General Delivery

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Missing_Post_Office_building%EF%BC%88Japan,_Kagawa_Prefecture_Mitoyo_Takuma_cho_Awashima%EF%BC%89.JPG
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Send a postcard to the “missing post office” on Awashima Island, Japan, and it will be held there to be read by anyone. Messages can be sent for any reason — the office has received cards addressed to deceased relatives, early loves, unborn children, even to a traffic light. Samples:

‘Mother, When you died last summer I didn’t cry. When you were alive it was like we only said horrible and spiteful things to each other … If we met now I think we still would … But a year has passed and I have only loving memories from childhood left. I have when we made pudding together. I have when we read books. I have when you bought me my piano. That was the happiest.’

‘To my future grandchild, When will you arrive? The sooner the better, come on and be born! I can’t wait to finally do for you everything I couldn’t do for my own kids.’

‘Actually, I was hoping to do the folk dance at school with you. My heart was pounding with excitement as our turn together was coming around soon but … just before it happened, the song cut off. Since then several autumns have gone by. What might have happened to you by now?’

The project was launched in 2013 by artist Saya Kubota and has been maintained due to its popularity. Anyone can participate — send a postcard to this address, omitting the name of the recipient and your own name and address:

Missing Post Office (Hyoryu Yubinkyoku) 769-1108 Hyoryu Yubinkyoku Dome Awashima 1317-2, Takuma Town, Miyoto City, Kagawa Prefecture, Japan

A visitor who feels a message is meant for them will be allowed to keep it.

Related: The Bridegroom’s Oak.

| Art · Oddities

Music Space

We seem to think naturally of musical pitches as bearing spatial relations to each other, and of music reflecting movement within that space — we speak of notes neighboring one another, of being higher or lower than one another, of scales ascending or descending, and so on. Why is this? It’s true that “high” notes reflect higher frequencies, but people who don’t know this still tend to use these terms. Why don’t we call “high” notes “hot” or “deep”?

In summarizing several cross-cultural studies, Stephen Davis concluded that music’s being “heard in spatial terms would appear to be more or less universal.” The notes that Westerners call “high” some other cultures call small, weak, sharp, or white, while “low” notes are big, strong, flat, heavy, or black. But Davies finds these are all terms for spatial concepts and found no reversals of these “synaesthetic equations” (no cultures in which “high” notes are low, big, or heavy, for example).

Trinity University philosopher Andrew Kania writes, “[F]undamental though the phenomenon seems to be to our experience of music, it can be quite baffling to consider what we could be hearing moving in the music, and what space such movement could be located in.”

(Andrew Kania, Philosophy of Western Music: A Contemporary Introduction, 2020.)

| Oddities

Efficient

In a friendly competition with linguist Richard Lederer in 1990, Bruce Monrad, a student at St. Paul’s School in Concord, N.H., produced an 11-word “supersentence” — “a single sentence that includes one example of each of the four phrases and three subordinate clauses that are identified in English grammar. These are: prepositional phrase, participial phrase, gerund phrase, infinitive phrase, adverb clause, adjective clause, and noun clause”:

Whoever rebels, daring oppose by fighting when oppressed, which overcomes, conquers.

Dave Morice labels the parts here. Lederer notes that the adjective clause, “which overcomes,” is a dangling modifier. “Still, I have never been able to improve on Bruce’s effort.”

(Richard Lederer, “The Glamour of Grammar,” Verbatim 16:4 [Spring 1990], 5-6.)

| Language

Empty Vessel

A puzzle by Soviet science writer Yakov Perelman: A bottle full of gasoline has a mass of 1,000 grams. The same bottle filled with acid has a mass of 1,600 grams. The acid is twice as dense as the gasoline. What’s the mass of the bottle?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

The Peirce-Putnam Paradox

peirce-putnam paradox

Divide line interval AD at point P and separate the halves by a short distance.

What’s happened to point P? Did it become point B or C? It seems wrong to say that it’s neither of these, or that it’s only one of them.

But if the single point P has “become” the two points B and C, how can we say it was a dimensionless object?

(Hilary Putnam, “Peirce’s Continuum,” in Kenneth Laine Ketner, ed., Peirce and Contemporary Thought: Philosophical Inquiries, 1995, via Piotr Łukowski, Paradoxes, 2011.)

| Oddities · Science & Math

Illumination

https://archive.org/details/sim_strand-magazine_july-december-1895_10/page/184/mode/2up?view=theater

Allegedly this scheme was invented by a poet who wanted to write all night without interruption. He set up a row of candles and linked the base of each to the top of the next with a piece of twine. When the first candle burned down to the twine, “the latter naturally caught fire, and a tongue of flame would creep up to the adjoining candle, lighting it in the manner desired.”

“The scheme is a pretty example of the brilliancy of simplicity in idea, as compared with the complicated arrangements often devised to secure simple results.”

(James Scott, “Strange Devices,” Strand, August 1895, 184-189.)

| Oddities · Technology

Win Count

Imagine a game of tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses) played in three dimensions in an 8×8×8 cube. A player wins by marking some straight line of eight cells through the large cube. How many such winning lines are there?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Insight

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Vill%C3%A9on_-_Lever_de_soleil.jpg

“Ideas often flash across our minds more complete than we could make them after much labor.” — La Rochefoucauld

“After investigating a problem in all directions, happy ideas come unexpectedly, without effort, like an inspiration. So far as I am concerned, they have never come to me when my mind was fatigued, or when I was at my working table. … They came particularly readily during the slow ascent of wooded hills on a sunny day.” — Hermann von Helmholtz

“You cannot, with your best deliberation and heed, come so close to any question as your spontaneous glance shall bring you while you rise from your bed or walk abroad in the morning after meditating the matter before sleep on the previous night.” — Emerson

| Quotations

“Three Threes Are Ten”

This little trick often puzzles many:–

Place three matches, coins, or other articles on the table, and by picking each one up and placing it back three times, counting each time to finish with number 10, instead of 9. Pick up the first match and return it to the table saying 1; the same with the second and third, saying 2 and 3; repeat this counting 4; but the fifth match must be held in the hand, saying at the time it is picked up, 5; the other two are also picked up and held in hand, making 6 and 7; the three matches are then returned to the table as 8, 9, and 10. If done quickly few are able to see through it.

— John Scott, The Puzzle King, 1899

04/20/2024 Reader Vladamir Tsepis adds, “This reminds me of the way to convince children you have 11 fingers. Start by showing your left hand splayed, curl down the thumb and index finger counting ‘one, two…’, then of the remaining say ‘let’s skip these three’. Move to your right hand, bend each finger in turn as you count ‘four, five, six, seven, eight…’. Return to the left hand counting off the three we skipped ‘nine, ten, eleven.'”

| Puzzles