The Magic Dice Cup
A tangram paradox from Sam Loyd’s Eighth Book of Tan (1903). Each of these cups was composed using the same seven geometric shapes. But the first cup is whole, and the others contain vacancies of different sizes.
“Of course it is a fallacy, a paradox, or an optical illusion, for you will say the feat is impossible!” But how is it done?
In a Word
nikhedonia
n. the pleasure of anticipating victory or success
Solvers Needed
On June 30, 1999, sheriff’s officers discovered the body of 41-year-old Ricky McCormick in a field in St. Louis. In his pockets were the two hand-printed documents above. Both the FBI and the American Cryptogram Association have failed to decipher the notes, so they’ve issued an appeal for help from the public.
Investigators believe the notes were written up to three days before McCormick’s death; his family says he’d used such encrypted notes since he was a boy. “Breaking the code could reveal the victim’s whereabouts before his death and could lead to the solution of a homicide,” said Dan Olson, chief of the FBI’s Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit. “Not every cipher we get arrives at our door under those circumstances.”
This is not an April Fools’ joke — the FBI’s appeal, including larger versions of the images, is here.
(Thanks, Bunk.)
Stage Pastoral
Grant Wood’s American Gothic is a bit ersatz — the artist recruited a Cedar Rapids dentist, B.H. McKeeby, to pose as the farmer, and his sister Nan plays the woman (conceived as the farmer’s spinster daughter, not his wife).
But the setting was inspired by a real cottage in Wood’s native Iowa, and by his admiration for “the kind of people I fancied should live in that house.”
“I tried to characterize them honestly, to make them more like themselves than they are in actual life,” he said. “To me they are basically good and solid people.”
