I must confess that recently I got the distinct impression that my friend Dipankar who is a nuclear physicist was goofing off. Like I mean instead of mucking around with Higgs particles and other vector bosons that go quark at night as one would imagine physicists should be deeply delving into, he and some of his colleagues got far more involved of an afternoon with a glass of water and a cork.
Rallying around that tumbler they filled it half full of water first and immediately proceeded to float a cork in the middle. They found that it would invariably migrate to any one edge of the glass, stick to the wallside, and stay there. On the other hand, when they filled the water right up to the brim and then some and floated that same cork back on, no migration took place. It just hung around there plumb dead in the middle. In fact, if the cork was deliberately placed towards one edge, it hurried back to the centre.
Now I’m no great physics dude but I still considered things like surface tension, convex and concave meniscuses, Brownian movement, hydrostatic forces and a host of other beauties of fluid dynamics and still came up zilch. But guess what -- here’s the real snorter: when I asked my friend to spill it he said he had no idea why but he and his colleagues were working on it. So does anyone want to out physics a physicist?
THROUGHPUT
Nobody got the answer to the problem where a monster’s prowling around the perimeter of a circular pond while you’re in the middle. The monster can move at four times the speed at which you can swim, but if you can reach the shore before it can, you can escape. So how do you do it?
Solution: Swim straight towards the shore along a radial path up to a distance of 1/4th times the pond’s radius. Then swim along the circumference of an imaginary circle concentric with the pond until you’re exactly opposite the monster. You can achieve this since you have a higher angular velocity. Once opposite the monster, swim for the nearest point on the shore. You will get there first because you have to travel less than 1/4th of the distance which the monster has to travel.
(The other problem was: “What’s the smallest number which has to be added to 69241811 to make it a palindrome?”)
Reversing the first four digits and subtracting the last four, ie, 4296 - 1811, we get 2485. 69241811 + 2485 = 69244296. -- Kishore Rao, kishoremrao@hotmail.com
2485 is the smallest number that has to be added to 69241811 to make it a palindrome. (The sum is 69244296.) -- Srinivasa Rao G, sagh49@yahoo.com
Of the four numbers that make 69241811 a palindrome 2485 is the smallest (sum: 69244296). The other numbers are 1002396 (sum: 70244207); 11202597 (sum: 80444408) and 21703098 (sum: 90944909). -- Hemalatha T, hemalatha1956@gmail.com
The smallest number to be added to 69241811 to make it a palindrome is 1149. This will give 069242960 (provided a zero can be added at the beginning!). -- Indira Vaseekhar, youmaycontactme@yahoo.com
Technically, all single digit numbers are palindromes. Therefore the smallest number that must be added to 69421811 so that it becomes a palindrome is - 69421811 because the sum is 0. The next one would be - 6942 1810. If addition of negative numbers is not contemplated, the smallest would be 2485. -- Rajagopalan K T, ktremail@gmail.com
One possible answer is 69241811 + 3.296 = 69241814.296. So the answer is 3.296 if you consider decimals (and why shouldn’t you?) -- Altaf Ahmed, ctrlaltaf@yahoo.in
(Among the first five who jumped on to the 2485 bandwagon are: Bitu Nayak, 2998b2nayak2998@gmail.com; Ramesh Kumar, rameshkumarthayyil@gmail.com; Nomita Ravi, ravinomita@yahoo.com; Sujit Kumar, sujit.iitr@gmail.com; Dhruv Narayan, dhruv510@gmail.com. However, read on . . .)
BUT GOOGLE THIS NOW
1. The original problem was: “What’s the smallest number which has to be added to 69241811 to make it a palindrome?” So what if the answer is actually 4. How?
2. The letters forming COLD can each be shifted forward three positions in the alphabet to form FROG. Similarly BALK can be turned into ONYX by shifting them 13 positions ahead. How rapidly can you work backwards from the following 10 words to determine what words were started with: (1) BEEFS; (2) INGOT; (3) LORRY; (4) SORRY; (5) FREUD; (6) FERNS; (7) JOLLY; (8) TOFFS; (9) TIFFS; (10) TIGER.
— Sharma is a scriptwriter and former editor of Science Today magazine.(mukul.mindsport@gmail.com)