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 » Music Space

Wednesday 10 April 19:22:28 UTC 2024

We seem to think naturally of musical pitches as bearing spatial relations to each other, and of music reflecting movement within that space — we speak of notes neighboring one another, of being higher or lower than one another, of scales ascending or descending, and so on. Why is this? It’s true that “high” notes reflect higher frequencies, but people … [Link]

GraphJam » They're Both Over-Estimating the Number of Normal People

Wednesday 10 April 16:06:13 UTC 2024

[Link]

Weird Universe » Song about the human dimensions of the oceans

Wednesday 10 April 11:10:00 UTC 2024

From the YouTube description:

The song was commission by Dr. Lekelia Jenkins especially for the Human Dimensions of the Ocean Symposium at the University of Washington in 2012. This is an example of how art can be blended with science to express scientific concepts in novel ways.
The singer really pulls out all the stops starting about 45 seconds in. … [Link]

Weird Universe » Mr. Squiggle

Wednesday 10 April 9:06:00 UTC 2024

All is explained at the Wikipedia page.

Weird as the newer version is, the 1950s show was even weirder. Go to this link, for a non-embeddable sample.

[Link]

Futility Closet » Efficient

Wednesday 10 April 7:24:54 UTC 2024

In a friendly competition with linguist Richard Lederer in 1990, Bruce Monrad, a student at St. Paul’s School in Concord, N.H., produced an 11-word “supersentence” — “a single sentence that includes one example of each of the four phrases and three subordinate clauses that are identified in English grammar. These are: prepositional phrase, participial phrase, gerund phrase, infinitive phrase, adverb … [Link]

John Gordon Ross

A Man for All Reasons