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 » Anagram

Thursday 21 March 19:04:26 UTC 2024

Corresponding with Leibniz about his method of infinite series in 1677, Isaac Newton wanted to advert to his “fluxional method,” the calculus, without actually revealing it. So he used an unusual expedient — after describing his methods of tangents and handling maxima and minima, he added: The foundations of these operations is evident enough, in fact; but because I cannot … [Link]

Weird Universe » Gestalt Shift Bird Image

Thursday 21 March 11:30:00 UTC 2024

The image below is a single-exposure photo. It wasn't created by Photoshop. Knowing that, it took me a long time to make sense of the image (because my brain refused to see how it could be a scene from real life). My wife, on the other hand, figured it out right away.

Some info about it from PetaPixel:

The photograph, … [Link]

Weird Universe » The Poetry of Hy Sobiloff

Thursday 21 March 9:44:00 UTC 2024

Something tells me Sobiloff should have stuck to his other careers.

From his encyclopedia entry:

Sobiloff, whose poetry was respected by many of his better-known contemporaries for its fresh, honest, unpretentious qualities, was also widely known as a filmmaker, industrialist, and philanthropist… While praising his work, both Aiken and Tate come close to representing the poet as a primitive, particularly … [Link]

Futility Closet » Bequest

Thursday 21 March 7:42:27 UTC 2024

Reader Nick Hare just sent me this. The opening line of Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit’s 1984 book Reasons and Persons is “Like my cat, I often simply do what I want to do.” But in fact Parfit didn’t own a cat. David Edmonds describes the solution in his 2023 biography Parfit: (Thanks, Nick.) [Link]

John Gordon Ross

A Man for All Reasons