Polyglot Ten-Squares

Since 1897 wordplay enthusiasts have been seeking an order-10 word square — a 10 × 10 array of letters whose rows and columns, read in order, produce the same set of 10 words. In English this is so difficult that it’s been called the Holy Grail of logology, but the task gets dramatically easier when we increase the vocabulary, and one way to do this is to admit words from multiple languages:

A  A  N  G  E  H  A  R  D  E  Dutch
A  P  E  R  N  A  S  E  I  S  Spanish
N  E  C  E  L  I  S  T  V  I  Czech
G  R  E  N  A  D  E  R  E  N  Norwegian
E  N  L  A  G  U  N  A  R  E  Spanish
H  A  I  D  U  C  E  S  T  E  Romanian
A  S  S  E  N  E  R  A  I  S  French
R  E  T  R  A  S  A  R  S  E  Spanish
D  I  V  E  R  T  I  S  S  E  French
E  S  I  N  E  E  S  E  E  N  Finnish

Graham Toal produced this example, as well as 775 others, in 2004, to prove the concept; Word Ways editor A. Ross Eckler estimated that Toal’s program might produce 135,000 such squares. In 2004 Toal told Eckler that some further efforts were being contemplated using distributed computing, but I haven’t seen anything since then.

(A. Ross Eckler, “The Polyglot Ten-Square,” Word Ways 37:3 [August 2004], 207-208.)

| Language

Q.E.D.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lewis_Carroll_1863.jpg

From the Daily Telegraph‘s obituary of Charles Dodgson, Jan. 15, 1898:

The sayings attributed to him at Oxford would fill an entertaining volume of Carrolliana. Among other things, his ‘etymology of the bell’ is still quoted with relish by scholars. There was a provisional belfry at Christ Church College, which was familiarly known to Oxonians of the time as ‘the meat safe.’ Mr. Dodgson, undertaking to explain this epithet etymologically, split up the word belfry into two parts — the French word belle and the German word frei (free). Then he went to work as follows:

Belle = beautiful = comely = meet (meat);
Frei = free = secure = safe
Result: ‘Meat-safe.’

His nephew, Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, wrote, “No one who was not by nature a lover of logic, and an extreme precisian in the use of words and phrases, could have written the two ‘Alice’ books.”

| Language · Literature

Podcast Episode 162: John Muir and Stickeen

https://www.nps.gov/media/photo/gallery.htm?id=B17BC4E5-155D-4519-3EC6B73FCE2806A8

One stormy morning in 1880, naturalist John Muir set out to explore a glacier in Alaska’s Taylor Bay, accompanied by an adventurous little dog that had joined his expedition. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe the harrowing predicament that the two faced on the ice, which became the basis of one of Muir’s most beloved stories.

We’ll also marvel at some phonetic actors and puzzle over a season for vasectomies.

See full show notes …

| Literature · Podcast · Science & Math

The Man of the Hole

For at least the last 20 years, a solitary indigenous man has been living entirely by himself in the Amazon rain forest. Known as “The Man of the Hole,” he’s believed to be the last surviving member of an uncontacted tribe.

His existence first came to light in 1996, and the Brazilian authorities launched expeditions to ensure his safety and preserved a 31-square-mile area in order to protect him from the encroachments of ranchers and loggers.

His nickname derives from the mysterious hole he digs in the floor of each of his palm thatch huts — more than 5 feet deep, rectangular, and serving no clear purpose. (A village of such huts had apparently been destroyed by settlers in 1996.) He’s been spotted a few times, a naked man with a bow and arrow who would now be in his 50s.

In 2009, gunmen believed to be ranchers attacked the man, but he’s believed to have escaped. Survival International director Stephen Corry told the Guardian, “His tribe has been massacred and now the ‘man of the hole’ faces the same fate. The ranchers must allow this man to live out his last days in peace on his own land, and the authorities must do all they can to protect it.”

