Futility Closet

Mark Lindsey had just graduated from the Virginia Tech architecture school in 1982 when his firm was asked to design an addition to the football stadium at VT’s rival, the University of Virginia.

“There was a V-shaped opening at the end of the stadium,” he told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “And I had a late-night inspiration that the best thing to put in this V-shaped opening was a T.”

To everyone’s surprise, UVA bought it, and Bryant Hall opened in 1985. In fact, though the VT logo was clearly visible from the air, UVA officials didn’t notice it until it was pointed out. They replaced the building in 1999.

“It’s been a great little story to tell at parties,” Lindsey said.

barbermonger
n. a vain man

Three condemned prisoners share a cell. A guard arrives and tells them that one has been pardoned.

“Which is it?” they ask.

“I can’t tell you that,” says the guard. “I can’t tell a prisoner his own fate.”

Prisoner A takes the guard aside. “Look,” he says. “Of the three of us, only one has been pardoned. That means that one of my cellmates is still sure to die. Give me his name. That way you’re not telling me my own fate, and you’re not identifying the pardoned man.”

The guard thinks about this and says, “Prisoner B is sure to die.”

Prisoner A rejoices that his own chance of survival has improved from 1/3 to 1/2. But how is this possible? The guard has given him no new information. Has he?

1816 is known as “the year without a summer” — the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora flung huge amounts of volcanic dust into the atmosphere, dropping temperatures worldwide and giving the sky a sallow cast that’s visible in Turner’s landscapes of the period (above).

It was a great calamity for farmers, but a boon for horror literature — the “wet, ungenial summer” forced Mary Shelley and John Polidori indoors on their Swiss holiday, where they wrote both Frankenstein and The Vampyre.

In 1800, robber and housebreaker Pierre Coignard was sentenced to 14 years’ hard labor in the prison at Toulon. After five years he escaped, journeyed to Catalonia, assumed the identity of a local nobleman, won glory fighting in the Spanish ranks, entered the French army, rose to become a decorated colonel …

… and was recognized in Paris by one of his former cellmates.

He was tried, convicted, and returned to the same prison he had escaped 18 years earlier.

Take any twenty-one cards, and ask a person to choose one from them. [Deal] them in three heaps, and ask the person who selected the card in which heap it is placed. Gather them up, and put the heap containing the chosen card between the other two. Do this twice more, and the chosen card will be found the eleventh from the top.

– Alfred Elliott, The Playground and the Parlour, 1868

Colin Rose makes mathematical works of art:

Many more at his website.