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 » Visionary

Monday 25 March 19:07:41 UTC 2024

Somebody said that it couldn’t be done —
But he, with a grin, replied
He’d never be one to say it couldn’t be done —
Leastways, not ’til he’d tried.
So he buckled right in, with a trace of a grin;
By golly, he went right to it.
He tackled The Thing That Couldn’t Be Done!
And he couldn’t do … [Link]

Weird Universe » An Upside-Down Experiment

Monday 25 March 10:44:00 UTC 2024

In 1950, graduate student Fred Snyder of the University of Wichita spent 30 days wearing special glasses that inverted his vision. It was part of an experiment designed by Dr. N.H. Pronko, head of the psychology department, to see if a person could adapt to seeing everything upside-down. The answer was that, yes, Snyder gradually adapted to inverted vision. And … [Link]

Weird Universe » That’s a Lot of Lobster Rolls

Monday 25 March 9:16:00 UTC 2024

Source.

[Link]

Futility Closet » Specialist

Monday 25 March 7:08:31 UTC 2024

A puzzle by Soviet science writer Yakov Perelman: Six carpenters and a cabinetmaker were hired to do a job. Each carpenter was paid 20 rubles, and the cabinetmaker was paid 3 rubles more than the average wage of the whole group. How much did the cabinetmaker make? SelectClick for Answer We’re told that the cabinetmaker made 3 rubles more than … [Link]

John Gordon Ross

A Man for All Reasons