“Jealousy Is as Blind as Love”

Aphorisms from Austin O’Malley’s Keystones of Thought, 1914:

  • Revenge is often like biting a dog because the dog bit you.
  • Education is only a ladder to gather fruit from the tree of knowledge, not the fruit itself.
  • Humility is the sister of humor.
  • Think what you have to say, and then don’t say it.
  • Men that believe only what they understand can write their creed on a postage-stamp.
  • A fallen lighthouse is more dangerous than a reef.
  • The best blood will at some time get into a fool or a mosquito.
  • Comedy smiles from a neutral intellect; humor laughs from a favoring intellect.
  • An essential quality of beauty is aloofness.
  • The picturesque is the romantic seen.
  • The worst miser is the learned man that will not write.
  • To laugh at yourself is real life, never acting.
  • Put your purse in your head and you will not be robbed.
  • A critic at best is only a football coach.
  • A gentleman seldom meets rude persons.
  • It is yesterday that makes to-morrow so sad.

“A little learning striving to explain a great subject is like an attempt to light up a cathedral with a single taper, which does no more than to show for an instant one foolish face.”

| Quotations

“A Happy Retort”

I am told that a certain friend of mine, as an undergraduate at Cambridge, was of an extreme nimbleness, an agility which he could not well control. One day that grave and reverend personage, the Master of his college, happening to meet him, remonstrated with him thus: ‘Mr. Dash, I am sorry to say I never look out of my window but I see you jumping over those railings.’ Mr. Dash was equal to the emergency, for he respectfully replied, ‘And it is a curious fact, sir, that I never leap over those railings without seeing you looking out of that window.’

— Frederick Locker-Lampson, Patchwork, 1879

| Society

Two Meetings

On Aug. 6, 1945, 24-year-old Jacob Beser was the radar specialist aboard the Enola Gay when it dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Three days later, Beser was aboard the B-29 Bockscar when it dropped the bomb on Nagasaki.

He is the only person who served as a strike crew member on both missions.

Below him, Japanese marine engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi endured the first bombing during a business trip to Hiroshima, then returned home to Nagasaki in time to receive the second.

He is the only person acknowledged by the Japanese government to have survived both bombings.

| History

Up and Down

A remarkably simple question by Russian scientist A. Savin, from the September/October 1995 issue of Quantum:

A ping-pong ball is tossed into the air. Will it take longer to go up or to come back down?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Black and White

clausén chess problem

By Sigurd Clausén. White to mate in three moves.

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| Puzzles

Never Mind

In 1812, inventor Charles Redheffer caused a sensation in Philadelphia when he announced a perpetual motion machine. Residents could view the device for a fee, he said, but none could approach it lest they damage the apparatus. When city commissioner Nathan Sellers arrived to observe the device, he happened to bring his son Coleman, who noticed something that all the adults had missed: The machine’s cogs were worn on the wrong side. The device that the machine was ostensibly driving was itself impelling the whole apparatus.

Redheffer decamped to New York City and tried again with an altered machine, but Robert Fulton noticed that this one ran unsteadily. He traced a catgut cord to an upper room, where an old man was turning a hand crank. Spectators destroyed the machine, and Redheffer fled the city.

| Hoaxes

Unquote

“Nothing, to my way of thinking, is better proof of a well-ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.” — Seneca, Letters From a Stoic

| Quotations

An Upper Stove

A problem by Soviet physicist Viktor Lange:

“By lifting up a bucket of coal to a third floor stove we increase the potential energy of the coal by about 800 J (the force of gravity on the coal is about 80 N and it is raised by about 10 m). Where will this additional potential energy go to when this coal is burnt in the stove?”

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| Puzzles

“Collective Farm”

In the best collective use,
Geese afoot are gaggles
(Even when one goose gets loose,
Falls behind and straggles);

Skein‘s the word for geese in flight.
Turtledoves form dools.
Barren‘s right (though impolite)
For a pack of mules.

Starlings join in murmuration,
Pheasants in a rye,
Larks in lovely exaltation,
Leopards, leap (they’re spry).

Ducks in flight are known as teams;
Paddings when they swim.
Herrings in poetic gleams
Please the wordsmith’s whim.

Cats collect into a clowder,
Kittens make a kindle.
Sloths of bears growl all the louder
As their forces dwindle.

Lapwings gather in deceit,
Apes convene in shrewdness,
Mares in stud (an odd conceit
Bordering on lewdness).

Foxes muster in a skulk,
Squirrels run in drays
While collectives in the bulk
Make up word bouquets.

— Felicia Lamport

| Language · Poems