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In a 2008 essay, computer scientist Paul Graham offered a hierarchy of verbal disagreement: “The most obvious advantage of classifying the forms of disagreement is that it will help people to evaluate what they read,” he wrote. “But the greatest benefit of disagreeing well is not just that it will make conversations better, but that it will make the people who have them happier....

In 1614, William Nealson, a trader in Japan for the British East India Company, wrote to his friend Richard Wickham. The first half of the letter is sensible enough, and Nealson notes that his associate Mr. Cocks has already written to Wickham, “wherein he hath informed you of all business, so as for me to write thereof should be but a tedious iteration.” But...

Modern punctuation doesn’t always do the job, so writers have suggested various improvements. In the 1580s, English printer Henry Denham proposed a “percontation point,” ⸮, to be used at the end of a rhetorical question. In 1668, Anglican clergyman John Wilkins suggested using an inverted exclamation point, ¡, for the same purpose. In the 1840s, Belgian newspaper publisher Marcellin Jobard introduced a small arrow...

Ghost leg is a method of establishing random pairings between any two sets of equal size. For example, it might be used to assign chores randomly to a group of people. The names of the participants are listed across the top of the diagram and the chores across the bottom, and a vertical line is drawn connecting each name to the chore below it....

From Lee Sallows: A feature common to many geomagic squares is that the set of shapes they employ reveal an atomic structure. That is, they are built up from repeated copies of a single unit shape. Examples of this are piece sets composed of polyominoes, the unit shape then being a (relatively small) square. For the would-be geomagic square constructor, a key advantage of...

“It is one of the misfortunes of life that one must read thousands of books only to discover that one need not have read them.” — Thomas De Quincey

The Journal International de Médecine carried a startling article in 1987: “Mise en Évidence Expérimentale d’une Organisation Tomatotopique chez la Soprano,” or “Experimental Demonstration of the Tomatotopic Organization in the Soprano (Cantatrix sopranica L.).” In it, author Georges Perec notes that throwing tomatoes at sopranos seems to induce a “yelling reaction” and sets out to understand why: Tomatoes (Tomato rungisia vulgaris) were thrown by...

A logic problem in the shape of a chess puzzle, by Éric Angelini. White has just moved. What was his move?

Peter Nicholson’s Carpenter’s New Guide of 1803 contains an interesting technique: To find a right line equal to any given Arch of a Circle. Divide the chord ab into four equal parts, set one part bc on the arch from a to d, and draw dc which will be nearly equal to half the arch. Apparently this was an item of carpentry lore in...

An 1897 article on curious wills in the Strand describes this 1813 will by the Rev. Hugh Worthington of Highbury Place, Islington. One side reads: Northampton Square, June 16th, 1813. I, Hugh Worthington, give and bequeath to my dear Eliza Price, who is my adopted child, all I do or may possess, real and personal, to be at her sole and entire disposal; and...

Just found this on Wikimedia Commons — “Where Is the Fifth Pig?”, an anonymous puzzle created in occupied Holland in 1940:

“The dogs are, by placing two lines upon them, to be suddenly aroused to life and made to run. Query, How and where should these lines be placed, and what should be the forms of them?”

John Grant McLoughlin offered this problem in Crux Mathematicorum in April 2008: Every four-digit numerical palindrome (e.g., 2772) is a multiple of 11. Why is this?

The River Welland used to split into two channels in the heart of Crowland, Lincolnshire, and in 1360 the townspeople arranged to bridge it with this unique triple arch, which elegantly spanned the streams at the point of their divergence, allowing pedestrians to reach any of the three shores by a single structure. The alternative would have been to build three separate bridges. The...

An intriguing photo caption from A Mind at Play, Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman’s 2017 biography of AI pioneer Claude Shannon: Shannon set four goals for artificial intelligence to achieve by 2001: a chess-playing program that was crowned world champion, a poetry program that had a piece accepted by the New Yorker, a mathematical program that proved the elusive Riemann hypothesis, and, ‘most important,’...

‘Suppose that a foolish man has seized hold of a plank from a sinking ship, shall a wise man wrest it away from him if he can?’ ‘No,’ says Hecaton; ‘for that would be unjust.’ ‘But how about the owner of the ship? Shall he take the plank away because it belongs to him?’ ‘Not at all; no more than he would be willing...

Golfers at the Aroostook Valley Country Club have to play carefully — a stray shot might leave the country. The club straddles the border between the United States and Canada — the course and clubhouse are in New Brunswick, and the parking lot and pro shop are in Maine. The club was launched in 1929, when enterprising founders built the clubhouse just feet inside...

Nearly every station in the London Underground contains an enamel plaque depicting a labyrinth. The collection were installed in 2013 by artist Mark Wallinger to mark the system’s 150th anniversary. Each of the 270 black and white designs is unique to its location, and all of them are posted in publicly accessible locations, so visitors can examine them directly, tracing the path with a...

The farmer leads no E Z life, The C D sows will rot, And when at E V rests from strife His bosom will A K lot. In D D has to struggle hard to E K living out, If I C frosts do not retard His crops, there’ll B A drought. The hired L P has to pay Are awful A Z too;...

Graffito, Paris, 2013. Below: In 2008, while anti-graffiti vigilante Fred Radtke was overpainting New Orleans street art with featureless gray, Banksy visited the city to leave an image of his own.

heuretic adj. of or relating to discovery or invention Sea travel is not kind to teapots, which tend to drip when pouring, tip over on tables, and chip in storage. Entrepreneur Robert Crawford Johnson solved all these problems by designing a pot in the shape of a cube, with the spout tucked into a corner. His invention, patented in 1917, was quickly adopted by...

Francis Galton was interested in communicating with Mars as early as 1892, when he wrote a letter to the Times suggesting that we try flashing sun signals at the red planet. At a lecture the following year he described more specifically a method by which pictures might be encoded using 26 alphabetical characters, which could then be transmitted over a distance in 5-character “words,”...

Stage actor Leo Reuss was just gaining fame in Berlin when the rising Nazi regime began to restrict the work of Jewish actors. So Reuss invented a new character. Retreating to a cabin in his native Austria, he grew out his beard, bathed in hydrogen peroxide to bleach his hair, studied the speech and mannerisms of farmers, and obtained new papers from a local...