Choose any three-digit number that’s not a palindrome.
Reverse its digits, and subtract the smaller number from the larger.
Reverse the digits of this new number (prepend a zero first if it has only 2 digits) and add this time.
The result will always be 1089.
See Kaprekar’s Constant, Easy, and The Pull of Four.
The Strand of January 1907 presents these photographs of Mr. Leslie Pogson of Anwick, Sleaford, as “an executant on the piano under various strange and trying conditions”:
When exhibiting his abilities for the entertainment of his friends Mr. Pogson begins, as the first six photographs make sufficiently clear, by performing a difficult piece of music in attitudes with which most pianists are quite unfamiliar, going even so far, in one instance, as to dispense with the keyboard altogether and, removing the piano front, to play direct upon the hammers. An assistant then enters, and pretending that he wishes to write a letter, and that he is greatly annoyed by the musical solos, he shouts to the performer to cease playing. This having no effect, he throws two pieces of stick at the player, who picks them up and goes on playing with them instead of with his fingers, even when a table-cloth is spread over the keys. A quilt used in the same way fails to diminish the variety of his attitudes, and even when his hands are handcuffed and he is placed with his back to the instrument the flood of music still flows forth as volubly as ever.
One night Mr. Pogson was passing unobserved through the crush of his late audience when he overheard the somewhat loudly expressed opinion that ‘The whole thing was a fake, my dear. The man never played a note in his life; the piano is an automatic one!’ The photographer did not succeed in portraying Mr. Pogson at that stage of the proceedings.
John Irving’s 1978 novel The World According to Garp contains the complete text of a novella, “The Pension Grillparzer.” Garp, an aspiring writer, submits it to a magazine and receives a summary rejection: “The story is only mildly interesting, and it does nothing new with language or with form. Thanks for showing it to us, though.”
When Irving’s editor asked whether this might seem too abrupt, Irving showed him a rejection slip from the Paris Review — he had submitted “The Pension Grillparzer” to them just to see what would happen and, receiving this response, inserted it verbatim into the novel. “I tried the story with American Review, too, they turned it down. And even two non-literary magazines didn’t want it: The New Yorker and Esquire.”
“It was a good feeling when ‘The Pension Grillparzer’ was repeatedly singled out as one of the strongest parts of the novel, and it won the Pushcart Prize for short fiction that year. One literary magazine, Antaeus, did publish it. Naturally, I’ve liked them ever since.”
lachschlaganfall
n. a condition in which a person falls unconscious due to violent laughter
Excerpts from the Harvard Economic Society’s Weekly Letter, 1929-1930:
In 1931, strapped by the depression, the Letter ceased publication.
You’re driving down the road and, in a moment of inattention, you run a red light. In one universe a cop pulls you over and gives you a ticket. In another universe you hit a little old lady and kill her.
In the first universe you’re just an ordinary motorist. In the second you’re a shameful monster. But you had no control over the presence of the little old lady; the same (small) list of controllable actions were available to you in both universes.
If our moral responsibility extends only to our voluntary actions, then in both universes your only transgression lies in running the red light. Why then do we assign additional blame for hitting the lady, an outcome over which you had no control?
In 1862, August Kekulé dreamed of a snake seizing its own tail; the vision inspired him to propose the structure of the benzene molecule.
Louis Agassiz had been struggling for two weeks to decipher the impression of a fossil fish in a stone slab when he dreamed on three successive nights of its proper character. When he chiseled away the stone he found that the hidden portions of the fish matched his nocturnal drawing.
William Watts had been forming lead shot mechanically when he dreamed he was caught in a cloudburst of molten metal. The image inspired him to develop the shot tower.
The best such story, alas, is false. It’s said that Elias Howe, frustrated in devising a sewing machine, dreamed he had been captured by an African tribe. He noticed that the menacing warriors’ spear-tips bore holes, and this inspired him to move the hole in his machine’s needle from the dull end (as in a hand needle) to the sharp one.
“This is not true,” writes Alonzo Bemis. “Mr. Howe was too much of a Yankee to place any dependence in dreams, and the needle idea was worked out by careful thought and countless experiments.”
There is a story to the effect that a statistician once found a very high correlation between the number of old maids and the size of the clover crop in different English counties. After puzzling over this relation for some time, he was able to trace what appeared to him to be the causal chain. Old maids, it appeared, kept cats; and cats ate mice. Field mice, however, were natural enemies of bumblebees, and these latter were, in turn, the chief agents in fertilizing the flowers of the clover plants. The implication, of course, is that the British Parliament should never legislate on the subject of marriage bonuses without first evaluating the effect upon the clover crop of reducing the spinster population.
— Herbert Simon, Administrative Behavior, 1997
USHERS contains five pronouns: HE, HER, HERS, SHE, US.
If rearranging letters is permitted, then SMITHERY contains 17: HE, HER, HERS, HIM, HIS, I, IT, ITS, ME, MY, SHE, THEIR, THEIRS, THEM, THEY, THY, YE.
You’re in a pitch-dark room. On a table before you are 12 pennies. You know that 5 are heads up and 7 are tails up, but you don’t know which are which. By moving and flipping the coins you must produce two piles with an equal number of heads in each pile. How can you do this without seeing the coins?