This time you’ve gone and hit the big time again man. You’ve actually murdered somebody. You know, as in killed, wasted, snuffed, blanked, dusted, juiced, whacked, etc. You get the drift. And you’re not even in your own country where you know all the loopholes to slip out into the fresh air, No sir, you’re in a place called Verybadland where they have a jury system alright but it functions in its own perverted way.
Like if the members come back completely divided down the middle then custom dictates that you take your own death in your own bloodstained hands. And this is how it works. You’re given two urns containing 25 white balls and 25 black balls respectively. Then you’re blindfolded. Now you have to choose an urn at random and draw a ball from it. Needless to say black = death; white = undeath and you get to taste that outside air of freedom once more. However, their tradition also gives you the option of distributing the balls in any way you like between the two urns before being blindfolded. Big deal because the total proportion between black and white doesn’t change.What should you do to maximise your chances of not meeting the two horned guy who lives downstairs with one tail?
THROUGHPUT
(The dairy fresh problem was: “There are 25 termites randomly arranged on a metre long stick. Each faces either left or right. At the word “go” they all begin marching at one centimetre per second. If two of them collide they immediately reverse direction. How long before all termites have left the stick?”)
The key is to realize that two termites colliding and switching directions is equivalent to two termites passing through one another. So the answer is 100 seconds -- the time it takes one termite to travel the full length of the stick. -- Dhruv Narayan, dhruv510@gmail.com
The act of colliding with each other and reversing direction is as good as walking past each other. So, in fact each termite is walking in its own path up to the end of the stick. Assuming at least one termite starting from the end of the stick, it would take at the most 100 seconds (since the speed is 1cm/sec on a one metre stick) for all the termites to leave the stick. -- Saifuddin S F Khomosi, Dubai
When the ants meet they exchange their speeds or so to say they exchange identities. This means one may consider an ant at one extremity of the rod going through to the other end as if nothing has happened. Then the maximum fall-off time = L(cm)/v (cm/sec) = 100 seconds. -- Ajit Athle, ajitathle@gmail.com
Whatever the random distribution, irrespective of the number of times they collide, all the termites crawling at the rate of 1 cm per sec will be off the 1 metre long stick, latest by 100 seconds. This regardless of case #1 with none on collision course; case #2 some termites have a single collision; or case #3 some or all termites undergo multiple collisions.-- Balagopalan Nair K, balagopalannair@gmail.com
(The other one was: “The weight on one pan of a grocer’s balance is 10% more than the other pan. By what angle will it tilt?”)
Let’s keep the initial angle of tilt of the grocer’s balance as 180° as the rod is a straight line. If the weight on one side of the balance increases by 10%, then the rod will tilt by 10%, thus having an angle of 18 degrees -- Lipika Muthu, geelipm@gmail.com (You almost aced it LM except right there at the end. But we’ll let you know more of this later. And while we’re at it, suffice to say that no one else came even close to a correct answer. So there! -- MS)
BUT GOOGLE THIS NOW
1. Two words are synonyms. Just by the addition of a suffix to each word, they become antonyms (same suffix for both words). What are they? (Submitted by Sheikh Sintha Mathar, sheikhsm7@gmail.com
2. You set out to run a 26.5-mile marathon hoping to average less than 9 minutes per mile. As you run, your friends measure your time along various mile-long segments of the course. On each mile that they measure -- indeed, on each mile that it’s possible to measure, starting anywhere along the course -- my time is exactly 9 minutes. Yet my average for the whole marathon is less than 9 minutes per mile. How is this possible?
Mukul Sharma
Sharma is a scriptwriter and former editor of Science Today magazine (mukul.mindsport@gmail.com)