Futility Closet

On the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, a customer was sitting on the steps of Sumitomo Bank in Hiroshima, waiting for the branch to open, when an atomic bomb exploded over the city. The bank was only 260 meters from ground zero, ...

Hansel and Gretl have discovered a gingerbread cottage and are wondering whether to eat some of the tiles on its walls. A witch appears and tells them how they must go about it. “Each of you is to name a whole number between 0 and 100. Hansel’s must be odd and Gretl’s even. No conferring. Whoever chooses the lower number can eat twice that number of gingerbread tiles....

In his 1908 autobiography, Francis Galton described a “beauty map” he’d compiled of the British Isles:

Whenever I have occasion to classify the persons I meet into three ...

A problem from the Eighth International Mathematical Olympiad, held in Sofia, Bulgaria, in July 1966 (contributed by the Soviet Union):

In a mathematical contest, three problems, A, B, C were posed. Among the participants there were 25 studen...

Said a boy to his teacher one day,
“Wright has not written rite right, I say.”
And the teacher replied,
As the error she eyed,
“Right! Wright: Write rite right, right away!”