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futility closet an idler s miscellany of compendious amusements an idler s miscellany of compendious amusements about blog podcast contact geomagic a late beautiful contribution by lee sallows see extra magic realized thanks lee september 13 2022 september 14 2022 science math hiatus after 17 years i think i m going to take a bit of a break for a little while i may post irregularly while i decide whether to continue in the meantime the blog archive and the podcast are still available thanks as always for reading greg p s wow thanks for all your kind messages there are too many to respond to but i m reading every one thanks again august 29 2022 august 30 2022 uncategorized poser a puzzle by mel stover move the minus sign to make an expression equivalent to nine fifty if you sense a trick you re right select click for answer if we take nine fifty to mean 50 minutes after 9 o clock then one answer is via nob yoshigahara august 26 2022 august 25 2022 puzzles second thoughts literary scholar robert hauptman calls this marginal emendation run amok it s a page from henry james 1877 novel the american as james revised it anxiously for a new edition in 1907 he had decided the plot was unconvincing and asked for so many changes that two copies of the book had to be inlaid page by page on larger sheets to give him room to mark all the revisions on the last page above james has partially or fully crossed out 16 of the 19 lines and rewritten the text for the definitive new york edition in the margins and at the foot of the page notes hauptman his scrawling alterations cover virtually all of the generous white space and must be inserted in at least three different locations in the original text words are blotted out or struck in the new version and as he approaches the bottom of the page the lettering diminishes in size because he realizes that he will run out of room the work on the earlier novels has involved much labour to the best effect for the vile things i m convinced james had written to grace norton that march modern critics generally disagree most editions today use the original version from robert hauptman documentation 2008 and harvard s marks in books 1985 august 26 2022 august 25 2022 literature black and white by éric angelini a regular chess game reached this position after black s fifth move four pieces have moved which ones select click for answer all solutions require moves by white s king knight black s king rook and both king rook pawns one runs 1 h3 h5 2 nf3 h4 3 nxh4 rh7 4 nf3 rxh3 5 ng1 rh8 thanks éric august 25 2022 august 24 2022 puzzles the chain test this is interesting in order for a simple arch to stand its shape when inverted must fit into the limits described by a hanging chain a catenary spanish catalan architect antoni gaudí followed this principle in designing some of his buildings he created inverted models and let the shapes of hanging chains or weighted strings determine the shapes of the arches august 25 2022 august 24 2022 science math the feynman sprinkler in the early 1940s a curious question began to circulate among the members of the princeton physics department an ordinary lawn sprinkler like the one shown here would turn clockwise in the direction of the long arrow as its jets ejected water short arrows if you reversed this that is if you submerged the sprinkler in a tank of water and induced the jets to suck in the fluid would the sprinkler turn in the opposite direction the problem is associated with richard feynman who was a grad student at the time and who destroyed a glass container in the university s cyclotron laboratory trying to find the answer in fact ernst mach had first asked the question in an 1883 textbook the answer briefly is no the submerged sprinkler doesn t turn counterclockwise because counterbalancing forces at the back of the nozzle result in no net torque experiments tend to bear this out although in some cases the sprinkler turns slightly counterclockwise perhaps due to the formation of a vortex within the sprinkler body august 24 2022 august 23 2022 science math unanswered during a visit to a club in 1775 samuel johnson was observed to put several seville oranges into his pocket after squeezing their juice into a drink he d made for himself the friends who saw this seemed to think that he had a strange unwillingness to be discovered visiting johnson the next morning and seeing the orange peels scraped and cut into pieces on a table james boswell asked about them johnson i have a great love for them boswell and pray sir what do you do with them you scrape them it seems very neatly and what next johnson let them dry sir boswell and what next johnson nay sir you shall know their fate no further boswell then the world must be left in the dark it must be said assuming a mock solemnity he scraped them and let them dry but what he did with them next he never could be prevailed upon to tell johnson nay sir you should say it more emphatically he