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The Royal Statistical Society’s 2024 Christmas Quiz consists of two parts, a warmup section and the quiz itself, each consisting of 12 questions. Solvers (and teams) have until January 5 to submit their solutions, and the top three entrants will win a donation of £150, £120, or £90 to the charity or good cause of their choice. Updates and corrections will be posted on...

Samuel Johnson said that sending a timid boy to a public school is “forcing an owl upon day.” Inscribed over the door of the library at Murcia, Spain: “Here the dead open the eyes of the living.” TRICE in Pig Latin is ICE TRAY. 35 × 1482 × 9760 = 3514829760 (Jean-Marc Falcoz) “Mauve is pink trying to be purple.” — Whistler Pekwachnamaykoskwaskwaypinwanik Lake...

During the Black Death, Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani wrote, “The priest who confessed the sick and those who nursed them so generally caught the infection that the victims were abandoned and deprived confession, sacrament, medicine, and nursing … And many lands and cities were made desolate. And this plague lasted till ________.” He left the blank so that he could record the date of...

Another and still more amusing instance of self-revelation may be found in a manuscript familiar to many who have visited the Bodleian Library at Oxford. There, among other precious treasures, is a collection of notes scribbled by Charles II. to Clarendon, and by Clarendon to Charles II., to beguile the tedium of Council. They look, for all the world, like the notes which school-girls...

“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before and wiser than the one that comes after it.” — George Orwell

Henry James told Austin Dobson he’d been lost in the maze at Hampton Court. “I am surprised at that,” Dobson answered. “I should have thought you would have felt that you were in the middle of one of your sentences.” (From a letter of Harold J. Laski to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Dec. 1, 1925. See Homage, A Prose Maze, Stops and Starts, and...

Apocryphal but entertaining: Allegedly a Paris (or Genoese?) opera company provided this synopsis of Carmen to its English-speaking patrons: Act 1. Carmen is a cigar-makeress from a tabago factory who loves with Don José of the mounting guard. Carmen takes a flower from her corsets and lances it to Don José (Duet: ‘Talk me of my mother’). There is a noise inside the tabago...

In January 1984, Games magazine challenged its readers to create a form of communication in which a positive statement can be changed to a negative one solely by changing its punctuation. As an example, contributing editor Gloria Rosenthal offered this love letter: Dear John: I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous, kind, thoughtful. People who are not...

The number of seconds in a year is 365.2425 × 24 × 60 × 60 = 31,556,952. By an unlikely coincidence, that value falls within 1 percent of π × 107.

A visual proof that a2 – b2 = (a + b)(a – b). Sophie Germain wrote, “It has been said that algebra is but written geometry and geometry is but diagrammatic algebra.”

Writing in the New Beacon in 1938, blind poet W.H. Mansmore describes a process he calls “mental alchemy,” “a transmutation of sensations from one order to another.” He takes up this visual description from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, in which the nymph Asia watches dawn break over the mountains: The point of one white star is quivering still Deep in the orange light of widening...

For any positive integer n, there exists a circle that passes through exactly n lattice points in the Euclidean plane. This was first proven by Polish mathematician Andrzej Schinzel in 1958. It’s known as Schinzel’s theorem.

A puzzle by S. Dvoryaninov from the July-August 1994 issue of Quantum: A very large military band marched in square formation on a parade ground, then regrouped into a rectangle so that the number of rows increased by 5. How many musicians were in the band?

The 2024 GCHQ Christmas Challenge is now live. Devised by Government Communications Headquarters, the British intelligence agency, this year’s puzzles encourage children aged 11-18 to think laterally and work as a team, testing skills including codebreaking, mathematics, and lateral thinking. “This year for the first time there are three additional elements hidden within the card for those who want to take on an extra...

Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott’s Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon of 1851 contains a sobering entry: ραφανιδοω: to thrust a radish up the fundament, a punishment of adulterers in Athens In recalling this to friends at Christmas in 1972, historian John Julius Norwich wrote, “I’m sure it must once have been familiar to every schoolboy, and now that the classics are less popular than they...

Freezing in the Canadian arctic in 1821, John Franklin noted some telling effects of fatigue in his companions: I observed, that in proportion as our strength decayed, our minds exhibited symptoms of weakness, evinced by a kind of unreasonable pettishness with each other. Each of us thought the other weaker in intellect than himself, and more in need of advice and assistance. So trifling...

Fleeing a rainstorm in 1710, Joseph Addison took shelter at an unfamiliar house. “As I sat in the porch, I heard the voices of two or three persons, who seemed very earnest in discourse. My curiosity was raised when I heard the names of Alexander the Great and Artaxerxes; and as their talk seemed to run on ancient heroes, I concluded there could not...

chirurgic adj. manual; relating to work done by the hand armillary adj. consisting of hoops or rings operosity n. laboriousness, painstaking endeavour; elaborateness idoneous adj. appropriate; fit; suitable; apt From Hungarian typographer Peter Virágvölgyi, a beautiful instance of “meta-calligraphy.”

Two “tricky” animal traps, described in the Strand, July 1898: Attracted by bait placed on a tree limb, a bear finds its way blocked by a hanging stone and pushes it aside with its paw. “But, alas! the bear has no knowledge of mechanics, and suffers in consequence, for the weight swings back and strikes him heavily.” Angered, the bear strikes the stone a...

Thomas Deininger makes assemblages of trash that take on new meaning when viewed from a particular angle — offering a new perspective on environmental degradation. More on his Instagram page.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley invented the clerihew, a distinctive biographical poem in four lines: Sir Christopher Wren Said, “I am going to dine with some men. If anyone calls Say I am designing St Paul’s.” For The Complete Clerihews of E. Clerihew Bentley, Bentley compiled an “Index of Psychology, Mentality and Other Things Frequently Noted in Connection With Genius,” so that his readers might explore...

This year’s puzzle Christmas card from Chalkdust Magazine, designed by Matthew Scroggs, contains 10 puzzles. Answering them correctly will guide you in completing a Christmas-themed picture. Here’s a printable PDF. And King William’s College has released its annual general knowledge quiz, which appears as fiendish as ever. (“During 1924, in what could one learn of the ordinariness of Chandrapore?”) MetaFilter is sponsoring a shared...

Playing tabula, a forerunner of backgammon, in 480 AD, the Byzantine emperor Zeno made such a stupendously unfortunate dice roll that we still remember it 1500 years later. Playing red in the position above, Zeno rolled a 2, 5, and 6. “As he was unable to move the men on (6) which were blocked by the black men on (8), (11), (12): or the...

When the philosopher Antisthenes was being initiated into the mysteries of Orpheus, and the priest told him that those who vowed themselves to that religion were to receive after death eternal and perfect blessings, he said to him: ‘Why, then, do you not die yourself?’ — Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond, 1576