Quiz Of The Week- What is K-selection?
(i) A Korean pop group
(ii) A manner of evolution
(iii) A technique for gene-editing
(iv) A sampler pack of breakfast cereals - Where might you find sporophytes?
(i) In a bottle of beer
(ii) On Mars
(iii) On a garden wall
(iv) Enslaved in Sparta - Who coined the term "scientist", and when?
(i) John Aubrey in the 1680s
(ii) Roger Bacon in the mid-13th century
(iii) Samuel Johnson in 1755
(iv) William Whewell in the 1830s - "When her husband left her for a younger woman in 1926, she crashed her car in a quarry and disappeared for an 11-day private holiday at a spa hotel in Yorkshire". Who is described here?
(i) Virginia Woolf
(ii) Agatha Christie
(iii) Greta Garbo
(iv) Mrs Patrick Campbell - What is shown in the image below?
(i) Part of a pseudosphere
(ii) An NFT which sold for $1.5m last year and for $12 last week
(iii) A design for a Met Ball dress by Issey Miyake
(iv) A surgical implant for the human ear
answers at the foot of the page
From The Browser Nine Years AgoBrief Interviews With Very Small Publishers
Nikkitha Bakshani | Morning News | 14th November 2013 | U All real. Not satire. Donkey Talk brings practical advice and "cl-ass-ified ads" to donkey owners around the world. Mountain Astrologer zooms in on the details that other media neglect: “Whitney Houston divorced Bobby Brown when her solar arc Mars was conjunct to his natal Mars at 20º Scorpio”. Grief Digest is written "for the bereaved, by the bereaved". As for Girls And Corpses ... (2,300 words) From The Browser Ten Years AgoIn Cold Type
Douglas McCollam | CJR | 2nd November 2012 | U In 1957 Truman Capote proposed to William Shawn that the New Yorker should experiment with highbrow takes on lowbrow culture: "Let’s take the very lowest form of journalism that could possibly be: An interview with a movie star.” Shawn agreed. Capote went to Japan, doorstepped the reclusive Marlon Brando, snagged a six-hour interview, and wrote the first classic of New Journalism (5,400 words)
Mozart's Ave Verum, with octobass The Montreal Symphony Orchestra has recently become the only ensemble in the world to employ an octobass, which typically plays a full octave below the double bass, and has never been produced on a large scale nor used much by composers. The only known work from the 19th century that specifically calls for an octobass is Charles Gounod‘s Messe solennelle de Sainte Cécile — Roughly Daily
Puzzle Of The WeekThe currency used on the planet Zog consists of bank notes of a fixed size differing only in colour. Three green notes and eight blue notes are worth 46 zogs; eight green notes and three blue notes are worth 31 zogs. How many zogs are two green notes and three blue notes worth? — from The Ultimate Mathematical Challenge by The UK Mathematics Trust solution below, after the crossword
Book Of The WeekBabel: Or The Necessity Of Violence
R.F. Kuang | Harper Voyager | 2022 Recommended by Natalie Zutter at Tor:
"It’s rare that a book's title so perfectly communicates the breadth of its story. But when R.F. Kuang’s alternate-history fantasy doorstopper was first announced in 2021, how could we not spend the intervening year waiting to crack the spine on Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution? The translators peruse endless texts in search of the perfect clever etymology that no one else has ever thought of. But the dark side of that is that all it takes is finding the perfect match-pair to wreak incredible violence; and that once they put those words out into the world, they cannot ever take them back."
Chart Of The WeekAnimal Sleep Patterns This graphic by Giulia De Amicis uses data from startsleeping.com to show the typical sleeping patterns of 40 different animals, highlighting their average sleep times, and what percentage of each 24-hour day they spend resting. Compared to the rest of the animals featured in the graphic, humans need a relatively small amount of sleep. We sleep for an average of eight hours — or 33% of our day.
— Visual Capitalist
Image Of The WeekEarly Cycladic Female Figure  Early Cycladic marble female figure ( 2600–2400 BCE), currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art) Under an agreement negotiated between Leonard Stern and the Greek state, this Cycladic figure and other other ancient artefacts will nominally be restored to Greece, but in practice will be be owned by a new entity which Stern has set up together with a private museum in Athens, and will continue to be exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for up to 50 years — Hyperallergic
Poem Of The WeekBack Soon; Driving
Carl Phillips | Poetry Foundation | 2022 The way the present cuts into history,
or how the future can look at first
like the past sweeping through, there
are blizzards, and there are blizzards.
