• If your number is a multiple of 2, you’ll win £2.
• If your number is a multiple of 3, you’ll win £3.
• If your number is a multiple of 4, you’ll win £4.
• If your number is a multiple of 5, you’ll win £5.
• If your number is a multiple of 6, you’ll win £6.
• If your number is a multiple of 7, you’ll win £7.

The catch is that you have to announce the prize you’re attempting before you roll the dice. Which prize should you pick?

At first it seems that the £2 prize must be best. If even one of the seven dice produces an even number, you can put that at the end of string and fulfill the condition. This will happen 99.2 percent of the time.

Surprisingly, though, choosing 7 has an even higher success rate, 99.997 percent! “In fact, almost all numbers can be rearranged to make a multiple of 7,” writes James Grime. “But finding the multiple of 7 is the tricky part.” See the paper below for a strategy that will win the jackpot nearly every time.

(James Grime, “The Seven Dice Shuffle,” Recreational Mathematics Magazine 13:22 [June 2026], 95-101.)

In a certain street are three tailors. The first to set up shop hung out this sign — ‘Here is the best tailor in the town.’ The next put up — ‘Here is the best tailor in the world.’ The third simply had this — ‘Here is the best tailor in this street.’

— John Scott, The Puzzle King, 1899

(Thanks, Macari.)

On a certain familiar island, some residents always lie, and the others always tell the truth. The total population is 100. Each resident worships one of three gods, the sun god, the moon god, or the Earth god. One day a visitor asks each resident three questions:

1. Do you worship the sun god?
2. Do you worship the moon god?
3. Do you worship the Earth god?

Sixty residents answer yes to the first question, 40 to the second, and 30 to the third. How many residents are liars?

(Apparently apocryphal, but entertaining.)

Like its predecessor, our present civilization may be no more than one of those crops farmers sow to improve their land by the fixation of nitrogen from the air; it may have grown only that, accumulating certain traditions, it may be ploughed into the soil again for better things to follow.

— H.G. Wells, The Outline of History, 1920

Through a remarkable series of blunders and ignorant reproductions of error, this word appears in modern dictionaries as ABACOT. In Hall’s Chron. a bicocket appears to have been misprinted abococket, which was copied by Grafton, altered by Holinshed to abococke, and finally ‘improved’ by Abraham Fleming to abacot (perhaps through an intermediate abacoc); hence it was again copied by Baker, inserted in his Glossarium by Spelman, and thence copied by Phillips, and so handed down through Bailey, Ash, Todd, etc., to 19th century dictionaries (some of which provide a picture of the ‘abacot’), and even inserted in dictionaries of English and foreign languages.

The OED defines abacot as a “variant of bycocket”.

An arresting sentence from poet George Barker’s 1950 novel The Dead Seagull:

“They cut down elms to build asylums for people driven mad by the cutting down of elms.”