Only 43 numbers have names that lack the letter N.
One of them, fittingly, is forty-three.
Author: Greg Ross
A Novel Defense
G stands for gnu,
Whose weapons of defense
Are long, sharp, curling horns, and common sense.
To these he adds a name so short and strong,
That even hardy Boers pronounce it wrong.
How often on a bright autumnal day
The pious people of Pretoria say,
“Come, let us hunt the–” Then no more is heard
But sounds of strong men struggling with a word.
Meanwhile, the distant gnu with grateful eyes
Observes his opportunity and flies.
— Hilaire Belloc
Varignon’s Theorem
Draw any quadrilateral and connect the midpoints of its sides.
You’ll always get a parallelogram.
Triangles, too, have perfection at heart.
Unquote
“I know of no rule which holds so true as that we are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.” — Thoreau
Actual Size
The familiar Mercator projection is useful for navigation, but it exaggerates the size of regions at high latitudes. Greenland, for example, appears to be the same size as South America, when in fact it’s only one eighth as large.
An equal-area projection such as the Mollweide, below, distorts the shapes of regions but preserves their relative size. This reveals some surprising facts: Russia is larger than Antarctica, Mexico is larger than Alaska, and Africa is just mind-bogglingly huge — larger than the former Soviet Union, larger than China, India, Australia, and the United States put together.
The Deliveryman’s Problem
A puzzle from L. Despiau’s Select Amusements in Philosophy and Mathematics, 1801:
Distribute among 3 persons 21 casks of wine, 7 of them full, 7 of them empty, and 7 of them half full, so that each of them shall have the same quantity of wine, and the same number of casks.
Yes or No?
Will you either answer no to this question or pay me a million dollars?
(Raymond Smullyan)
Equal Opportunity
She frowned and called him Mr.
Because in sport he Kr.
And so in spite
That very night
This Mr. Kr. Sr.
— Anonymous
Better Safe
For several years during the Cold War, New York police guarded the Soviet consulate at 9 East 91st Street in Manhattan. Officers manned a pale blue guard post 24 hours a day. “It’s like being a prisoner of war stuck in a telephone booth,” one said.
The Soviets left in 1980, and the police department accordingly canceled the guard, but two months later the 23rd precinct received a call from an Officer Cowans who said that Inspector Whitmore of police intelligence had ordered the guard to be reactivated. So the police resumed their vigil over the now-disused building.
Five months later, in May 1982, the police happened to mention the consulate duty in a report. “What booth?” asked a bewildered intelligence official. It turned out that Officer Cowans and Inspector Whitmore did not exist; the police had been guarding an empty building around the clock for five months, right through Christmas, for no reason.
They closed up shop and removed the booth. “Whoever did this was someone who wanted to break chops or who stood to gain from it,” Lt. Robert McEntire told the New York Times. “We’re not sure which, and we probably never will be.”
Misc
- The telephone number 266-8687 spells both AMOUNTS and CONTOUR.
- 38856 = (38 – 85) × 6
- CARTHORSE is an anagram of ORCHESTRA.
- The French for paper clip is trombone.
- “The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them.” — Samuel Butler