Delighted

Josiah Winslow’s programming language Bespoke encodes instructions into the lengths of words, producing programs that look like poetry. This one prints the phrase “Hello, World!”:

more peppermint tea?
ah yes, it's not bad
I appreciate peppermint tea
it's a refreshing beverage

but you immediately must try the gingerbread
I had it sometime, forever ago
oh, and it was so good!
made the way a gingerbread must clearly be 
baked

in fact, I've got a suggestion
I may go outside
to Marshal Mellow's Bakery
so we both receive one

Related: In the early 1980s, Frank Hayes was so vexed with the S-100 computer bus that he wrote a sea shanty about it:

(Thanks, Jeremiah.)

| Technology

Expanding Knowledge

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Meno_(Socrates)_drawing_29.gif
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Each side of the yellow square is 2 feet long. In the Meno, Socrates asks a slave boy how long would be the side of a square that had twice the yellow square’s area. The boy guesses first 4 feet, then 3, and finds himself at a loss.

Socrates builds a square four times the size of the yellow one, then divides each of its constituent squares in half with a diagonal. The area of the blue square is thus twice that of the yellow one, and its side has the length we’d sought.

“Some things I have said of which I am not altogether confident,” Socrates tells Meno. “But that we shall be better and braver and less helpless if we think that we ought to enquire, than we should have been if we indulged in the idle fancy that there was no knowing and no use in seeking to know what we do not know; that is a theme upon which I am ready to fight, in word and deed, to the utmost of my power.”

| Science & Math

Made to Order

https://archive.org/details/strand-1899-v-17/page/218/mode/2up?view=theater

Back in 2007 I noted the report of a curious wager in Berkshire in 1811: Sir John Throckmorton of Newbury bet a thousand guineas that he could have a coat made between sunrise and sunset of a single summer’s day, from the shearing of the sheep to the finished coat’s delivery by the tailor.

This appears to be true — in 1899 the Strand published a retrospective of the feat, including the first photo of the finished coat and the remarks of 93-year-old Charles Coxeter, the sole surviving witness and the younger brother of John Coxeter, the cloth manufacturer who had superintended most of the work. The sheep had been sheared at 5 a.m., and by 6:20 p.m. Throckmorton was able to don the finish coat before a crowd of 5,000 people, an hour and three-quarters before the deadline.

Coxeter was a curiously ambitious man: After the Battle of Waterloo he sponsored the preparation of a plum pudding 20 feet long, “which was cooked under the supervision of twelve ladies.” The “monster pudding” was carried to his house on a timber wagon drawn by two oxen and declared by all who partook “as nice as mother makes ’em.”

https://archive.org/details/strand-1899-v-17/page/218/mode/2up?view=theater

| Oddities

Express

https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzae061
Image: Mind

For his article “A Universal Money Pump for the Myopic, Naive, and Minimally Sophisticated,” in the April 2025 issue of Mind, philosopher Johan Gustafsson devised this minimal paradoxical stairway to illustrate a cyclic ranking: A appears higher than B, B appears higher than C, and C appears higher than A.

Two other perplexities, while we’re at it — by Mike Tolleb:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Faux_Escalier.JPG
Image: Wikimedia Commons

And by Wikimedia user Mabit1:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Unmoegliches_Objekt_4.svg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

(Thanks, Johan.)

| Oddities

Gatherings

“I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” — Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby

“At any gathering I always feel as though I am the youngest person in the room.” — W.H. Auden

“The difference between what is commonly called ordinary company and good company, is only hearing the same things said in a little room or in a large saloon, at small tables or at great tables, before two candles or twenty sconces.” — Pope, Thoughts on Various Subjects, 1727

| Quotations · Society

The Miura Fold

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Miura-Ori_CP.svg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 1980, Japanese astrophysicist Kōryō Miura worked out a pattern of parallelograms that permit a map to be folded much more compactly than conventional right-angle creases. So efficient is the pattern that a map can be opened or refolded with a single motion by pulling on opposite ends, rather like an accordion. Today it’s used to fold surgical devices, furniture, and solar panel arrays on spacecraft.

| Science & Math

“The Sniffle”

In spite of her sniffle
Isabel’s chiffle.
Some girls with a sniffle
Would be weepy and tiffle;
They would look awful,
Like a rained-on waffle,
But Isabel’s chiffle
In spite of her sniffle.
Her nose is more red
With a cold in her head,
But then, to be sure,
Her eyes are bluer.
Some girls with a snuffle,
Their tempers are uffle.
But when Isabel’s snivelly
She’s snivelly civilly,
And when she’s snuffly
She’s perfectly luffly.

— Ogden Nash

| Poems

Quick Thinking

During lunch one day at Los Alamos, Richard Feynman told his colleagues, “I can work out in sixty seconds the answer to any problem that anybody can state in ten seconds, to 10 percent!”

He had completed several challenges when mathematician Paul Olum walked past.

‘Hey, Paul!’ they call out. ‘Feynman’s terrific! We give him a problem that can be stated in ten seconds, and in a minute he gets the answer to 10 percent. Why don’t you give him one?’

Without hardly stopping, he says, ‘The tangent of 10 to the 100th.’

“I was sunk: you have to divide by pi to 100 decimal places! It was hopeless. … He was a very smart fellow.”

(From Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, 1985.)

| Science & Math