“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before and wiser than the one that comes after it.” — George Orwell
Zing!
Henry James told Austin Dobson he’d been lost in the maze at Hampton Court.
“I am surprised at that,” Dobson answered. “I should have thought you would have felt that you were in the middle of one of your sentences.”
(From a letter of Harold J. Laski to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Dec. 1, 1925. See Homage, A Prose Maze, Stops and Starts, and Thank You for Your Submission.)
Lost in Translation
Apocryphal but entertaining: Allegedly a Paris (or Genoese?) opera company provided this synopsis of Carmen to its English-speaking patrons:
Act 1. Carmen is a cigar-makeress from a tabago factory who loves with Don José of the mounting guard. Carmen takes a flower from her corsets and lances it to Don José (Duet: ‘Talk me of my mother’). There is a noise inside the tabago factory and the revolting cigar-makeresses burst into the stage. Carmen is arrested and Don José is ordered to mounting guard her but Carmen subduces him and he lets her escape.
Act 2. The Tavern. Carmen, Frasquita, Mercedes, Zuniga, Morales. Carmen’s aria (‘The sistrums are tinkling’). Enter Escamillio, a balls-fighter. Enter two smuglers (Duet: ‘We have in mind a business’) but Carmen refuses to penetrate because Don José has liberated her from prison. He just now arrives (Aria: ‘Slop, here who comes!’) but hear are the bugles singing his retreat. Don José will leave and draws his sword. Called by Carmen shrieks the two smuglers interfere with her but Don José is bound to dessert, he will follow into them (final chorus: ‘Opening sky wandering life’).
Act 3. A roky landscape, the smuglers shelter. Carmen sees her death in cards and Don José makes a date with Carmen for the next balls fight.
Act 4, A place in Seville. Procession of balls-fighters, the roaring of the balls heard in the arena. Escamillio enters, (Aria and chorus: ‘Toreador, toreador, all hail the balls of a Toreador’). Enter Don José (Aria: ‘I do not threaten, I besooch you.’) but Carmen repels himwants to join with Escamillio now chaired by the crowd. Don José stabbs her (Aria: ‘Oh rupture, rupture, you may arrest me, I did kill der’) he sings ‘Oh my beautiful Carmen, my subductive Carmen …’
From what I can tell, the earliest date claimed for the opera performance is 1928, and this excerpt didn’t appear until 1966. No one anywhere makes any confident claim as to the writer.
Second Thoughts
In January 1984, Games magazine challenged its readers to create a form of communication in which a positive statement can be changed to a negative one solely by changing its punctuation. As an example, contributing editor Gloria Rosenthal offered this love letter:
Dear John:
I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous, kind, thoughtful. People who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me for other men. I yearn for you. I have no feelings whatsoever when we’re apart. I can forever be happy — will you let me be yours?
Harriet
How can Harriet tell John to get lost solely by repunctuating her letter?
Time and Chance
The number of seconds in a year is 365.2425 × 24 × 60 × 60 = 31,556,952.
By an unlikely coincidence, that value falls within 1 percent of π × 107.
Tidy
A visual proof that a2 – b2 = (a + b)(a – b).
Sophie Germain wrote, “It has been said that algebra is but written geometry and geometry is but diagrammatic algebra.”
In Other Words
Writing in the New Beacon in 1938, blind poet W.H. Mansmore describes a process he calls “mental alchemy,” “a transmutation of sensations from one order to another.” He takes up this visual description from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, in which the nymph Asia watches dawn break over the mountains:
The point of one white star is quivering still
Deep in the orange light of widening morn
Beyond the purple mountains; through a chasm
Of wind-divided mist the darker lake
Reflects it; now it wanes; it gleams again
As the waves fade, and as the burning threads
Of woven cloud unravel in pale air;
‘T is lost! and through yon peaks of cloudlike snow
The roseate sunlight quivers; …
“I give below an attempt to render the same passage in terms of touch:”
One cold metallic grain is quivering still
Deep in the flood of warm ethereal fluid
Beyond the velvet mountains: through a chasm
In banks of fleece the heavier lake is splashed
With fairy foam: it wanes: it grows again
As the waves thicken, and as the burning threads
Of woven wool unravel in the tepid air:
‘Tis lost! and through the unsubstantial snow
Of yonder peaks quivers the living form
And vigour of the Sun …
“Or it may be put into sound, thus:”
One star pierces with thin intensity
The large crescendo consonance of morn
Beyond the drumming mountains: on the lake
Through stolid silence ghostly-faint is thrown
An echo: now it wanes: it grows again
Its echo fades, and splits into a swarm
Of singing notes that scatter in the faint air:
Then through a sound of breathing winds afar
Begins the throbbing anthem of the Sun.
He adds, “I owe Shelley an apology for publishing the above travesties of his work, but with all their inadequacy they may serve to make clear our method of realising the unreal world of light in the real world of sound and touch.”
Round Numbers
For any positive integer n, there exists a circle that passes through exactly n lattice points in the Euclidean plane.
This was first proven by Polish mathematician Andrzej Schinzel in 1958. It’s known as Schinzel’s theorem.
Harmony
A puzzle by S. Dvoryaninov from the July-August 1994 issue of Quantum:
A very large military band marched in square formation on a parade ground, then regrouped into a rectangle so that the number of rows increased by 5. How many musicians were in the band?
Another Christmas Quiz
The 2024 GCHQ Christmas Challenge is now live. Devised by Government Communications Headquarters, the British intelligence agency, this year’s puzzles encourage children aged 11-18 to think laterally and work as a team, testing skills including codebreaking, mathematics, and lateral thinking. “This year for the first time there are three additional elements hidden within the card for those who want to take on an extra challenge.”
The agency has included puzzles in its Christmas cards to global national security heads since 2015. Director Anne Keast-Butler said, “The puzzles are aimed at teenagers and young people, but everyone is encouraged to give them a try — they might surprise you.”