Voice Flowers

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SoundTree_Margaret_Watts_Hughes.jpeg

In 1885, seeking a way to depict vocal sounds visually, Welsh singer Megan Watts Hughes invented the eidophone, a chamber capped with an elastic membrane that would resonate when the singer sang into a tube. When she spread the disk with a thin layer of sand or glycerine, standing waves would register as visible patterns resembling forget-me-nots, daisies, marigolds, chrysanthemums, and sunflowers.

“Stepping out of doors,” she wrote, “[I] have seen their parallels living in the flowers, ferns, and trees around me; and … the hope has come to me that these humble experiments may afford some suggestions in regard to nature’s production of her own beautiful forms.”

The field of study she helped to pioneer is now known as cymatics — see Chladni Figures.

| Art · Science & Math

Regularity

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pocketwatch_(PSF).png

You know the watch argument was [William] Paley’s greatest effort. A man finds a watch and it is so wonderful that he concludes that it must have had a maker. He finds the maker and he is so much more wonderful than the watch that he says he must have had a maker. Then he finds God, the maker of the man, and he is so much more wonderful than the man that he could not have had a maker. This is what the lawyers call a departure in pleading.

— Robert G. Ingersoll, “Why I Am an Agnostic,” 1896

| Religion

A High Purpose

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

The Massachusetts School Law of 1642 declared ignorance to be a satanic ill:

It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures, as in former times by keeping them in an unknown tongue, so in these latter times by persuading from the use of tongues, that so that at least the true sense and meaning of the original might be clouded and corrupted with love and false glosses of saint-seeming deceivers; [we resolve] that learning may not be buried in the grave of our forefathers, in church and commonwealth, the Lord assisting our endeavors.

It ordered every town of more than 50 families to hire a teacher and every town of more than 100 families to establish a grammar school, an early step toward public education in the United States.

| History · Society

Misc

  • Dorothy Parker said that James Thurber’s cartoon figures had the “semblance of unbaked cookies.”
  • In typing AUTHENTICITY, the left and right hands alternate.
  • P.G. Wodehouse wrote the last 26 pages of Thank You, Jeeves in one day.
  • INTERROGATIVES is an anagram of both REINVESTIGATOR and TERGIVERSATION.
  • 1232882 + 3287682 = 123288328768

(Thanks, Steve.)

| Art · Language · Literature · Science & Math

Leapfrog

A puzzle by Y. Ionin, from the September/October 1990 issue of Quantum:

Three frogs occupy three vertices of a square. When one frog jumps over another, it lands beyond it at the same distance that had originally separated them. Can any frog reach the fourth vertex?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Javelin

A puzzle by Steven T., a systems engineer at the National Security Agency, from the NSA’s September 2016 Puzzle Periodical:

Three athletes (and only three athletes) participate in a series of track and field events. Points are awarded for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place in each event (the same points for each event, i.e. 1st always gets “x” points, 2nd always gets “y” points, 3rd always gets “z” points), with x > y > z > 0, and all point values being integers.

The athletes are named Adam, Bob, and Charlie.

  • Adam finished first overall with 22 points.
  • Bob won the Javelin event and finished with 9 points overall.
  • Charlie also finished with 9 points overall.

Question: Who finished second in the 100-meter dash (and why)?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles