Howard W. Bergerson devised these:
As in a word square, the “columns” in each sum are identical with the “rows.”
12/07/2021 UPDATE: Reader James Foster finds that 20 such squares are possible. (Thanks, James.)
Search Results for: in a word
Footloose
A visitor’s description of William Kingston, a Somerset farmer born without arms, recounted in John Platts, Encyclopedia of Natural and Artificial Wonders and Curiosities, 1876:
He highly entertained us at breakfast, by putting his half-naked feet upon the table as he sat, and carrying his tea and toast between his great and second toe to his mouth, with as much facility as if his foot had been a hand, and his toes fingers. … He then shewed me how he shaves himself with the razor in his toes; and he can comb his own hair. He can dress and undress himself, except buttoning his clothes. He feeds himself, and can bring both his meat or his broth to his mouth, by holding the fork or spoon in his toes. He cleans his own shoes, lights the fire, and does almost any domestic business as well as any other man. … He can milk his cows with his toes, and cuts his own hay, binds it up in bundles, and carries it about the field for his cattle. Last winter he had eight heifers constantly to fodder. The last summer he made all his hay-ricks. He can do all the business of the hay-field (except mowing) as fast and as well with his feet as others can with rakes and forks. … In a word, he can nearly do as much without as others can with their arms.
The Numerosity Adaptation Effect
Fixate on the top figure for 30 seconds and then look at the bottom figure. Though the two circles in the lower figure contain the same number of dots, those on the left appear more numerous. This suggests that the visual system has adapted to the number of items seen in the priming phase, and that, like color, number is a primary attribute of vision.
Psychologists David Burr and John Ross write, “We propose that just as we have a direct visual sense of the reddishness of half a dozen ripe cherries, so we do of their sixishness. In other words there are distinct qualia for numerosity, as there are for color, brightness, and contrast.
“One of the more fascinating aspects of this study … is that although the total apparent number of dots is greatly reduced after adaptation, no particular dots seem to be missing. This reinforces old and more recent evidence suggesting that the perceived richness of our perceptual world is very much an illusion.”
(David Burr and John Ross, “A Visual Sense of Number,” Current Biology 18:6 [March 25, 2008], 425-428.)
Hush-Hush
Wei-Hwa Huang offered this brilliant crossword in the May 2008 issue of Word Ways:
Across
1 Sticks
6 Farm animals
7 Ogles
8 Leisure
9 Ride
Down
1 Soothe
2 Peaceful
3 Reserved
4 Untroubled
5 Pacify
Selflessness
Carol Shields’ 2000 short story “Absence” does not contain the letter I:
She woke up early, drank a cup of strong, unsugared coffee, then sat down at her word processor. She knew more or less what she wanted to do, and that was to create a story that possessed a granddaughter, a Boston fern, a golden apple and a small blue cradle. But after she had typed half a dozen words, she found that one of the letters of the keyboard was broken, and, to make matters worse, a vowel, the very letter that attaches to the hungry self.
She resolves to write about it: “‘A woman sat down and wrote,’ she wrote.”
The Clockwise Ant
A problem by Argentinian puzzlist Jaime Poniachik, from the February 1992 issue of Games magazine:
An ant crawls onto a clock face at the 6 mark just as the minute hand is passing 12. She begins crawling counterclockwise around the face’s circumference at a uniform speed. When the minute hand passes her, she reverses course and crawls clockwise without changing her speed. Forty-five minutes after her first encounter with the minute hand, it passes her a second time and she departs. How much time did she spend on the clock face?
A Near Thing
A memorably creepy ghost story is told of Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava:
One night when Lord Dufferin had accepted, in Ireland, the hospitality of a friend, he awakened suddenly, preyed upon by an indefinable restlessness. He got up, went to the window, which was lighted by the moon, and saw distinctly in the shadow below him a man bearing a large burden on his shoulder. This man was walking slowly. When he passed before the house, it became manifest that he bore a coffin; he lifted his head; his face was so repulsive that Lord Dufferin was greatly struck. His gaze followed the apparition as it drew away, and he went back to bed, where he had great difficulty in going to sleep once more.
The morning of the next day, he questioned his host, but the latter could give him no enlightenment. He knew no one corresponding to the description of the person carrying the coffin, and no burial was awaited in the village.
Some years later Lord Dufferin was appointed Ambassador to France. Determined faithfully to discharge the duties of his high position, he went, one day, to a diplomatic reception that was to be held in the Grand Hotel in Paris. His private secretary conducted him to a large lift before which there were several state officials standing respectfully in line. Lord Dufferin, passing them, bowed, and was about to step into the lift, when he gave an involuntary start. The employee who operated the cable was ugly, surly-looking, and had precisely the features of the mysterious apparition of the Irish village!
Moved by an instinctive impulse, the ambassador drew back; he retraced his steps, uttering some words of excuse, and, on the pretext that he had forgotten something, asked them to take up those who had gone on before, without waiting for him; he then went to the hotel office to make inquiries as to the person who had caused his very natural emotion. But he did not have time. At that moment a terrible crash was heard, mingled with cries of anguish. The lift, reaching a certain height, had dropped suddenly to the bottom of the shaft, crushing or mutilating those within it.
It appears that none of this is true — there was a lift accident in the Grand Hotel in 1878, but that was years before Dufferin arrived there, and the rest seems to have been made up. It’s such a striking story, though, that Dufferin himself used to relate it as a personal anecdote.
A Second Act
Nathanael West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust contains a character named Homer Simpson:
Except for his hands, which belonged on a piece of monumental sculpture, and his small head, he was well proportioned. His muscles were large and round and he had a full, heavy chest. Yet there was something wrong. For all his size and shape, he looked neither strong nor fertile.
In a 2012 interview with Smithsonian, Matt Groening said, “I took that name from a minor character in the novel The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West. Since Homer was my father’s name, and I thought Simpson was a funny name in that it had the word ‘simp’ in it, which is short for ‘simpleton’ — I just went with it.”
Quite a Dedication
This diagram appears in a 1673 Portuguese composition inscribed to the Conde de Villaflor. The title explains, “Each circle is a verse, each verse two anagrams. The letters are composed by the numbers and the numbers by the letter, on the periphery of this globe.”
Following the instructions we can read around the outer circle the words ‘DOM SANCHO MANOEL.’ To each of the letters of this name a number is attributed, so that we have the numbers from 1 to 15, corresponding to the letters over which they are placed. In the inner circles those numbers are to be retranslated into letters and, if the reader does so, he will decipher the riddle and end up with the announced sonnet, in which the name DOM SANCHO MANOEL is found in an acrostic and in the twenty-eight anagrams (two in each line) formed by the combination of letters in those words.
Hatherly, a professor of Baroque literature at UC Berkeley, discovered the solution in an 18th-century manuscript:
D O Onde nam macho o sol o sol manchandome; M mancha nem dolo so nem sol mo achando: S sol como de manhan nam escolho, mando: A achem. Mando no sol Solon chamandome N Nome mancha do sol no cham. Sol andome C chamando sol nem o encham o sol. Mando H homem os do cannal nos mostre chamando O oh do mesmo cannal com al sonhandome, M Mancha medo no sol, sol nam, chamo onde A achem damno no sol, nem sol chamando N nam ilho escondam o sol, nome dam ancho O Onde o sol mancham, mal o sol ham conde E echo nam dam no sol em sol manchando L lem coando sonham no Leam Dom Sancho.
(From Merald E. Wrolstad and Dick Higgins, Visible Language, 1986.)
Square Deal
From the Fall 1983 issue of Pi Mu Epsilon Journal, a wordless proof by Purdue University freshman Hao-Nhen Qua. Vu:
