Still Life

https://esolangs.org/wiki/File:Efghij_%E2%80%94_BelMandel_function.jpg

The programming language efghij is literally object-oriented — its logic is expressed by arranging ordinary items in meaningful tableaus:

In this example, the tray and the cutting board constitute code blocks. The oblong plate, however, has a clothes peg on it, which expresses a for loop. The fork is a local variable. The fork variable is initialized to 1 within the for loop’s initial-value expression. The sauce with the rubber band indicates that the number of iterations is equal to the function’s argument. The stuff on the cutting board is the loop body. Using a stapler, the fork is multiplied by the sauce and the result assigned to the fork using a drinking glass. A hammer decrements the sauce, which demonstrates that the function’s parameter can be used as a local variable too. Finally, the toilet roll indicates that the return value is the final value of the fork.

That produces a factorial. The program below outputs the phrase “Hello, world!” — it’s just a pillow bearing a piece of paper on which those words are written.

https://esolangs.org/wiki/File:Efghij_hello_world.jpg

| Science & Math

Self-Study

A puzzle from the October 1962 issue of Eureka, the journal of the Cambridge University Mathematical Society:

(a) At least two of these statements, apart from this one, are true.
(b) At least two of these statements, apart from this one, are false.
(c) At least one of these statements is false.
(d) x of these statements are true.

Given that, if you knew the value of x, you could determine uniquely which statements are true and which are false, determine the value of x.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

“Ballade of Soporific Absorption”

Ho! Ho! Yes! Yes! It’s very all well,
You may drunk I am think, but I tell you I’m not,
I’m as sound as a fiddle and fit as a bell,
And stable quite ill to see what’s what.
I under do stand you surprise a got
When I headed my smear with gooseberry jam;
And I’ve swallowed, I grant, a beer of lot —
But I’m not so think as you drunk I am.

Can I liquor my stand? Why, yes, like hell!
I care not how many a tossed I’ve pot,
I shall stralk quite weight and not yutter an ell,
My feech will not spalter the least little jot:
If you knownly had own! — well, I gave him a dot,
And I said to him, ‘Sergeant, I’ll come like a lamb —
The floor it seems like a storm in a yacht,
But I’m not so think as you drunk I am.”

For example, to prove it I’ll tale you a tell —
I once knew a fellow named Apricot —
I’m sorry, I just chair over a fell —
A trifle — this chap, on a very day hot —
If I hadn’t consumed that last whisky of tot! —
As I said now, this fellow, called Abraham —
Ah? One more? Since it’s you! Just a do me will spot —
But I’m not so think as you drunk I am.

Envoi

So, Prince, you suggest I’ve bolted my shot?
Well, like what you say, and soul your damn!
I’m an upple litset by the talk you rot —
But I’m not so think as you drunk I am.

— J.C. Squire

| Poems

Speak, Memory

A puzzling passage from Vladimir Nabokov’s 1957 novel Pnin:

Pnin’s birthday … fell on February 3, by the Julian calendar into which he had been born in St. Petersburg in 1898. He never celebrated it nowadays, partly because, after his departure from Russia, it sidled by in a Gregorian disguise (thirteen — no, twelve days late), and partly because during the academic year he existed mainly on a motuweth frisas basis.

This describes the novelist’s own confusing situation. He’d been born in Saint Petersburg on April 10, 1899, in the Julian calendar, which corresponds to April 22, 1899, in the Gregorian. (Russia didn’t adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1918.) The turn of the century added a further wrinkle: The offset between the two calendars increased from 12 to 13 days for dates occurring after February 1900. Properly this had no effect on earlier dates, so Nabokov’s birthday should always have been reckoned April 22, but some confused writers began to give it as April 23, and eventually that’s when he began to celebrate it himself — as he told interviewers, it meant he now shared a birthday with both William Shakespeare and Shirley Temple.

(Though he nowhere explains it, “motuweth frisas” refers to the days of the week, the most familiar rhythm of an academic’s life.)

| Literature

A Bouquet

A surprising number of flowers are named for people:

  • begonia: after Michel Bégon, a former governor of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti)
  • camellia: after Jesuit botanist Georg Joseph Kamel
  • dahlia: after Anders Dahl, a student of Carl Linnaeus
  • forsythia: after Scottish botanist William Forsyth
  • fuchsia: after German botanist Leonhart Fuchs
  • gardenia: after Scottish naturalist Alexander Garden
  • magnolia: after French botanist Pierre Magnol
  • poinsettia: after Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first U.S. minister to Mexico, who is credited with bringing the flower to the United States
  • wisteria: after American physician Caspar Wistar
  • zinnia: after German botanist Johann Gottfried Zinn

The ackee fruit of Jamaica is named Blighia sapida after William Bligh, who discovered it in his travels after the mutiny on HMS Bounty.

