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.
Speeding Indeed
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.)
“A True Maid”
No, no; for my virginity,
When I lose that, says Rose, I’ll die:
Behind the elms last night, cried Dick,
Rose, were you not extremely sick?
— Matthew Prior
Time magazine called this perhaps the only naughty verse that can’t be bowdlerized.
(While we’re at it: In 1680 John Wilmot published a poem about premature ejaculation.)
Double Duty
This 1904 comic by Gustave Verbeek (click to enlarge) is a sort of visual palindrome — the first six panels are presented conventionally, and then they’re displayed again in reverse order and upside down to compose the story’s second half. Even the written messages change their meaning: why big buns am mad u! becomes in pew we sung big hym, and so on. Only the captions beneath the first panels are discarded in the second half.
“A Mill”
Two leaps the water from its race
Made to the brook below,
The first leap it was curving glass,
The second bounding snow.
— William Allingham
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Ambigram shot glasses by Basile Morin. The design is here.
The Lunatic
Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. Thus, no animal is clever enough, when there is a drought, to imagine that the rain is being withheld by evil spirits, or as a punishment for its transgressions. Therefore you never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. No horse, for example, would kill one of its foals in order to make a wind change its direction. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cats’ meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent, but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
— Aldous Huxley, Texts and Pretexts, 1932
The Liars
A problem by British puzzlist Hubert Phillips:
In writing home about an examination, five schoolgirls each made one true statement and one untrue one. The relevant passages:
Betty: Kitty was second in the examination. I was only third.
Ethel: You’ll be glad to hear that I was top. Joan was second.
Joan: I was third, and poor old Ethel was bottom.
Kitty: I came out second. Mary was only fourth.
Mary: I was fourth. Top place was taken by Betty.
In what order did they place?
Misc
- It’s illegal to mispronounce Joliet.
- G.K. Chesterton left an unfinished poem titled Plakkopytrixphylisperadaulantiobatrix.
- Alms has no singular.
- The Spanish village Trasmoz has been cursed and excommunicated by the Catholic Church.
- “The wink was not our best invention.” — Ralph Hodgson
An Irish riddle: Yonder he is through the stream, a man without a coat, a man without a belt, a man of hard slender legs, it is my woe that I cannot run. Death.
In a Word
vatic
adj. relating to a prophet
futurition
n. future existence
natalitial
adj. of or relating to a person’s birth
aporetic
adj. inclined to raise objections
In 2000, three sisters from Inverness bought a £1 million insurance policy to cover the cost of bringing up the infant Jesus Christ if one of them had a virgin birth.
Simon Burgess, managing director of britishinsurance.com, told the BBC, “The people were concerned about having sufficient funds if they immaculately conceived. It was for caring and bringing up the Christ. We sometimes get weird requests and this is the weirdest we have had.”
The company withdrew the policy in 2006 after objections by the Catholic Church. “The burden of proof that it was Christ had rested with the women and any premium on the insurance was donated to charity, said Mr Burgess.”