Futility Closet

In 1994, Leonard Gordon showed that all 37 presidential surnames to date can fit into a 22 × 18 rectangle:

Zeno once caught a slave stealing and began to beat him.

Knowing the philosopher’s penchant for paradoxes, the slave cried, “But it was fated that I should steal!”

Zeno said, “And that I should beat you.”

Choose four distinct digits and arrange them into the largest and smallest numbers possible (e.g., 9751 and 1579). Subtract the smaller from the larger to produce a new number (9751 – 1579 = 8172) and repeat the operation.

Within seven iterations you’ll always arrive at 6174. With three-digit numbers you’ll aways arrive at 495. A similar technique works with words.

The border between Delaware and Pennsylvania is a perfect curve.

It’s the arc of a circle centered on the cupola of the courthouse at New Castle.

It’s the only such boundary in the territorial United States.

“We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable.” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Someone once asked Jean Cocteau, “Suppose your house were on fire and you could remove only one thing. What would you take?”

Cocteau considered, then said, “I would take the fire.”

Finland’s national painting is Hugo Simberg’s The Wounded Angel.

Simberg refused to explain its meaning … but it was his favorite work.

In 1855, American whaler James Buddington came across an abandoned vessel stuck in the ice off Baffin Island in northeastern Canada. It was HMS Resolute, a British exploration ship that had been abandoned two years earlier and drifted rudderless through 1200 miles of the Canadian Arctic.

The U.S. Congress returned the ship to Queen Victoria, and in 1879 its timbers were made into two desks with admirable pedigrees: One resides in Buckingham Palace … and the other is in the Oval Office, where it’s been used by almost every president since Rutherford B. Hayes.

‘Did you hear the story of the extraordinary precocity of Mrs. Perkins’s baby that died last week?’ asked Mrs. Allgood. ‘It was only three months old, and lying at the point of death, when the grief-stricken mother asked the doctor if nothing could save it. “Absolutely nothing!” said the doctor. Then the infant looked up pitifully into its mother’s face and said—absolutely nothing!’

‘Impossible!’ insisted Mildred. ‘And only three months old!’

– Henry Ernest Dudeney, Amusements in Mathematics, 1917

James McNeill Whistler failed his West Point chemistry exam.

“If silicon had been a gas,” he said later, “I should have been a major general.”