~feeds_feedburner_com | Bookmarks (199)
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More Geomagic - Futility Closet
Another geometric magic square from Lee Sallows: (Thanks, Lee!)
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Seeing Things - Futility Closet
This is a picture of a cow. If you can’t see it (I couldn’t), there’s an...
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One World at a Time - Futility Closet
Thomas Jefferson to the Rev. Isaac Story, Dec. 5, 1801, on the afterlife: When I was...
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Shipshape - Futility Closet
These are the punts of Trinity College, Cambridge, moored on the River Cam. What is the...
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Escort - Futility Closet
Steaming from New York to the Azores in 1867, Mark Twain noted a curious companion overhead:...
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Narrow Meaning - Futility Closet
Reader J. William Hook submitted this curiosity to the Strand in August 1899. Holding the page...
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Small Talk - Futility Closet
(Until William Herschel’s advances in telescopes, stars seemed to have “rays” or “tails.”) At a dinner...
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The Octoplex - Futility Closet
An art gallery with n walls will always be safe with n/3 guards — the guards...
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Practice - Futility Closet
For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner. It is...
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In a Word - Futility Closet
renitence n. unwillingness, resistance to persuasion subdolous adj. cunning, crafty, sly autoschediasm n. something done on...
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Misc - Futility Closet
Julius Caesar thought that elk have no knees. Duke Ellington’s first piano teacher was named Marietta...
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International Relations - Futility Closet
From Martin Geldart’s Guide to Modern Greek, 1883: Here we are (arrived) at the station. What...
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A Smile More Brightened - Futility Closet
In September 1931 the Weekend Review pointed out the “regrettable omission of any reference to tooth-brushing...
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The Other Half - Futility Closet
Who’s Who invites its contributors to list their recreations. Some responses are unusual: Charles Causley: “Playing...
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The Engine - Futility Closet
Gulliver’s Travels describes a device by which “the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and...
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Fundamentals - Futility Closet
In 1955, the editor of a Michigan high school newspaper wrote to E.E. Cummings, asking his...
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Freight - Futility Closet
A problem from Cambridge mathematician J.E. Littlewood’s Miscellany (1953): Is it possible to pack a cube...
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Overheard - Futility Closet
Song of a neighborhood nightingale transcribed in 1868 by German naturalist Johann Matthäus Bechstein: Tioû, tioû,...
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Some Lost Snowmen - Futility Closet
In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), Giorgio Vasari notes that...
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"Good and Clever" - Futility Closet
If all the good people were clever, And all clever people were good, The world would...
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A Magic Box Cube - Futility Closet
Reader William Walkington devised this “hollow” cube of order 4, each of whose faces is a...
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"A Sound of Clinking Waiters" - Futility Closet
“Description of things and atmosphere” from the notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The island floated, a...
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"Mary Had a Transposed Lamb" - Futility Closet
The second stanza of this poem is an anagram of the first: A girl once kept...
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Academia - Futility Closet
Caprices of Oxford dons, recounted in Maurice Bowra’s Memories: 1898-1939: “In his quiet way [Wadham College...