Mementos

https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/1igjigr/leonce_evrard_is_a_skilled_marble_worker_he_was/

At midday each June 21, a shaft of light pierces the roof of a mausoleum in Brussels’ Laeken Cemetery and creates a heart of light.

It’s not clear whether this was deliberate. The tomb’s occupants, Louise Flignot and Léonce Evrard, died in 1916 and 1919, and the mausoleum was not built until 1920. Its designer, one Georges deLarabrie, is not known to have produced any other work, and the planning documents don’t mention the heart.

When Sir Lawrence Tanfield died in 1625, his wife composed this inscription for their joint monument at Burford in Oxfordshire:

Here shadows lie
Whilst earth is sadd,
Still hopes to die
To him she hadd.
In bliss is hee
Whom I loved best;
Thrice happy shee
With him to rest.

So shall I bee
With him I loved,
And he with mee
And both us blessed.
Love made me poet,
And this I writt;
My heart did do it,
And not my wit.

See Workaround, Reunion, and Early Arrival.

| Death

Associate Degrees

In 1988, traversing synonyms in the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, A. Ross Eckler found his way from TRUE to FALSE:

TRUE-JUST-FAIR-BEAUTIFUL-PRETTY-ARTFUL-ARTIFICIAL-SHAM-FALSE

He found his way back again by a different route:

FALSE-UNWISE-FOOLISH-SIMPLE-UNCONDITIONAL-ABSOLUTE-POSITIVE­-REAL-GENUINE-TRUE

He was using the dictionary’s ninth edition; see the article below for his conventions regarding qualifying synonyms. Two more examples:

BAD-POOR-MEAN-PENURIOUS-STINGY-CLOSE-SECRET-FURTIVE-SLY-CUNNING-CLEVER-GOOD

GOOD-CLEVER-CUNNING-SLY-FURTIVE-SECRET-TICKLISH-CRITICAL-ACUTE-SHARP-HARSH-ROUGH-INDELICATE-INDECOROUS-IMPROPER-INCORRECT-WRONG-SINFUL-WICKED-EVIL-BAD

LIGHT-BRIGHT-CLEVER-CUNNING-SLY-FURTIVE-SECRET-HIDDEN-OBSCURE-DARK

DARK-OBSCURE-VAGUE-VACANT-EMPTY-FOOLISH-SIMPLE-EASY-LIGHT

Somewhat related: Lewis Carroll invented word ladders, in which one transforms one word into another by changing one letter at a time:

COLD-CORD-WORD-WARD-WARM

Each intermediate step must itself be an English word. Donald Knuth once used a computer to find links among 5,757 common five-letter English words. 671 of these, he found, were not connected to any other word in the collection. These he dubbed “aloof” — and noted that ALOOF itself is such a word.

(A. Ross Eckler, “Websterian Synonym Chains,” Word Ways 21:2 [May 1988], 100-101.)

| Language

Double Duty

https://archive.org/details/StrandVolume22/page/n789/mode/2up?view=theater

From the Strand, December 1901, “one of Sir John Stainer’s musical jokes, two hymns in one — in B flat or G major, according to the manner in which it is read, upside up or upside down. It was written as an autograph for a friend of his son’s.”

| Art · Entertainment

Footwork

Conclusion of a 2021 investigation by physicist Eve Armstrong of her cat’s reactions to a laser pointer:

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fffscinating and merits further investigation.

(Eve Armstrong, “My Cat Chester’s Dynamical Systems Analysyyyyy7777777777777777y7is of the Laser Pointer and the Red Dot on the Wall: Correlation, Causation, or SARS-Cov-2 Hallucination?”, arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.17058 [2021].)

| Humor · Science & Math

“The Ingenious Patriot”

Having obtained an audience of the King an Ingenious Patriot pulled a paper from his pocket, saying:

‘May it please your Majesty, I have here a formula for constructing armor plating that no gun can pierce. If these plates are adopted in the Royal Navy our warships will be invulnerable and therefore invincible. Here, also, are reports of your Majesty’s Ministers, attesting the value of the invention. I will part with my right in it for a million tumtums.’

After examining the papers, the King put them away and promised him an order on the Lord High Treasurer of the Extortion Department for a million tumtums.

‘And here,’ said the Ingenious Patriot, pulling another paper from another pocket, ‘are the working plans of a gun that I have invented, which will pierce that armor. Your Majesty’s royal brother, the Emperor of Bang, is eager to purchase it, but loyalty to your Majesty’s throne and person constrains me to offer it first to your Majesty. The price is one million tumtums.’

Having received the promise of another check, he thrust his hand into still another pocket, remarking:

‘The price of the irresistible gun would have been much greater, your Majesty, but for the fact that its missiles can be so effectively averted by my peculiar method of treating the armor plates with a new –‘

The King signed to the Great Head Factotum to approach.

‘Search this man,’ he said, ‘and report how many pockets he has.’

‘Forty-three, Sire,’ said the Great Head Factotum, completing the scrutiny.

‘May it please your Majesty,’ cried the Ingenious Patriot, in terror, ‘one of them contains tobacco.’

‘Hold him up by the ankles and shake him,’ said the King; ‘then give him a check for forty-two million tumtums and put him to death. Let a decree issue making ingenuity a capital offence.’

— Ambrose Bierce, Fantastic Fables, 1899

| Literature · Society

Learning

“Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again.” — Karl Popper

“There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you’ve made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you’ve made a discovery.” — Enrico Fermi

“This particular thesis was addressed to me a quarter of a century ago by John Campbell, who … told me that all theories are proven wrong in time. … My answer to him was, ‘John, when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was [perfectly] spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.’ The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are absolute; that everything that isn’t perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong. However, I don’t think that’s so. It seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts.” — Isaac Asimov, The Relativity of Wrong, 1988

| Science & Math

The Arc of Narrative

In 2020, three researchers from UT Austin and Lancaster University examined 40,000 fictional narratives and discovered a consistent linguistic pattern. Articles and prepositions such as a and the are common at the start of a story, where they set the stage by providing information about people, places, and things. As the plot progresses, auxiliary verbs, adverbs, and pronouns become more common — words that are action-oriented and social. Near the end, “cognitive tension words” such as think, realize, and because become more common, words that reflect people trying to make sense of their world.

These patterns are consistent across novels, short stories, and amateur (“off-the-cuff”) stories. “If we want to connect with an audience, we have to appreciate what information they need, but don’t yet have,” said lead author Ryan Boyd. “At the most fundamental level, humans need a flood of ‘logic language’ at the beginning of a story to make sense of it, followed by a rising stream of ‘action’ information to convey the actual plot of the story.”

At this website you can view the graphs produced by various example narratives and even analyze your own.

(Ryan L. Boyd, Kate G. Blackburn, and James W. Pennebaker, “The Narrative Arc: Revealing Core Narrative Structures Through Text Analysis,” Science Advances 6:32 [2020], eaba2196.) (Thanks, Sharon.)

| Literature · Science & Math

Black and White

morse chess problem

By Christopher Jeremy Morse. White to mate in two.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

“The Elephant; or the Force of Habit”

A tail behind, a trunk in front,
Complete the usual elephant.
The tail in front, the trunk behind,
Is what you very seldom find;

If you for specimens should hunt
With trunks behind and tails in front,
That hunt would occupy you long;
The force of habit is so strong.

— A.E. Housman

| Poems