Cerebrum ludos...... a penny for your thoughts!

There’s a common and widespread myth that a small coin like a US one cent penny dropped directly down from the top of the Empire State Building in New York will kill a person if it falls on their head

There’s a common and widespread myth that a small coin like a US one cent penny dropped directly down from the top of the Empire State Building in New York will kill a person if it falls on their head. This is not true because the terminal velocity of a falling penny is about 50 - 80 km/h, and the coin will not exceed that speed regardless of the height from which it is dropped. At that speed, its energy is not enough to penetrate a human skull.

However, there’s an even more interesting reason why it would not fall on a person’s head. That’s the main lateral thing problem you have to solve. (If you can’t then what does the following Latin sentence mean: Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?)
 
THROUGHPUT
(The odd one out was about you meeting on old friend at his house after many years and you could only remember he had two kids. And so on and on. You know the rest.)
Since I have no clue to whether my friend has girls or boys or one of each, there are four possibilities. Let’s denote boy with B and girl with G.  There are four options: BG, GB, BB, GG. The first child is a boy so there are three probabilities. Now (1) The probability that the sleeping child is also a boy is 1/3; (2) Since the boy introduced is the elder one the probability changes to 1/2. -- Reuben Romal Thomas, reubenromal123@gmail.com

Assume the probability of a male or female child born to be equal, there are four cases in which the person can have two children: (a) boy and then again a boy; (b) boy and then girl; (c) girl and then boy; (d) girl and then again girl. In the first case when the friend sees a boy as one child of the two, the probability of the other child being a boy is 1/3 as only one case is eliminated (case d) out of four. Further, if he says he is the elder of two it further eliminates case (c) in which girl is elder. So now the total number of cases is two (case a, b) and the favourable one is only case (a). Thus the probability now is 1/2. The two probabilities are not the same. -- Anu A Menon, anuamen73@gmail.com
(The second problem was: “Why are the bones of tinned fish almost as soft as the flesh?”)

In the canning process, the fish is already cooked as it passes through two main stages; pre-treatment stage and retorting stage. During pre-treatment, the fish is heated with steam for a few hours. In the retorting stage brine, oils and other additives are added and boiled at a higher temperature for another few hours. This process is destroy microbes. This is why canned fish has a very long shelf life. Meat becomes softer and, importantly, bone is softened as well. -- Shashi Shekher Thakur, shashishekher@yahoo.com

The acid content of the processing preparation reacts with the calcium in the bones of the fish and makes them soft. This usually only works with smaller fish like mackerel and sardine. Larger fish have bones which are way too thick to be completely softened. – Mihir Pramanick, Cochin, India
(The third one was about how many cups of wine were there initially in the barrel if a person stole wine by removing three cups of wine from a barrel and replaced it with three cups of water for three days.).
Assume the barrel has ‘n’ cups of wine to start with. After taking three cups of wine, the barrel has n - 3 cups. When three cups of water are added, the barrel is back to ‘n’ cups with the wine concentration or ratio of (n - 3)/n = (1 - 3/n). After the second day, three cups of wine with a ratio of (1 - 3/n) are gone resulting in (n - 3) - 3(1 - 3/n) = n - 6 + 9/n cups of wine. The wine ratio will become (n - 6 + 9/n)/n = (1 - 3/n)^2. After the third day, we can see the wine ratio becoming (1 - 3/n)^3. Equating this to 0.5 (the final wine ratio), we get n is about 14.5 cups. We are still happy to drink this though! -- Saishankar Swaminathan, saishankar482@gmail.com

BUT GOOGLE THIS NOW

1. What do Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Baa, Baa, Black Sheep and The Alphabet Song have in common. No it’s not what you think.
2. Why do veins appear blueish or purple when actually they have blood running in them which is red to dark red in colour?

Sharma is a scriptwriter and former editor of Science Today magazine.(mukul.mindsport@gmail.com)

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