Futility Closet

A puzzle by A.

This famous adagio is commonly attributed to the 18th-century Venetian composer Tomaso Albinoni (1671–1751).

The prime factorization of 255987 is 33 × 19 × 499.

I don’t know who devised this; I found it in The Batsford Chess Puzzle Book (2002).

What word has kst in the middle, and at the end, and in at the beginning?

All teeth and claws, behold this little Jaguar!

anatine: of or pertaining to, resembling or characteristic of, a duck cancrine: having the qualities of a crab caprine: of or relating to a goat columbine: of, belonging to, or of the nature of, a dove or pigeon formicine: of, or of the nature of, ants fr…

“Genuine works of art carry their own aesthetic theory implicit within them and suggest the standards according to which they are to be judged.” — Goethe, letter, 1808

Five pirates of different ages want to divide a treasure of 100 gold coins.

John Morton, Lord Chancellor under Henry VII, used a universal argument to demand gifts for the royal treasury: If a man lived well, he was obviously rich.

In 1884, zoologist William Hay Caldwell sent a historic cable from Australia to his colleagues at the British Association for the Advancement of Science: MONOTREMES OVIPAROUS, OVUM MEROBLASTIC In four words this manages to proclaim that the platypus lays…

In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has.

I have 13 magnetic tapes on reels; one empty reel; and a machine that can unwind a tape from a full reel onto an empty one, reversing the tape’s direction.

If there were only two men in the world, how would they get on?

There are biscuits on the sideboard if you want them.

The man with the longest surname in Fiji is Levani Mavoaiuluivitimaitaveunienanodralakicakacakatakanavalenilotunagon enivadravadraenaesitetimaiuraqaicuruvularuaenavaleniveivakabulaimaiwaiyevoenayasanakocakaudrove.

Image: Wikimedia Commons In 1917, W.S.

A Trick that everyone abhors In Little Girls is slamming Doors.

Maxims of Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián (1601-1658): When you counsel someone, you should appear to be reminding him of something he had forgotten, not of the light he was unable to see.

The last item in J.G.

We think of light speed as dizzyingly fast, but it’s still disastrously slow given the roomy universe we find ourselves in.

“Books we want to have young people read should not be recommended to them but praised in their presence.

a man who is so dull that he can learn only by personal experience is too dull to learn anything important by experience. — Don Marquis, ‘archy on this and that’, Archy Does His Part, 1935

Image: Wikimedia Commons This logic puzzle is the numerical equivalent of a crossword.

The programming language efghij is literally object-oriented — its logic is expressed by arranging ordinary items in meaningful tableaus: In this example, the tray and the cutting board constitute code blocks.

A puzzle from the October 1962 issue of Eureka, the journal of the Cambridge University Mathematical Society: (a) At least two of these statements, apart from this one, are true.

Ho!

A puzzling passage from Vladimir Nabokov’s 1957 novel Pnin: Pnin’s birthday … fell on February 3, by the Julian calendar into which he had been born in St.

A surprising number of flowers are named for people: begonia: after Michel Bégon, a former governor of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) camellia: after Jesuit botanist Georg Joseph Kamel dahlia: after Anders Dahl, a student of Carl Linnaeus forsythia: after Sco…

In 1848, English poet Arthur Hugh Clough named a new work The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich, apparently thinking this was an innocent Gaelic place name.

An elegant alphametic by Jonathan Joseph, from the October 1991 issue of Games magazine: VENUS MARS SATURN + URANUS -------- NEPTUNE If each letter consistently represents a particular digit, what equation does this expression encipher?

“Plaindromes” are ordinary sentences that sound as if they ought to be palindromes: Money-man I, an Adam, not even a doom.

Flemish engraver Aegidius Sadeler II based these prints on designs by Pieter Stevens II.

Image: ArXiv There are four states in which matter can exist: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma.

Anglican priest Samuel Peters opposed American independence and was forced to flee the colonies as the revolution approached.

From William Wordsworth, “Goody Blake and Harry Gill”: Of waistcoats Harry has no lack, Good duffle grey, and flannel fine; He has a blanket on his back, And coats enough to smother nine.