Futility Closet

In one copy of a 1942 edition of German historian Gert Buchheit’s biography of Rainer Maria Rilke, someone has glued a typewritten and hectographed alphanumeric text. The text fills 33 pages with 18,760 characters in groups of four. Analysis shows that it’s less ordered than English or German but more ordered than random text. To date, no one has been able to make sen...

I’d missed this: In 2006 a geneticist, a philosopher, and a chicken farmer all agreed that the egg came before the chicken.

Nottingham University geneticist John Brookfield pointed out that the first chicken (the first creature bearing chicke...

ladrone
n. a thief; robber; highwayman; rogue

depeculation
n. a robbing or embezzling

desponsate
adj. married

adhorn
v. to make a cuckold of

According to legend, French highwayman Claude Duval agreed not to rob one gentleman if his wife would dance the courante with him by the wayside.

He was hanged at Tyburn...

A problem from the October 1961 issue of Eureka, the journal of the Cambridge University Mathematica...

An “easy and curious method of foretelling rainy or fine weather,” from an 1860 book on conjuring, of all places:

“[T]he best instrument of all, is a good pair of scales, in one of which let there be a brass weight of a pound...