H.G. Wells’ predictions for the “house of the future,” made in 1903:

• Chimneys will be obsolete, replaced by an electric heater in the center of each apartment. The absence of chimneys will also permit roof gardens.
• Air will be circulated by an electric fan “and will come in through a proper shaft and filter” communicating with the roof.
• No longer required for ventilation, windows may take any shape and will be positioned for lighting and for aesthetic effect.
• Labor-saving appliances will include dustless sweepers, self-making beds, and “neatly-mounted electric cooking things.”
• Walls and floors will meet in a curve rather than at right angles, to prevent the accumulation of dust.
• Walls will be soundproof, doors will be framed in metal, artificial stone floors will be clad in linoleum, and all will be fireproof.
• “In the end our present houses may come to be thought singularly squat, massive, and dark beside these elegant new comers.”

He also thought that single-family homes would become rare in urban areas, replaced with “a wide forest of buildings in which many families may live,” sharing common restaurants, children’s playgrounds, and the like. “The scope for ingenuity and for invention in planning such places is enormous.”

dr/dt = –aj, dj/dt = br,

where

r(t) = Romeo’s love/hate for Juliet at time t
j(t) = Juliet’s love/hate for Romeo at time t.

Positive values of r, j signify love, negative values signify hate, and the parameters a, b are positive, to be consistent with the story.

“The sad outcome of their affair is, of course, a neverending cycle of love and hate; their governing equations are those of a simple harmonic oscillator. At least they manage to achieve simultaneous love one-quarter of the time.”

The same idea can be pursued in other variations. He adds, “the term ‘many-body problem’ takes on new meaning in this context.”

(Steven H. Strogatz, “Love Affairs and Differential Equations,” Mathematics Magazine 61:1 [February 1988], 35.)

A mother, her brother, her daughter, and her son take part in a family chess tournament. Two of the four are twins. At the end of the tournament, the winner and the “loser” (the player in last place) are found to be the same age, and the winner is the opposite gender to the loser’s twin. Who won the tournament?

Girl, bathing on Bikini, eyeing boy, finds boy eyeing bikini on bathing girl.

From a New Statesman competition:

Women understand men; few men understand women.
God knows man. What is doubtful is what man knows God.
Does milk machinery milk does?
Bores are people that say that people are bores.

A few more.

“The anthology has no particular axe to grind, apart from that of having no particular axe to grind.”

— David McCord

He called her a noun, a pronoun, an adverb, and she hesitated. He vigorously charged her with being conjunction and preposition. She wavered. And when at length with stentorian voice he accused her to her face of being a parallelopipedon, she broke in disorder and fled in the utmost confusion.

(Frederic Coudert, “Lying as a Fine Art,” 1873.)

It has been claimed that only three people read the three volumes of Russell and Whitehead’s monumental Principia Mathematica in its entirety, namely Russell, Whitehead, and the proofreader. There has been some scepticism, however, about Russell and Whitehead belonging to the list.

— Leo Moser, quoted in Howard Eves, Mathematical Circles Adieu, 1977

From an observation by the fifth-century Indian grammarian and philosopher Bhartrhari. “[E]very argument advanced to support any instance of the unnameability thesis drives one still more firmly into the paradox,” note philosophers Hans and Radhika Herzberger, “for they naturally tend to involve repeated reference to the very things whose unnameability they undertake to establish.”

(Hans G. Herzberger and Radhika Herzberger, “Bhartrhari’s Paradox,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 9:1 [March 1981], 1-17.)

‘Theft’ is a concept that logically and genetically depends on the antecedent concept of ‘rightfully owned property’ — and refers to the act of taking that property without the owner’s consent. If no property is rightfully owned, that is, if nothing is property, there can be no such concept as ‘theft.’ Thus, the statement ‘All property is theft’ has an internal contradiction: to use the concept ‘theft’ while denying the validity of the concept of ‘property,’ is to use ‘theft’ as a concept to which one has no logical right — that is, as a stolen concept.

— Nathaniel Branden, “The Stolen Concept,” The Objectivist Newsletter, January 1963