This arrangement of rubber bands is “Brunnian”: Though the bands are entangled, no two are directly linked; and though no band can be extricated from the mass, cutting any one of them will free all the others.
By following the pattern here, any number of bands can be joined in a configuration with the same properties.
Entries in a notebook carried by 37-year-old Iowa burglar Michael Sutton, arrested in the 1950s:
Clothes express and accentuate a person’s personality and station in life. Wear good clothes in order to be inconspicuous. Live in best hotels, so I won’t be noticed going and coming at odd hours.
Always carry the daily paper when on the prowl early in the evening — or a magazine. It looks like a person coming home from the office. Better still, carry a briefcase.
It takes an amazing amount of cunning to master crime.
Use bulb in toilet bowl to hide diamonds in — or cash.
Check to see if a town has an opera house or concerts on certain nights of the week. That’s where rich people congregate. Watch newspapers for names of people attending these.
Rich people live on No. 10 Hill in Baltimore, Maryland.
Bartenders, cabbies, fences, and women are stools. Frequent high class places where cheap stools and detectives can’t go.
Patience excels science.
Believe just the opposite of what people say — especially men — and you will be right ninety percent of the time.
Two guns in shoulder holsters and one 25 or 32 caliber automatic strapped to leg.
Leave phoney overcoat button at scene.
Use sneeze powder to foil capture. Sold in novelty stores. Called Cachoo — $1.00 per bottle.
Iowa Falls Museum. Solid gold armor. Also $5,000 gun collection, some with silencers. Go up through floor or down through roof.
The F.L. Doheny home has solid gold bath fixtures.
Dogs love the smell and taste of cinnamon.
Try to find out wealthy people’s birthdays. Chances are they have birthday parties downstairs. Then ransack second-floor rooms.
Buy diamonds with cash from Cartier’s when I want to sell a hot one. Show the receipt that it was purchased. Make sure it is same size and cut and purity.
On the day a criminal decides he is smarter than the police, he moves that much closer to the moment of his capture. Don’t belong to the egocentric class of criminals. Thieves who are so egotistical as to think that they can’t be caught are the ones who get caught.
I don’t have to prove my innocence. The police must prove my guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
“I wonder a good deal about whether I’m crazy or not,” he told journalist St. Clair McElway. “They tell me they’ve got me taped as a constitutional psychopath, whatever the hell that is.”
(From Dennis Potter and Kevin B. Kinnee, Preliminary Criminal Investigations, 2015.)
A problem from Crux Mathematicorum, April 2006:
A group of people must be formed into committees. Show that the number of possible committees that can be formed with an odd number of members is the same as the number that can be formed with an even number of members. (Assume that a committee with no members and one that includes everyone are both allowed.)
Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules for good writing:
“My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
Obscure words from Paul Hellweg’s Insomniac’s Dictionary, 1989:
tomecide: the destruction of a book
lampadomancy: augury by torch flame
shotclog: a drinking companion tolerated because he pays for the drinks
allonym: the name of a real person borrowed by an author
ephelides: freckles
feuterer: someone who keeps a dog
hypnopedia: the process of learning while asleep (e.g. by listening to a recording)
girouettism: the practice of frequently altering personal opinions to follow popular trends
panchreston: a broadly inclusive thesis that purports to cover all aspects of its subject but usually ends up as an unacceptable oversimplification
grangousier: one who will swallow anything
A few facetious Latinisms collected by Michael Quinion:
ferroequinologist: a railroad enthusiast (“one who studies the iron horse”)
infracaninophile: a lover of the underdog
anti-fogmatic: an alcoholic drink that counteracts the effects of fog
In 2014 a Futility Closet reader led me to elephantocetomachia, “a fight between an elephant and a whale,” a valuable word assembled from spare parts. And my notes say that vacansopapurosophobia means “fear of blank paper” — a useful expression, even if it’s not in the dictionary.
Here are two 16th-century German portraits of seated ladies wearing hats, shown in three-quarter view. The one on the left was painted by Hans Holbein, the one on the right by the lesser-known Hans Krell. A panel of 12 specialists agreed that the Holbein painting had more artistic merit, and subjects who said they were familiar with art agreed with them. But individuals with no art expertise often chose the “wrong” painting, the Krell. This would suggest that people’s judgment in art is shaped by their expertise.
But Holbein is also much more famous than Krell, and this factor is likely to influence judgments too. How important is it? That’s not clear.
“Only if we can show that art experts across cultures agree on the comparative aesthetic merit of works they have never seen before and never heard of can we conclude there is consensus independent of cultural learning,” notes Boston College psychologist Ellen Winner. “This kind of study has not been done.”
(Ellen Winner, How Art Works, 2018.)
A golfer takes a swing at a golf ball. Fortunately it’s a good shot, and the ball heads for the cup. Unfortunately, a squirrel, rather dangerously positioned near the cup, kicks the ball away, thus decreasing the ball’s chance of landing in the cup. Fortunately, the ball then hits the branch of a nearby tree and is deflected into the cup.
“Question: was the squirrel’s kick a cause of the hole-in-one?” asks Australian National University philosopher Helen Beebee. “According to some philosophers’ intuitions, the answer is yes. According to others, the answer is no: the ball went in despite the kick. According to a third view, the kick was a cause of the hole-in-one and the hole-in-one occurred despite the kick.” Who’s right?
(Helen Beebee, “Do Causes Raise the Chances of Effects?”, Analysis 58:3 [July 1998], 182-190. The original example is due to Deborah A. Rosen.)
Articles observed by the crew of Welsh pirate Bartholomew Roberts (1682-1722):
That’s from Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates (1724), via naval historian David Cordingly’s Under the Black Flag (1995). In the early years of the 18th century, Cordingly writes, a pirate captain “had absolute power in battle and when ‘fighting, chasing, or being chased,’ but in all other matters he was governed by the majority wishes of the crew.”
In a 1993 segment on National Public Radio, Will Shortz challenged listeners to construct sentences that use only two consonants, such as “Can Connie, a nice niece in Canaan, can-can on a canoe in uncanny innocence?”
The winner, sent in by Dawne Bear and Rachel Chanin, was “See Tess taste-test Sissy’s sassy tea to attest to its tastiest status.” Other entries:
In presenting these in Word Ways the following May, editor Ross Eckler noted that “No one discovered that palindromes sometimes work: too hot to hoot; Madam, I’m Adam; name no one man.”
This shepherd thought poetic thoughts
As by the flocks he sat;
But while he wrote his verses,
The goat fed on his hat.
Children’s author and illustrator Peter Newell collected a whole series of such reversible images in Topsys and Turvys (1893) and a sequel. He followed these up with The Hole Book (1908), in which young Tom Potts accidentally fires a gun, sending a bullet through a town; The Slant Book (1910), a book shaped like a rhombus in which a runaway baby carriage careens downhill; and The Rocket Book (1912), in which a janitor’s son sends a rocket upward through 21 successive floors of an apartment building.
The Hole Book was manufactured with a hole right through it — on each page the physical hole shows the mayhem caused by the bullet, deflating bagpipes, severing kite strings, sounding a bass drum, and blowing up a car, among many other things. It’s finally stopped by a cake:
And this was lucky for Tom Potts,
The boy who fired the shot —
It might have gone clean round the world
And killed him on the spot.