(Via Maxwell W. Nurnberg, Wonders in Words, 1968.)

| Language

Oops

In 1848, English poet Arthur Hugh Clough named a new work The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich, apparently thinking this was an innocent Gaelic place name. The Literary Gazette informed him that it means “the hut of the bearded well” — it’s a Highland toast to the female genitalia.

“Red-faced and embarrassed, Clough was nevertheless ribald enough to giggle delightedly over the appallingly ludicrous way in which he had introduced such unseemliness into ‘all the drawing rooms and boudoirs (of course) of all the world,'” notes author Robindra Kumar Biswas.

On republishing the poem, Clough changed the name to the appropriately meaningless Tober-na-Vuolich.

| Literature

Impostors

“Plaindromes” are ordinary sentences that sound as if they ought to be palindromes:

Money-man I, an Adam, not even a doom.
Stella, Otis deified Satan and Edna.
An item? No, revolt took Natasha.
Eggbert, a wry dross needs seating, tea-grams.
Droop: an old fan? Needles fone a poor ode.

“Ungrams” are invalid anagrams:

Richard M. Nixon / Noxious charmer
Brooklyn Bridge / Good ride by lake

Both were invented by Jef Raskin of Cupertino, California (from the August 2010 issue of Word Ways).

| Language

Four Seasons

Flemish engraver Aegidius Sadeler II based these prints on designs by Pieter Stevens II. Spring:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aegidius_Sadeler,_Pieter_Stevens_II_-_Spring.jpg

Summer:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aegidius_Sadeler,_Pieter_Stevens_II_-_Summer.jpg

Autumn:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aegidius_Sadeler,_Pieter_Stevens_II_-_Autumn.jpg

Winter:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aegidius_Sadeler,_Pieter_Stevens_II_-_Winter.jpg

One year is sufficient to behold all the magnificence of nature, nay, even one day and night; for more is but the same brought again. This sun, that moon, these stars, the varying dance of the spring, summer, autumn, winter, is that very same which the golden age did see. They which have the longest time lent them to live in, have almost no part of it at all, measuring it either by the space of time which is past, when they were not, or by that which is to come. Why shouldst thou then care whether thy days be many or few, which, when prolonged to the uttermost, prove, paralleled with eternity, as a tear is to the ocean? To die young, is to do that soon, and in some fewer days, which once thou must do; it is but the giving over of a game, that after never so many hazards, must be lost.

— William Drummond of Hawthornden, A Cypress Grove, 1623

| Art

Fare Division

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.16580
Image: ArXiv

There are four states in which matter can exist: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Similarly, in an April Fools’ Day paper in 2022, Harvard’s Madelyn Leembruggen and Caroline Martin proposed that foods can be classified as soup, salad, or sandwich:

  • “Soups are a suspension of ingredients in a liquid matrix, whereas salads are a suspension of ingredients in a gaseous matrix.” Thus cereal is soup, and mixed nuts are salad. The transition between phases is continuous: Depending on how finely they’re chopped, the same set of ingredients might produce a chunky salad, a salsa, or a gazpacho. Vanilla ice cream is a “glassy” soup because it doesn’t flow at its serving temperature, but it takes on a more liquid character as it melts.
  • A soup or salad becomes a sandwich when it’s enclosed in a carbohydrate. The shape and quality of the carbohydrate must vary according to the substance it encloses, but a proposed general rule is that if you can pick up a dish by the carb and eat it, it’s a sandwich.

Further investigation is needed into some edge cases (e.g., lasagna vs. baked ziti), but in most cases a lot of ground can be covered by just asking “Is this a soup, a salad, or a sandwich?” “Most of the time, the answer you blurt out with the least amount of thought is the most true.”

“Finally, to remove any of the reader’s lingering uncertainty: yes, a hotdog is a sandwich.”

(Madelyn Leembruggen and Caroline Martin, “What’s for Lunch? A Systematic Ordering of Foods in the Soup-Salad-Sandwich Phase Space,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.16580 [2022].)

| Humor · Science & Math