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 » Brute Nature

Wednesday 27 March 19:13:12 UTC 2024

Images: Wikimedia Commons French painter Charles Le Brun (1619-1690) was a student of physiognomy, the notion that a person’s character or personality can be read in the face. In 1671 he presented a lecture to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris in which he drew comparisons between the features of humans and animals. The lecture has been lost, … [Link]

Weird Universe » Beatniks Under the Microscope

Wednesday 27 March 15:00:24 UTC 2024

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Weird Universe » Is it marijuana or alfalfa?

Wednesday 27 March 9:40:34 UTC 2024

Peter Hlookoff had an unusual strategy to avoid being convicted for possession of marijuana — he always carried a container of alfalfa with him.

His reasoning was that alfalfa and marijuana smell similar (so he claimed). So if the police ever arrested him for possession of marijuana he could claim that it was actually alfalfa they had smelled (or seen … [Link]

Futility Closet » Sideways Music

Wednesday 27 March 7:10:29 UTC 2024

It’s sometimes contended that time is one of four similar dimensions that make up a single manifold that we call spacetime. The four dimensions are orthogonal to one another, and though humans view one of them, time, as distinct from the others in various ways, it’s not intrinsically different. Philosopher Ned Markosian offers a novel argument against this view: If … [Link]

John Gordon Ross

A Man for All Reasons