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.”

Weird Universe » Person-Alysis Game

Thursday 14 March 22:05:06 UTC 2024

Reveal which member of the family has an Oedipus Complex! Who's a sociopath? Good fun!

The entry at Board Game Geek.

[Link]

Futility Closet » Magic

Thursday 14 March 19:26:46 UTC 2024

Swiss chemist Hans Heinrich Landolt discovered this startling reaction in 1886: Two colorless solutions are mixed and, after a distinct delay, the liquid turns dark blue due to the formation of a triiodide–starch complex. It’s called the iodine clock reaction. See A Chemical Traffic Light. [Link]

Weird Universe » The Princess Who Was Murdered by a Moth

Thursday 14 March 10:32:41 UTC 2024

The story goes that Princess Caravella of Italy was found dead in her bed, shot through the heart. Her husband was accused of her murder, but during the trial a police investigator convinced the jury that the Princess had actually been killed by a moth that singed its wings on a candle in her room, then fell onto a pistol … [Link]

GraphJam »

Thursday 14 March 8:46:20 UTC 2024

[Link]

Futility Closet » Cistercian Numerals

Thursday 14 March 7:27:26 UTC 2024

In the 13th century, Cistercian monks worked out a system of numerals in which a single glyph can represent any integer from 1 to 9,999: Image: Wikimedia Commons Once you’ve mastered the digits in the top row, you can represent tens by flipping them (second row), hundreds by inverting them (third row), and thousands by doing both (fourth row). And now … [Link]

John Gordon Ross

A Man for All Reasons