(Thanks, Steve.)

| Oddities

Late Again

kendall/thomas railroad puzzle

A problem from P.M.H. Kendall and G.M. Thomas’ Mathematical Puzzles for the Connoisseur, 1962: A road runs parallel to a railway until it bends to cross it, as shown. A man normally cycles to work along the road at a constant speed of 12 mph, and when he reaches the crossing he’s normally overtaken by a train traveling in the same direction. One day he was 25 minutes late for work and found that the train passed him 6 miles before the crossing. What was the speed of the train?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Nothing Doing

forest protest

Invited to participate in São Paulo’s biennial art exhibition in 1973, French artist Fred Forest found a unique way to protest the censorship imposed by Brazil’s ruling junto: He organized a group of marchers to carry blank signs through the city. “Instead of calling on dissidents or students who could have been arrested and tortured, Forest hired fifteen men to carry the signs,” writes Karen O’Rourke in Walking and Mapping. “As professional sandwich-board men who work at street corners in the heart of São Paulo, they could not be held responsible for the content of their signs.”

The press published the marchers’ route, and the public understood that the blank signs reflected the government’s repression. Although it was against the law for more than three people to congregate in the street, Forest’s march attracted nearly 2,000 followers, and onlookers showered them with ticker tape from their balconies.

The police arrested Forest for holding up traffic, but he was protected by his status as a foreign artist. After several hours of questioning, they let him go.

| Art · Society

A Little Story

IBM nanophysicists have made a stop-motion movie using individual atoms — carbon monoxide molecules arranged on a copper substrate and then magnified 100 million times using a scanning tunneling microscope. The molecules remain stationary because they form a bond with the substrate at this extremely low temperature (-268.15° C); each CO molecule stands “on end” so that only one atom is visible.

The result, “A Boy and His Atom,” holds the Guinness world record for the world’s smallest stop-motion film.

07/16/2017 UPDATE: The day I posted this, news broke that researchers have encoded five frames of an 1870s short film into bacterial DNA. (Thanks, Sharon.)

| Entertainment · Science & Math

Effles

An effle is a grammatical English sentence that no one would ever say — they tend to turn up in textbooks for students learning English as a foreign language:

The farmer kills the duckling.
This is a pencil. This is a boy. Peter is a boy. Peter is not a pencil.
A hat is not food.
A man has a dog.
Is this my finger or your finger?
A tailor sews with a needle.
He’s not very good so I can’t marry him.
One praises a pupil when he works hard.
You can’t go to a restaurant if you don’t have money.
Shall I leave without paying?
These are the people’s lunches.
Ouch! O, foolish bee!

Struck by these absurdities while trying to learn English from a textbook in 1950, Eugene Ionesco wrote a play, The Bald Prima Donna, with the same inane tone:

MARY: I am the maid. I have just spent a very pleasant afternoon. I went to the pictures with a man and saw a film with some women. When we came out of the cinema we went and drank some brandy and some milk, and afterwards we read the newspaper.

MRS. SMITH: I hope you spent a pleasant afternoon. I hope you went to the pictures with a man and drank some brandy and some milk.

Mr. SMITH: And the newspaper.

MARY: Your guests, Mr. and Mrs. Martin, are waiting at the door. They were waiting for me. They were afraid to come in on their own. They were meant to be dining with you this evening.

In his 1973 book The Language Laboratory and Language Learning, linguist Julian Dakin recalls a school textbook for foreign learners in which two children are continually asking one another their names. In Lesson 6 it turns out they’re brother and sister.

See Can You Do Without Soap?

| Language

Never Too Late

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abraham_Lincoln,_President,_U.S_-_NARA_-_527823.tif

Abraham Lincoln had less than a year of formal schooling.

The fifth Lincoln-Douglas debate was held before Knox College in 1858. As he crawled through a second-story window to reach the platform, he said, “At last I have gone through college.”

| History