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This is beautifully well done — a humiliating list of all the ways your brain can deceive you (click to enlarge). Designed by John Manoogian III.

This is a picture of a cow. If you can’t see it (I couldn’t), there’s an explanatory image on page 66 of John McCrone’s 1991 book The Ape That Spoke. The experience illustrates how the brain is able to construct a picture from limited data by relying on patterns and experience.

Thomas Jefferson to the Rev. Isaac Story, Dec. 5, 1801, on the afterlife: When I was young I was fond of the speculations which seemed to promise some insight into that hidden country, but observing at length that they left me in the same ignorance in which they had found me, I have for very many years ceased to read or to think concerning...

These are the punts of Trinity College, Cambridge, moored on the River Cam. What is the significance of their names?

Steaming from New York to the Azores in 1867, Mark Twain noted a curious companion overhead: We had the phenomenon of a full moon located just in the same spot in the heavens at the same hour every night. The reason of this singular conduct on the part of the moon did not occur to us at first, but it did afterward when we...

Reader J. William Hook submitted this curiosity to the Strand in August 1899. Holding the page level with the eyes foreshortens the characters and reveals a love poem: Art thou not dear unto my heart? Oh, I search that heart and see And from my bosom tear the part That beats not true to thee. But to my bosom thou art dear, More dear...

(Until William Herschel’s advances in telescopes, stars seemed to have “rays” or “tails.”) At a dinner given by Mr Aubert in the year 1786, William Herschel was seated next to Mr Cavendish, who was reputed to be the most taciturn of men. Some time passed without his uttering a word, then he suddenly turned to his neighbour and said: ‘I am told that you...

An art gallery with n walls will always be safe with n/3 guards — the guards will always be able arrange themselves to observe the whole gallery. That’s Chvátal’s art gallery theorem, discovered in 1973 by mathematician Václav Chvátal. Interestingly, it’s true only of two-dimensional floor plans — a three-dimensional gallery may not be safe even if you post a guard at every corner....

For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner. It is not a mechanical routine but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I cannot think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not its only meaning for...