...In God we trust!
Consider the Bible text: Genesis 4 : 13 - 16. “And Cain said to the Lord, ‘My punishment is too great to bear. Now that You have driven me this day from the soil I must hide from Your presence, I shall be a restless wanderer on the earth and whoever finds me will kill me.’ And the Lord said to him, ‘Therefore whoever kills Cain shall suffer sevenfold vengeance’.” The question is, why is this statement not logically wrong? Meaning, the first thing you have to think of is why should it be at all considered wrong in the first place and, then, what is it that confers the wrongness?
THROUGHPUT
(The shiny new puzzle was: “Aristotle used to teach that heavy things fall faster than light ones. In 1638, Galileo realised Ari was wrong even before conducting a single experiment himself. How?”)
Galileo opposed the Aristotelian view that heavies objects fell faster through the air and he is supposed to have carried out a “thought experiment” as follows: Imagine two objects, one light and one heavier than the other one, are connected to each other by a string.
Drop this system of objects from the top of a tower. If we assume heavier objects do indeed fall faster than lighter ones (and conversely, lighter objects fall slower), the string will soon pull taut as the lighter object retards the fall of the heavier object. But the system considered as a whole is heavier than the heavy object alone, and therefore should fall faster. This contradiction leads one to conclude the Aristotelian assumption is false. -- Leena Jolie. jolieleena1949@gmail.com
(The second one was: “Solve the alphabetical addition to replace the alphabets with their numerical values. C R O S S + R O A D S = D A N G E R.”)
Only one solution possible; viz: 96233 + 62513 = 158746. -- Ajit Athle, ajitathle@gmail.com
Stepwise reasoning and a bit of luck got me to the solution 96233 + 62513 = 158746. Now that I have got the right answer will you SEND + MORE = MONEY?.Or are you busy playing BASE + BALL = GAMES. If so you can ask your buddies, DONALD + GERALD = ROBERT to do so. Notwithstanding that they may be in SATURN + URANUS = PLANETS. – Dr Ramakrishna Easwaran, drrke12@gmail.com
(And the last was: “When Mr H drove from his residence at 55 kmph, the minute hand of his 12 hour analogue wristwatch was exactly located on a minute mark. After two kilometres of travel, Mr H stopped by a petrol pump to refuel when he observed that the minute hand and the hour hand of his wristwatch were exactly coincident with the minute hand not precisely situated on a minute mark. At what time did he leave his residence?”)
As Mr H’s speed is 55 kmph, he will need (60/55)*2 minutes to reach the station -- ie, he will need 130.9090 . . . seconds which means that around 10.909 seconds would have elapsed in that minute. Now checking this value with a simple time equation (nx + tx = 12xt, where x = speed of hour hand, t = time and n varies from 1 to 12) to find when the hour and minute hand overlap yields 7:38:10.9090 . . . as answer which obviously implies that Mr H left at 7:36. -- Dhruv Narayan, dhruv510@gmail.com
Since M. H travelled a distance of 2 KM from his house at a steady speed of 55 kmph, a time of 2 minutes and 10+ seconds have elapsed since his start. And as the hour and minute hands overlap at 00:00:00, 01:05:27, 2:10:54, 3:16:21, 4:21:49, 5:27:16 , 6:32:43, 7:38:10, 8:43:38, 9:49:05, 10:54:32 and 12:00:00, It can be seen that the time he started at the house has to be 7:36:00 precisely to meet the stipulated conditions. -- A V Ramana Rao, aoavr@gmail.com
BUT GOOGLE THIS NOW
1. Here are the three last lines of a very famous limerick. What you have to do is supply the first two lines that are not really un-written here: Reversed gets time/ Whose poet a I’m/ Cursed I’m that explain me let First.
2. The waiter at the cafe had lost track of the number of coffees and milkshakes consumed at table #17 “How many had coffee?” she asks. Nine put their hands up. “How many had milkshakes?” Nine put their hands up. “And how many had both?” Eight put their hands up. Now if seven had neither, how many people were there at table #17?
Sharma is a scriptwriter andformer editor of Science Today magazine.(mukul.mindsport@gmail.com)