Futility Closet

"Moreover, the satellites of Jupiter are invisible to the naked eye, and therefore can exercise no influence over the Earth, and therefore would be useless, and therefore do not exist." — Astronomer Francesco Sizzi, on Galileo's claim to have seen the moons of Jupiter

In an 1849 letter to his sister, Lewis Carroll asks which is more accurate, a clock that is right once a year or one that has stopped altogether. The stopped clock is more accurate, he says–because it's correct twice a day.

You might go on to ask, 'How am I to know when eight o'clock does come? My clock will not tell me.' Be patient, reader: you know that when eight o'clock comes your clock is right; very good; then your rule is this: keep your eye fixed on your clock, and the very moment it is right it will be eight o'clock.

"'But–' you say. There, that'll do, reader; the more you argue the farther you get from the point, so it will be as well to stop."

• FOUR contains four letters.
• TEN is spelled with ten raised dots in Braille.
• TWELVE is worth 12 points in Scrabble.
• FIFTEEN is spelled with 15 dots and dashes in International Morse Code.

TWENTY-NINE contains 29 straight lines — if you don't count the hyphen.

27639 = 2⁷ × 6³ – 9

At the 1939 World's Fair, San Francisco Seals catcher Joe Sprinz tried to catch a baseball dropped from the Goodyear blimp 1,200 feet overhead.

Sprinz knew baseball but he hadn't studied physics — he lost five teeth and spent three months in the hospital with a fractured jaw.

3685 = (3⁶ + 8) × 5

What do these sentences have in common?

They're all precisely the same length.

Four statisticians are playing bridge. One of them says, "I have an ace." The chance that she's holding more than one ace is 5359/14498, which is less than 37 percent.

Later the same player says, "I have the ace of spades." Strangely, the chance that she has more than one ace is now 11686/20825, which is more than 56 percent.

Why does specifying the suit of her ace improve the odds that she's holding more than one ace? Because, though a smaller number of potential hands contain that particular ace, a greater proportion of those hands contain a second ace. It's counterintuitive, but it's true.