12 + 22 + 32 + … + 242 = 702
This is the only case in which the sum of the first k perfect squares is itself a square.
03/23/2020 UPDATE: Reader Pieter Post made a pyramid of 4900 golf balls in the Netherlands last summer:
It took him an hour and a half. (Thanks, Pieter.)
When I feel a pain in my leg, what do I mean by in? It might seem that I’m referring to spatial location: The pain resides within the tissues of my leg. But philosopher Ned Block points out that then this argument should be valid:
The pain is in my fingertip.
The fingertip is in my mouth.
Therefore, the pain is in my mouth.
“The conclusion obviously does not follow, so we must conclude that ‘in’ is not used in the spatial enclosure sense in all three statements. It certainly seems plausible that ‘in’ as applied in locating pains differs in meaning systematically from the standard spatial enclosure sense.”
(Ned Block, “Mental Pictures and Cognitive Science,” Philosophical Review 92:4 [1983], 499-541.)
belamour
n. a glance or look of love
oeillade
n. an amorous look
leman
n. one beloved
kilig
adj. exhilarated by a romantic experience
“I wonder … that a soothsayer doesn’t laugh when he sees another soothsayer.” — Cicero
In a 1988 experiment with 2-year-olds, psychologist Alan Leslie asked each child to “fill” two toy cups with imaginary “juice” or “tea” from a bottle. Leslie then said, “Watch this!”, upended one of the cups, shook it, and replaced it next to the other cup. Then he asked the child to point to the “full cup” and the “empty cup.” Though both cups had been empty throughout, all 10 of the 10 subjects indicated that the “empty” cup was the one that had been inverted.
“This leads to pretending something that is true, namely, that the empty cup is empty,” Leslie wrote. “At first glance, this may seem ridiculous. But there is, of course, an important difference between the empty cup is empty and pretending (of) the empty cup ‘it is empty.'” Children distinguish between pretense and reality even when the content of those beliefs is the same.
“These examples help us realize that, far from being unusual and esoteric, cases of ‘non-counterfactual pretence’, that is, pretending something is true when it is true, are ubiquitous in young children’s pretence and indeed has an indispensable role in the child’s ability to elaborate pretend scenarios.”
(Alan M. Leslie, “Pretending and Believing: Issues in the Theory of ToMM,” Cognition on Cognition [1995], 193-220.)
After a severe fever in 1776, Rhode Island farmer’s daughter Jemima Wilkinson was reborn as a genderless celestial being who had been sent to warn of the coming Apocalypse. But the general public was too scandalized by the messenger to pay heed to the message. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the story of the Public Universal Friend and the prejudiced reaction of a newly formed nation.
We’ll also bid on an immortal piano and puzzle over some Icelandic conceptions.
Dutch writer Gerard Nolst Trenité’s 1920 poem “The Chaos” is a polemic on the senselessness of English pronunciation:
Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.
I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.
Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word.
Sword and sward, retain and Britain
(Mind the latter how it’s written).
Made has not the sound of bade,
Say–said, pay–paid, laid but plaid.
Maxims of Goethe:
“There are people who ponder about their friends’ shortcomings: there’s nothing to be gained by that. I have always been on the lookout for the merits of my opponents, and this has been rewarding.”
