Whittle It a Little, It’ll Fit

Odds and sods I look at regularly, just because they amuse me. I hope they do the same for you. Incidentally, I found this page’s title on Greg Ross’s Futility Closet (it’s somewhere on this page) in a mini-article which also includes the delightful sentence in Icelandic: Barbara Ara bar Ara araba bara rabbabara. Ross points out that this, “besides being fun to say, is spelled with only three letters. It means “Barbara, daughter of Ari, brought only rhubarb to Ari the Arab.”

Futility Closet » “The Twenty-Four Monks”

Wednesday 6 March 20:24:22 UTC 2024

During the middle ages there existed a monastery, in which lived twenty-four monks, presided over by a blind abbot. The cells of the monastery were planned as shown in the accompanying figure, passages being arranged along two sides of each of the outer cells and all round the inner cell, in which the abbot took up his quarters. Three monks … [Link]

Weird Universe » Are we swallowing other universes?

Wednesday 6 March 13:03:00 UTC 2024

An unusual cosmological hypothesis was recently published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. At least, it's an idea I haven't heard before.

It suggests that our universe has been swallowing "baby universes," and that this eating habit is the cause of the observed accelerating rate of expansion of our universe.

The article, authored by researchers from the Niels … [Link]

Weird Universe » Follies of the Madmen #589

Wednesday 6 March 10:46:00 UTC 2024

[Link]

Futility Closet » “I Loved Thee”

Wednesday 6 March 8:23:43 UTC 2024

I loved thee, beautiful and kind,
And plighted an eternal vow;
So alter’d are thy face and mind,
‘Twere perjury to love thee now. — Robert, Earl Nugent (1709-1788) [Link]

Futility Closet » Fact and Fiction

Wednesday 6 March 1:07:18 UTC 2024

Has it ever occurred to you that novelists are using up experience at a dangerous rate? No, I see it hasn’t. Well, then, consider that before the novel emerged as the dominant literary form, narrative literature dealt only with the extraordinary or the allegorical — with kings and queens, giants and dragons, sublime virtue and diabolic evil. There was no … [Link]

John Gordon Ross

A Man for All Reasons