A problem from Cambridge mathematician J.E. Littlewood’s Miscellany (1953):
Is it possible to pack a cube with a finite number of smaller cubes, no two of which are the same size?
Overheard
Song of a neighborhood nightingale transcribed in 1868 by German naturalist Johann Matthäus Bechstein:
Tioû, tioû, tioû, tioû.
Spe, tiou, squa.
Tiô, tiô, tiô, tiô, tio, tio, tio, tix.
Coutio, coutio, coutio, coutio.
Squô, squô, squô, squô.
Tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzi.
Corror, tiou, squa pipiqui.
Zozozozozozozozozozozozo, zirrhading!
Tsissisi, tsissisisisisisisis.
Dzorre, dzorre, dzorre, dzorre, hi.
Tzatu, tzatu, tzatu, tzatu, tzatu, tzatu, tzatu, dzi.
Dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo.
Quio, tr rrrrrrrr itz.
Lu, lu, lu, lu, ly, ly, ly, liê, liê, liê, liê.
Quio, didl, li lulylie.
Hagurr, gurr quipio!
Coui, coui, coui, coui, qui, qui, qui, qui, gai, gui, gui, gui.
Goll goll goll goll guia hadadoi.
Couigui, horr, he diadia dill si!
Hezezezezezezezezezezezezezezezeze couar ho dze hoi.
Quia, quia, quia, quia, quia, quia, quia, quia, ti.
Ki, ki, ki, ïo, ïo, ïo, ioioioio ki.
Lu ly li le lai la leu lo, didl ïo quia.
Kigaigaigaigaigaigaigai guiagaigaigai couior dzio dzio pi.
In his 1795 Natural History of Cage Birds, he notes that some captive birds “never sing unless confined within narrow limits, being obliged, as it would appear, to solace themselves, for the want of liberty, with their song,” and so should never be given freedom within a room.
See Bird Talk, Bird Songs, and Who’s Who.
Some Lost Snowmen
In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), Giorgio Vasari notes that in January 1494, while Michelangelo was working on his first full-scale stone figure, “there was a heavy snowfall in Florence and Piero de’ Medici, Lorenzo’s eldest son … wanting, in his youthfulness, to have a statue made of snow in the middle of his courtyard, remembered and sent for Michelangelo and had him make the statue.”
A heavy snowfall did occur that month: One chronicler wrote, “There was the severest snowstorm in Florence that the oldest people living could remember.” And it was a tradition on such occasions for outstanding artists to sculpt large snow figures, including the Marzocco, the heraldic lion that is the city’s symbol. But “What snow figure Michelangelo fashioned is not known,” writes critic Georg Brandes, “only that it stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Medici.”
Seventeen years later, Brussels residents protested the wealthy Habsburgs by building 110 satirical snowmen, more than half of which were said to be pornographic. There’s no visual record of that, either. It’s known as the Miracle of 1511.
“Good and Clever”
If all the good people were clever,
And all clever people were good,
The world would be nicer than ever
We thought that it possibly could.
But somehow ’tis seldom or never
The two hit it off as they should,
The good are so harsh to the clever,
The clever, so rude to the good!
So friends, let it be our endeavour
To make each by each understood;
For few can be good, like the clever,
Or clever, so well as the good.
— Elizabeth Wordsworth
A Magic Box Cube
Reader William Walkington devised this “hollow” cube of order 4, each of whose faces is a magic square that draws on numbers from 1 to 56. The lines of four numbers in each row, column, long diagonal, and even some of the broken diagonals, produce the magic sum 114. Further, remarkably, when the figure is “scrambled” like a Rubik’s cube, the result is often another magic box cube:
For more information, see his site. (Thanks, William.)
“A Sound of Clinking Waiters”
“Description of things and atmosphere” from the notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald:
- “The island floated, a boat becalmed, upon the almost perceptible curve of the world.”
- “The first lights of the evening were springing into pale existence. The Ferris wheel, pricked out now in lights, revolved leisurely through the dusk; a few empty cars of the roller coaster rattled overhead.”