Some contain us; some we carry
within us until they die, when we do.
The snow falls there, barely snowing,
into a long wooden trough where
the cattle feed on those apples we
used to call medieval, or I did,
for their smallish size, as if medieval
meant the world in miniature but
not so different otherwise from
our own, just smaller, a bit sweeter,
more prone therefore to rot quickly,
which is maybe not the worst thing. continue reading at Poetry Foundation
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Click here to solve the Browser Sevens Editor's note — We're thrilled to have another guest setter this week! Katie Hamill is a lifelong puzzle solver and sometime constructor. She has written or co-written puzzles for several outlets, including the American Values Club, the MIT Mystery Hunt, and the Boston Area Puzzle Hunt League. To support her puzzling habit, she practices law in the Boston area — Dan Feyer
Problem SolvedProblem: The currency used on the planet Zog consists of bank notes of a fixed size differing only in colour. Three green notes and eight blue notes are worth 46 zogs; eight green notes and three blue notes are worth 31 zogs. How many zogs are two green notes and three blue notes worth? Solution: Suppose that the value of a green note and the value of a blue note are g zogs and b zogs respectively. Then 3g + 8b = 46 and 8g + 3b = 31. Solving these simultaneously gives b = 5 and g = 2. So 2g + 3b = 19. — from The Ultimate Mathematical Challenge by The UK Mathematics Trust
Quiz Answers
- What is K-selection?
(i) A Korean pop group
(ii) A manner of evolution
(iii) A technique for gene-editing
(iv) A sample pack of breakfast cereals
K-selection is an evolutionary strategy seemingly best suited to a species which is already a strong competitor in a crowded niche with limited resources available. Some adaptation needs to happen within each individual’s lifespan. Organisms that follow this strategy tend to live longer lives, nurturing and teaching their few offspring. Elephants are one such species; humans another. - Where might you find sporophytes?
(i) In a bottle of beer
(ii) On Mars
(iii) On a garden wall
(iv) Enslaved in Sparta
They may possibly exist on Mars, but the surest answer is "on a garden wall", or wherever else moss grows. Sporophytes are tiny stalks which jut out of moss leaves, each stalk proffering at its outermost end a capsule of spores intended to be carried away by wind and rain to new places where the spores can multiply and flourish as new moss. - Who coined the term "scientist", and when?
(i) John Aubrey in the 1680s
(ii) Roger Bacon in the mid-13th century
(iii) Samuel Johnson in 1755
(iv) William Whewell in the 1830s
It was William Whewell, probably in 1833, though the first recorded usage was in 1834. One of the last true polymaths, Whewell achieved distinction as a poet, a mathematician, a philosopher, a theologian, a natural scientist and a philologist. His coinages included the words "scientist", "physicist" and "linguistics". He suggested to Michael Faraday the terms "electrode", "anode", and "cathode". - "When her husband left her for a younger woman in 1926, she crashed her car in a quarry and disappeared for an 11-day private holiday at a spa hotel in Yorkshire". Who is described here?
(i) Virginia Woolf
(ii) Agatha Christie
(iii) Greta Garbo
(iv) Mrs Patrick Campbell
It was Agatha Christie, already famous in 1926 for her crime novels. Her brief disappearance caused a national sensation in Britain, and the precise circumstances of it remain something of a mystery to this day. It has been variously contended that Christie was deliberately seeking to provoke a scandal; that she wanted a quiet break and had no idea of the fuss she might cause; or that she was in the grip of some sort of nervous breakdown. Christie herself never explained the event; her estranged husband (they divorced a few months later) claimed afterwards that she was suffering from "amnesia" and so could not account for her actions. - What is shown in the image below?
(i) Part of a pseudosphere
(ii) An NFT which sold for $1.5m last year and for $12 last week
(iii) A design for a Met Ball dress by Issey Miyake
(iv) A surgical implant for the human ear
 It is part of a pseudosphere, a geometrical construct defined as "a surface with constant negative Gaussian curvature". The picture necessarily shows only a part, because a pseudosphere, or so I read, extends infinitely along its axis of rotation (an imaginary line connecting the pointy bits), although its volume and its surface area will always contrive to remain finite.
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