Books were rare treasures in the Middle Ages, painstakingly copied out by hand. So how to protect them from theft? Scribes sometimes added a curse to the first page of those books that was supposed to keep thieves away — and some were as vicious as...
An industrial-design student in Savannah, Georgia, uses Boolean software for making 3-D renderings. Why Boolean ? The term honors the brilliant autodidact George Boole, who helped pioneer the use of binary computing language and Boolean logic. This...
This week’s puzzle by Quiz Guy John Chaneski is inspired by the drawings used by logicians — that is, each answer rhymes with the term Venn Diagram. For example, a map of nearby marshlands isn’t a Venn Diagram, it’s a… This is part of a complete...
Stigler’s Law states that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer, and the same pattern shows up in other eponyms. Venn diagrams were popularized by John Venn in the 1880s, but Leonard Euler had introduced similar diagrams...
What a difference pronunciation makes! The United States has a Department of Defense, and an individual might take classes in self-defense. So why do football and basketball coaches say they’re proud of their . . . “DEE-fence?” Linguists have a...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a game that changes Venn diagrams to zen diagrams. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Zen Diagrams Quiz” You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Martha Barnette...