- “Farther out in the water there were other lights where a fleet of slender yachts rode the tide with slow dignity, and farther still a full ripe moon made the water bosom into a polished dancing floor.”
- “It was a cup of a lake with lily pads for dregs and a smooth surface of green cream.”
- “A region of those monotonous apartment rows that embody the true depths of the city — darkly mysterious at night, drab in the afternoon.”
- “Spring came sliding up the mountain in wedges and spear points of green.”
- “The music indoors was strange in the summer; it lay uneasily upon the pulsing heat, disturbed by the loud whir of the fans.”
- “Drawing away from the little valley, past pink pines and fresh, diamond-strewn snow.”
- “And perhaps, on the widest and shadiest of the porches there is even a hammock left over from the hammock days, stirring gently in a Victorian wind.”
- “Bundled up children were splattering in for tea as if the outdoors were tired of them and wanted to change its dress in quiet dignity.”
- “Out the window, the snow on the pine trees had gone lilac in the early dusk.”
- “The sun had gone behind Naples, leaving a sky of pigeon’s blood and gold, and as they rounded the bay and climbed slowly toward Torredell Annunziata, the Mediterranean momentarily toasted the fading splendor in pink wine.”
- “The sea was dingy grey and swept with rain. Canvas sheltered all the open portions of the promenade deck, even the ping-pong table was wet.”
- “Is there anything more soothing than the quiet whir of a lawnmower on a summer afternoon?”
- “In Spring when there was no leaf dry enough to crackle and the loudest sound was a dog barking in the next county.”
- “The deep South from the air — a mosaic of baseball diamonds set between dark little woods.”
In his 1925 story “Love in the Night,” a “limousine crawled crackling down the pebbled drive.”
“Mary Had a Transposed Lamb”
The second stanza of this poem is an anagram of the first:
A girl once kept a tiny sheep,
Widely famed for whiteness:
This pet would dog her every step,
No certain sign of brightness.
‘Twas viewed, the pest, one day in class
By impish children there;
Kids laugh to see pets, goofing off,
Weren’t trying — open, err!
Academia
Caprices of Oxford dons, recounted in Maurice Bowra’s Memories: 1898-1939:
“In his quiet way [Wadham College Warden Joseph Wells] had an impressive authority, and it was told that once, when he heard a fearful row in the back quad, he walked up in the dark and said, ‘If you don’t stop at once, I shall light a match.’ They stopped.”
“[Oxford administrator Benjamin Parsons] Symons never admitted that he was wrong. An undergraduate was found drunk, and Symons abused another, quite innocent man for it, who said that his name was not that by which Symons had called him, but Symons would not admit it. ‘You’re drunk still. You don’t even know your own name. Go to your room at once.'”
“[Philosophy tutor Frank] Brabant kept a car and drove it badly, even by academic standards, which, from myopia, or self-righteousness, or loquacity, or absorption in other matters, are notoriously low. Once when I was with him, he drove straight into a cow and knocked it down, fortunately without damage. When the man in charge of it said quite mildly, ‘Look out where you are going,’ Brabant said fiercely, ‘Mind your own business,’ and drove on.”
See Metathesis.
Viewpoint
In judging others we can see too well
Their grievous fall, but not how grieved they fell;
Judging ourselves, we to our minds recall,
Not how we fell, but how we grieved to fall.
— George Crabbe, “Boys at School,” 1819
Misc
- Dante’s 1305 essay “De vulgari eloquentia” contains a 27-letter word, sovramagnificentissimamente, “supermagnificently.”
- Life Savers candies were invented by Hart Crane’s father.
(Colin Rose)
- RETROSUSCEPTION is an anagram of COUNTERRIPOSTES.
- “Of all the reciprocals of integers, the one that I best like is 1/0 for it is a titan amongst midgets.” — Sam Linial
Lord David Cecil called Samuel Johnson “an outstanding example of the charm that comes from an unexpected combination of qualities. In general, odd people are not sensible and sensible people are not odd. Johnson was both and often both at the same time.”