moral, constraints that prevent us from practising it.”
(Christopher New, “Time and Punishment,” Analysis 52:1 [January 1992], 35-40.)
