The Anthem Veterans Memorial, in Anthem, Arizona, consists of five white pillars representing the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard. Each pillar contains a slanted elliptical opening, and the five are arranged so that at 11:11 a.m. on Veterans Day, November 11, the sun’s light passes through all five and illuminates the Great Seal of the United States, which is inlaid among 750 red paving stones engraved with the names of veterans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euiFY-RxeRE
A puzzle from MIT Technology Review, September-October 1999: A popular pastime at Bell Labs in the 1970s was to identify a word that contains a given string of letters — for example, OOKKEE is found in BOOKKEEPER. Michael Foster found English words that contain HIPE, HCR, and UFA. What are they?
In E.M. Forster’s 1907 novel The Longest Journey, the description of the country estate Cadover contains a surprising term:
The lawn ended in a Ha-ha (‘Ha! ha! who shall regard it?’), and thence the bare land sloped down into the village.
A ha-ha is indeed the term for a sort of buried wall adjoined by a sloping ditch — it will keep deer out of your garden without blocking the view. But how it came by that name seems uncertain. Possibly it’s a shortened form of “half and half” (half wall, half ditch), and possibly it’s named for the cries of its observers — the earliest usage in the Oxford English Dictionary is John James’ 1712 translation of Antoine-Joseph Dézallier d’Argenville’s Theory and Practice of Gardening — he refers to “a large and deep Ditch at the Foot.., which surprizes..and makes one cry, Ah! Ah! from whence it takes its Name.”
In Terry Pratchett’s novel Men at Arms, a ha-ha is accidentally specified to be 50 feet deep. The result is called a hoho, and it claims the lives of three gardeners. In Snuff, two characters go for a walk in the countryside and “navigate their way around the ha-ha, keep their distance from the ho-ho and completely ignore the he-he.”
In October 1996, Parade magazine published the results of a vanity license plate contest that received more than 7,000 entries. Here are the 10 winning plates:
What are their meanings?
ingeminate
v. to utter (a sound) twice or oftener
stoundmeal
adv. at intervals; from time to time
anamnesis
n. the recalling of things past
concinnate
v. to arrange or blend together skillfully
New York zoning rules limit the height of skyscrapers, so Oiio Studio has proposed an innovative solution: Bend the building into a horseshoe. Designer Ioannis Oikonomou’s “Big Bend” building would be the “longest” building in the world, at 4,000 feet, but it would stand only 200 feet taller than One World Trade Center, currently the city’s tallest building.
“If we manage to bend our structure instead of bending the zoning rules of New York we would be able to create one of the most prestigious buildings in Manhattan,” the firm says in its building proposal. “The Big Bend can become a modest architectural solution to the height limitations of Manhattan.”
Whether that can be done remains to be seen. The project remains in the proposal stage.
In 1882 Anton Chekhov published eight “Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician.” Here are the first three:
The full list appears in The Undiscovered Chekhov, translated by Peter Constantine (1998). No answers are provided.
At the 1961 Solvay conference on physics, Abdus Salam overheard this conversation between Richard Feynman and Paul Dirac:
Feynman extended his hand towards Dirac and said: ‘I am Feynman.’ It was clear from his tone that it was the first time they were meeting. Dirac extended his hand and said: ‘I am Dirac.’ There was silence, which from Feynman was rather remarkable. Then Feynman, like a schoolboy in the presence of a Master, said to Dirac: ‘It must have felt good to have invented that equation.’ And Dirac said: ‘But that was a long time ago.’ Silence again. To break this, Dirac asked Feynman: ‘What are you yourself working on?’ Feynman said: ‘Meson theories’ and Dirac said: ‘Are you trying to invent a similar equation?’ Feynman said: ‘That would be very difficult.’ And Dirac, in an anxious voice, said: ‘But one must try.’
“At that point the conversation finished because the meeting had started.”
(Abdus Salam, “Physics and the Excellences of the Life It Brings,” in Ideals and Realities: Selected Essays of Abdus Salam, 1987.)
In 1890, French inventor Louis Le Prince vanished just as he was preparing to debut his early motion pictures. He was never seen again. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll consider the possible causes of Le Prince’s disappearance and his place in the history of cinema.
We’ll also reflect on a murderous lawyer and puzzle over the vagaries of snake milking.
This is brilliant: University of Hull chemist Mark Lorch has combined the periodic table with London’s classic Tube map to create an Underground Map of the Elements.
“My son loves trains. So I came up with a train related twist to an inspection of the periodic table. We sat and cut up a copy of the table and then rearranged each element as a ‘station’ on an underground rail system. Each line represents a characteristic shared by the elements on that line.”
More details at the Guardian and at Chemistry Blog.
_crop.jpg){kind=link}
