Hinchliffe’s rule, named after physicist Ian Hinchliffe, states that if the title of a scholarly article takes the form of a yes-no question, the answer to that question will be no.

In 1988 Boris Peon tested this proposition by writing a paper titled “Is Hinchliffe’s Rule True?”:

Hinchliffe has asserted that whenever the title of a paper is a question with a yes/no answer, the answer is always no. This paper demonstrates that Hinchliffe’s assertion is false, but only if it is true.

This seems to threaten the integrity of the universe. Happily, Harvard computer scientist Stuart Shieber pointed out that Hinchliffe’s rule might simply be false, in which case Peon’s title presents no problem.

Unfortunately Shieber also managed to resurrect the paradox by titling his article “Is This Article Consistent With Hinchliffe’s Rule?”

We await developments.

In 2009, marketing professors Priya Raghubir and Joydeep Srivastava gave $1 to each of 89 undergraduates and told them they could keep the money or spend it on candy. The students received the money in different denominations — 43 students were given four quarters, and 46 were given a dollar bill. About 63 percent of the students who’d received quarters chose to buy candy, but only 26 percent of those who’d received a dollar bill did so.

In related studies, Raghubir and Srivastava found that subjects who foresaw a need to exert self-control in spending chose to receive money in large denominations. And “[t]ightwads choose to receive money in a large denomination as a precommitment device when the need for self-control is high.”

The lesson seems to be that people are less likely to spend money when they receive it in large denominations. “[L]arge denominations are psychologically less fungible than smaller ones, allowing them to be used as a strategic device to control and regulate spending.”

(Priya Raghubir and Joydeep Srivastava. “The Denomination Effect,” Journal of Consumer Research 36:4 [December 2009], 701-713.)

Dry Falls, in central Washington, has a stunningly dramatic history: At the end of the last glaciation, when ice dams to the east gave way, torrents of water roared through the landscape from flooded Montana, pouring over a 400-foot rock face at 65 mph in a waterfall five times as wide as Niagara and carrying 10 times the flow of all the world’s rivers combined.

The scale of the cataclysm is hard to imagine, so geologist Nick Zentner of Central Washington University commissioned these animations from Newlands & Company of Portland to help to convey its magnitude.

Physicist Bruce Sherwood has created a 3-D computer model of a flat earth so that conspiracy theorists can examine the implications of their own theory.

For example, if Antarctica is a mountain range surrounding a flat disk, what should we expect to see in the sky? “Walk inside the model and look up,” Sherwood told philosopher Lee McIntyre. “If you’re standing at the North Pole, then Polaris should be directly overhead. Fair enough. But if you’re standing at the ‘edge of the Earth’ — and Polaris is only a few thousand miles overhead — shouldn’t you at best see it at an angle? But if you’re actually in Antarctica, you won’t be able to see it at all. Their model is inconsistent with physical observation. And they can see that for themselves.”

(Bruce Sherwood, “A Flat Earth?”, via Lee McIntyre, et al., How to Talk to a Science Denier, 2021.)

The following was rather widely quoted a few years ago. It bothered one banker so much that he made a hasty trip to consult his neighbor, a college professor of mathematics. Assume we make a deposit of $50 in a bank.

    withdraw $20.00 leaving $30.00
now withdraw  15.00 leaving  15.00
now withdraw   9.00 leaving   6.00
now withdraw   6.00 leaving   0.00
             ------         ------
             $50.00         $51.00

We now present our figures to the bank, showing the discrepancy, and demand the extra dollar. Repeat ten thousand times, and retire for a while.

— Cecil B. Read, “Mathematical Fallacies,” School Science and Mathematics, June 1933