“Reason misleads us more often than nature.” — Vauvenargues
Quite a Dedication
This diagram appears in a 1673 Portuguese composition inscribed to the Conde de Villaflor. The title explains, “Each circle is a verse, each verse two anagrams. The letters are composed by the numbers and the numbers by the letter, on the periphery of this globe.”
Following the instructions we can read around the outer circle the words ‘DOM SANCHO MANOEL.’ To each of the letters of this name a number is attributed, so that we have the numbers from 1 to 15, corresponding to the letters over which they are placed. In the inner circles those numbers are to be retranslated into letters and, if the reader does so, he will decipher the riddle and end up with the announced sonnet, in which the name DOM SANCHO MANOEL is found in an acrostic and in the twenty-eight anagrams (two in each line) formed by the combination of letters in those words.
Hatherly, a professor of Baroque literature at UC Berkeley, discovered the solution in an 18th-century manuscript:
D O Onde nam macho o sol o sol manchandome; M mancha nem dolo so nem sol mo achando: S sol como de manhan nam escolho, mando: A achem. Mando no sol Solon chamandome N Nome mancha do sol no cham. Sol andome C chamando sol nem o encham o sol. Mando H homem os do cannal nos mostre chamando O oh do mesmo cannal com al sonhandome, M Mancha medo no sol, sol nam, chamo onde A achem damno no sol, nem sol chamando N nam ilho escondam o sol, nome dam ancho O Onde o sol mancham, mal o sol ham conde E echo nam dam no sol em sol manchando L lem coando sonham no Leam Dom Sancho.
(From Merald E. Wrolstad and Dick Higgins, Visible Language, 1986.)
Life During Wartime
A recent survey of London school children has shown that youngsters between the ages of five and seven have forgotten so many of the attributes of peacetime living that they will have a hard time adjusting themselves to normal conditions again.
Most of the children, when questioned about such things as street lights or foods like bananas, stared suspiciously at the teacher and indicated plainly that they did not believe in their existence.
— New York Times, June 1943
(Shown a seashell, one boy replied, “That’s no shell. Shells come out of guns.”)
Charged Words
Electrical terms that Benjamin Franklin appears to have been the first to use, at least in print in English:
- armature
- battery
- brush
- charged
- charging
- condense
- conductor
- discharge
- electrical fire
- electrical shock
- electrician
- electrified
- electrify
- electrized
- Leyden bottle
- minus (negative or negatively)
- negatively
- non-conducting
- non-conductor
- non-electric
- plus (positive or positively)
- stroke (electric shock)
- uncharged
This list is from Carl Van Doren’s 1938 biography. “Though he never lost sight of what was being done in electricity during his whole lifetime, he was perfectly willing to have his contributions to it absorbed in the enlarging science. They were absorbed, and it is now difficult to trace the details of his influence.”
Interest Group
One might conjecture that there is an interesting fact concerning each of the positive integers. Here is a ‘proof by induction’ that such is the case. Certainly, 1, which is a factor of each positive integer, qualifies, as do 2, the smallest prime; 3, the smallest odd prime; 4, Bieberbach’s number; etc. Suppose the set S of positive integers concerning each of which there is no interesting fact is not vacuous, and let k be the smallest member of S. But this is a most interesting fact concerning k! Hence S has no smallest member and therefore is vacuous. Is the proof valid?
— Edwin F. Beckenbach, “Interesting Integers,” American Mathematical Monthly, April 1945
Square Deal
From the Fall 1983 issue of Pi Mu Epsilon Journal, a wordless proof by Purdue University freshman Hao-Nhen Qua. Vu:
He and She
The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium hold two anthropomorphic landscapes painted in the 16th century, one masculine (above) and one feminine (below).
The artist is unknown.
The Lovers’ Knot
This unusual poetic form made its first appearance in William Browne’s 1625 verse collection Britannia’s Pastorals.
The text traces a single continuous intertwined line, involved with itself and never ending.
A Few Specific Words
abactor
n. a person who steals livestock
epyllion
n. a little epic
hecatomped
adj. measuring 100 feet square
nouveau pauvre
n. a person who has recently become poor
pogonology
n. a treatise on beards
tessaraglot
adj. written or printed in four languages
transpontine
adj. beyond a bridge
truandise
n. fraudulent begging
(Thanks, Kevin.)
Penetration
The coastline of Nova Scotia was once frequented by pirates, and people occasionally dig for buried pirate treasure. On a local radio program a few years ago I heard an interview with someone who had done a study of attempts to find pirate treasure. He claimed that in most of the cases in which treasure was actually found, it was in a place where treasure-hunters had dug before, rather than in a brand new, previously undug, location. Past diggers simply hadn’t dug deep enough. The previous digger had, in fact, often stopped just short of the treasure. If the previous digger had dug a little deeper than he did, he would have found it.
The interviewer asked him what advice he would give to treasure hunters on the basis of this study; and, producing an interesting application of induction, he lamely suggested that diggers should dig a little deeper than they in fact do. Can you see why this advice is impossible to follow?
— Robert M. Martin, There Are Two Errors in the the Title of This Book, 2002