标签: puzzle

It's no secret that I am a huge fan of The Big Bang Theory TV show. In fact, I love it so much that -- now the eighth season is over -- I'm watching the entire thing from the very beginning. It's amazing how much you forget. For example, do you recall what Leonard and Sheldon were doing when we first meet them at the start of the very first episode?   The reason I'm waffling on about this here is that I was meandering my way around the Internet as is my wont when my eye was caught by the image below. The contents of the whiteboard are obviously superimposed onto a scene from the show, which couldn’t fail to intrigue me.   STOP! Before you look at the puzzle in the following image, glance at your watch, and then see how many seconds it takes you to solve this cunning conundrum.     Please don't post the answer below -- let's not spoil the fun for the next person to see this blog. On the other hand, I would be interested to know how many seconds it took you to solve the puzzle.

Have you seen the old 1960s TV show featuring Adam West and Burt Ward as Batman and Robin ? One of Batman's arch enemies was The Riddler —a man obsessed with riddles, puzzles, and word games. The Riddler used to delight in forewarning Batman and the police of his capers by sending them complex clues, which Batman and Robin would decipher in the most improbable ways. I mean we're talking about clues of the caliber "What has yellow skin and writes?" The answer to this conundrum being, of course, "A ballpoint banana!" I used to love these things as a kid ( Click Here to see a whole bunch more). But that's not what I wanted to talk about. A few days ago, my wife ( Gina The Gorgeous ) made a ginger cake for supper (well, for dessert after supper). I remember hearing the electric mixer thrashing away in the kitchen. The result was yummy scrummy. Yesterday when I was emptying the dishwasher, I ran across the two whisks from the mixer sitting in the cutlery area along with the knives and forks. I was just about to place them in the appropriate drawer in the kitchen ( "A place for everything and everything in its place," as they say, and by "they" I mean that everyone from Benjamin Franklin to Winnie The Pooh is associated with this quote) when I was taken by surprise... ...looking in the drawer I saw a multitude of whisks as shown below:   The thing is that we are the proud owners of only one little rinky-dinky handheld mixer. Where did all of these other whisks come from? Why have we horded them over the years? (Are we actually hording them, or are they breeding?) I have to say that this has puzzled me ever since. Goodness only knows what Batman would make out of this. So, am I alone here, or have you run across this sort of situation in your own kitchen?  

I've been thinking of a few puzzles that I'd like to share. Let's start with a bit of an "old chestnut" just to get our brains oiled up and ready for action...   Puzzle #1: OK, suppose you have a planet that's 20km in diameter. Let's assume that this planet is perfectly spherical. In fact let's assume that it's made out of stainless steel and has been polished like a mirror (hey, it's our planet, we can assume what we like).   Now, suppose we have a very large ball of red string and we loop it all around our planet's equator. Now suppose we have a large ball of green string and we loop this around the equator also, but this time we use lots and lots of wooden sticks to keep the green string exactly one meter above the ground.   So, how much longer will the green string be compared to the red string?   Puzzle #2:  Have you heard that Car Talk program on National Public Radio (NPR). It's hosted by two brothers called Frick and Frack (I have no idea if these are their real names) and it's a lot of fun. Anyway, I was listening to the show a couple of weekends ago whilst driving around and they posed an interesting problem that was submitted by the owner of a big tractor-trailer.   It seems that the fuel gauge on this guy's tractor-trailer is broken, so he has been reduced to using a stick to see how much fuel he has left in his tank. Purely for the sake of this discussion, let's assume that his tank is 1m long and 50 cm in diameter as reflected in the illustration below.   So if he makes a mark on the stick 50 cm from the bottom, then this would represent a full tank. And if he makes a mark on the stick 25 cm up from the bottom then this would represent 1/2 a tank. So what he is asking is where he should put the marks corresponding to 1/4 and 3/4 of a tank.   Puzzle #3: Have you seen the four-part mini-series of television programs called Aftermath . The idea is that they postulate something happening like the population of the world doubling overnight or all of the oil that's still in the ground suddenly disappearing ... and then they consider what would happen.   One of these programs was titled Aftermath: When the Earth Stops Spinning . The idea is to consider what would happen if the world suddenly started to slow down its spinning over the course of five years. I saw thsi program on TV and it was very interesting. Anyway, this set me to thinking...   Let's assume that the circumference of the world is exactly 24,000 miles at the equator. We know that the earth spins round once every 24 hours, so at the equator this is 24,000 miles in 24 hours, which equates to 1,000 miles per hour.   The point is that, if you are standing at the equator, the spin of the world is sort of trying to throw you off (if you see what I mean). So, assuming that someone has a mass of exactly 100kg if we were to weigh him at the North or South Pole – and also that our guy has access to a really sensitive and accurate weighing scale, what would the reading on the weighing scale be if our subject was standing on it at the equator?

I've been thinking of a few puzzles that I'd like to share. Let's start with a bit of an "old chestnut" just to get our brains oiled up and ready for action...   Puzzle #1: OK, suppose you have a planet that's 20km in diameter. Let's assume that this planet is perfectly spherical. In fact let's assume that it's made out of stainless steel and has been polished like a mirror (hey, it's our planet, we can assume what we like).   Now, suppose we have a very large ball of red string and we loop it all around our planet's equator. Now suppose we have a large ball of green string and we loop this around the equator also, but this time we use lots and lots of wooden sticks to keep the green string exactly one meter above the ground.   So, how much longer will the green string be compared to the red string?   Puzzle #2:  Have you heard that Car Talk program on National Public Radio (NPR). It's hosted by two brothers called Frick and Frack (I have no idea if these are their real names) and it's a lot of fun. Anyway, I was listening to the show a couple of weekends ago whilst driving around and they posed an interesting problem that was submitted by the owner of a big tractor-trailer.   It seems that the fuel gauge on this guy's tractor-trailer is broken, so he has been reduced to using a stick to see how much fuel he has left in his tank. Purely for the sake of this discussion, let's assume that his tank is 1m long and 50 cm in diameter as reflected in the illustration below.   So if he makes a mark on the stick 50 cm from the bottom, then this would represent a full tank. And if he makes a mark on the stick 25 cm up from the bottom then this would represent 1/2 a tank. So what he is asking is where he should put the marks corresponding to 1/4 and 3/4 of a tank.   Puzzle #3: Have you seen the four-part mini-series of television programs called Aftermath . The idea is that they postulate something happening like the population of the world doubling overnight or all of the oil that's still in the ground suddenly disappearing ... and then they consider what would happen.   One of these programs was titled Aftermath: When the Earth Stops Spinning . The idea is to consider what would happen if the world suddenly started to slow down its spinning over the course of five years. I saw thsi program on TV and it was very interesting. Anyway, this set me to thinking...   Let's assume that the circumference of the world is exactly 24,000 miles at the equator. We know that the earth spins round once every 24 hours, so at the equator this is 24,000 miles in 24 hours, which equates to 1,000 miles per hour.   The point is that, if you are standing at the equator, the spin of the world is sort of trying to throw you off (if you see what I mean). So, assuming that someone has a mass of exactly 100kg if we were to weigh him at the North or South Pole – and also that our guy has access to a really sensitive and accurate weighing scale, what would the reading on the weighing scale be if our subject was standing on it at the equator?