could not be prevailed upon even by his dearest friends to tell i don t think this has ever been fully explained but boswell notes that in a letter to mrs piozzi johnson had once recommended dried orange peel finely powdered as a medicine august 24 2022 august 23 2022 literature oddities the connection a thought provoking piece of nonsense by russian absurdist poet daniil kharms philosopher i am writing to you in answer to your letter which you are about to write to me in answer to my letter which i wrote to you a violinist bought a magnet and was carrying it home along the way hoods jumped him and knocked his cap off his head the wind picked up the cap and carried it down the street the violinist put the magnet down and ran after the cap the cap fell into a puddle of nitric acid and dissolved in the meantime the hoods picked up the magnet and hid the violinist returned home without a coat and without a cap because the cap had dissolved in the nitric acid and the violinist upset by losing his cap had left his coat in the streetcar the conductor of the streetcar took the coat to a secondhand shop and exchanged it there for sour cream groats and tomatoes the conductor s father in law ate too many tomatoes became sick and died the corpse of the conductor s father in law was put in the morgue but it got mixed up and in place of the conductor s father in law they buried some old woman on the grave of the old woman they put a white post with the inscription anton sergeevich kondratev eleven years later the worms had eaten through the post and it fell down the cemetery watchman sawed the post into four pieces and burned it in his stove the wife of the cemetery watchman cooked cauliflower soup over that fire but when the soup was ready a fly fell from the wall directly into the pot with this soup they gave the soup to the beggar timofey the beggar timofey ate the soup and told the beggar nikolay that the cemetery watchman was a good natured man the next day the beggar nikolay went to the cemetery watchman and asked for money but the cemetery watchman gave nothing to the beggar nikolay and chased him away the beggar nikolay became very angry and set fire to the cemetery watchman s house the fire spread from the house to the church and the church burned down a long investigation was carried on but did not succeed in determining the cause of the fire in the place where the church had stood a club was built and on the day the club opened a concert was organized at which the violinist who fourteen years earlier had lost his coat performed in the audience sat the son of one of those hoods who fourteen years before had knocked the cap off that violinist after the concert was over they rode home in the same streetcar in the streetcar behind theirs the driver was the same conductor who once upon a time had sold the violinist s coat in a secondhand shop and so here they are riding late at night through the city in front the violinist and the hood s son and in back the driver the former conductor they ride along and don t know what connection there is between them and they won t know till the day they die august 23 2022 august 22 2022 literature society living memory image flickr part of new york is standing still in 1978 artist alan sonfist reclaimed a rubble strewn lot on the corner of west houston street and la guardia place in greenwich village and re established the vegetation soil and rock formations that had existed there before the western settlers arrived as in war monuments that record the life and death of soldiers the life and death of natural phenomena such as rivers springs and natural outcroppings need to be remembered he wrote in a 1968 manifesto proposing the project interestingly he d hoped to do even more than this on canal street i propose to create a marshland and a stream on spring street i propose to restore the natural spring in front of city hall i propose to restore the historical lake there are a series of fifty proposals i have made for the city of new york only this one called time landscape has been realized but it s still growing after 44 years a tiny piece of history that sonfist says helps the city remember its heritage august 23 2022 august 22 2022 art history posts navigation page 1 of 1 256 1 2 3 4 5 10 20 30 40 last explore random post archives archives select month september 2022 august 2022 july 2022 june 2022 may 2022 april 2022 march 2022 february 2022 january 2022 december 2021 november 2021 october 2021 september 2021 august 2021 july 2021 june 2021 may 2021 april 2021 march 2021 february 2021 january 2021 december 2020 november 2020 october 2020 september 2020 august 2020 july 2020 june 2020 may 2020 april 2020 march 2020 february 2020 january 2020 december 2019 november 2019 october 2019 september 2019 august 2019 july 2019 june 2019 may 2019 april 2019 march 2019 february 2019 january 2019 december 2018 november 2018 october 2018 september 2018 august 2018 july 2018 june 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