“What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?” — Bertolt Brecht
Feature Set
Short film titles, from Patrick Robertson’s Film Facts (2001):
- A (Japanese, 1999)
- E (British, 1993)
- F (Japanese, 1998)
- G (British/German, 1974)
- H (Spanish, 1997)
- I (Swedish, 1966)
- K (Hungarian, 1989)
- M (German, 1931)
- Q (French/Italian/Belgian, 1974)
- W (Filipino, 1985)
- X (Korean, 1982)
- Y (Colombian, 1992)
- Z (French/Italian, 1968)
- $ (U.S., 1972)
Darren Aronofsky’s 1998 film π concerns a mathematician who seeks patterns in strings of numbers.
Its running time is 1:23:45.
An Even Match
Max Weiss and Jacques Schwarz led oddly symbolic chess careers: Their names mean “white” and “black,” and they tended to reach draws together. Here’s their encounter from the Nuremberg tournament of 1883:
1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.exd5 exd5 4.Nf3 Nf6 5.Bd3 Bd6 6.O-O O-O 7.Bg5 Bg4 8.c3 c6 9.Nbd2 Nbd7 10.Qc2 Qc7 11.Rfe1 Rfe8 12.h3 Bxf3 13.Nxf3 h6 14.Bxf6 Nxf6 15.Nh4 Rxe1+ 16.Rxe1 Re8 17.Rxe8+ Nxe8 18.Nf5 Bf8 19.Qe2 Nd6 20.Nxd6 Qxd6 21.Qe8 Qe7 22.Qxe7 Bxe7 23.Bf5 Bg5 24.Bc8 Bc1 25.Bxb7 Bxb2 26.Bxc6 Bxc3 27.Bxd5 Bxd4 1/2-1/2
The final position is perfectly symmetrical.
Irving Chernev calls this “the perfect game” — proof, perhaps, that chess is a theoretical draw.
In a Word
curtain-lecture
n. a reproof given by a wife to her husband in bed
That’s from Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, which is more colorful than one might suppose. It also defines cough as “a convulsion of the lungs, vellicated by some sharp serosity” and lexicographer as “a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original and detailing the signification of words.”
The Unrepentant Liar
“According to [Bertrand] Russell’s treatment the sentence within the rectangle of Fig. 1 is meaningless, and may be called a pseudo-statement, because it is a version of the liar-paradox. But Russell’s treatment is unsatisfactory because it resolves the original paradox at the price of a new one. For, if the sentence of Fig. 1 is meaningless we must admit, since we observe that there are no other sentences within the rectangle, that it is false that there is a genuine or meaningful statement within the rectangle of Fig. 1. And, if there is no statement within the rectangle of Fig. 1 then it is false that there is a true statement within the rectangle of Fig. 1. The italicized part of the preceding sentence will be recognized as identical with (even if a different token of) the sentence within the rectangle of Fig. 1. And since the italicized sentence is true, and therefore a meaningful statement, the sentence within the rectangle is not a pseudo-statement either. Thus, if the sentence in question is meaningless, then it is meaningful and vice versa.”
— A.P. Ushenko, “A Note on the Liar Paradox,” Mind, October 1955
Erin Go
Count these leprechauns:
Now swap the two upper panels and count again:
Where has the extra one been hiding?
Imaginary Lover
In a letter, Lewis Carroll asked his sister to analyze a little girl’s reasoning:
“I’m so glad I don’t like asparagus — because, if I did like it, I should have to eat it — and I can’t bear it!”
Carroll added: “It bothers me considerably.”
It’s Official
The soul, aspiring, pants its source to mount,
As streams meander level with their fount.
That’s Robert Montgomery, in “The Omnipresence of the Deity.” Thomas Macaulay writes:
We take this to be, on the whole, the worst similitude the world. In the first place, no stream meanders, or can possibly meander level with its fount. In the next place, if streams did meander level with their founts, no two motions can be less like each other than that of meandering level and that of mounting upwards.
“Those who write clearly have readers,” wrote Camus. “Those who write obscurely have commentators.”
Hair Raising
Patented in 1951, John J. Boax’s “hair singeing apparatus” would do away with conventional haircuts: Vacuums extend the user’s hair and the hood burns it to a chosen length.
Even the guy in the drawing seems uncertain about this, but all progress requires sacrifice.
A Literary Eagle
In 1892, J. McCullough, secretary of Scotland’s North Berwick Green Committee, wrote a little book called Golf in the Year 2000, in which a man falls asleep and wakes up in a technologically advanced future. It was largely overlooked at the time but was rediscovered in the millennium, when the future world arrived.
On the links McCullough largely missed the mark — he thought we’d have golf clubs that automatically kept score, driverless carts, and jackets that yelled “Fore!”
But in the wider world he accurately predicted:
- women’s liberation
- the conversion of British currency to decimal coins
- digital watches
- bullet trains
- television
McCullough had said he was simply trying to imagine “what we are coming to if things go on as they are doing.” It’s a pity he didn’t write a sequel — one wonders what he might have foreseen in our own future.