....that’s the plain truth!
So you’ve been flying from Artishoken to Bakustrade and it’s been a great four hours of pleasant music, inflight movies and nice airconditioning without clear air turbulence or wind shear to make you clutch your internal organs from spilling 35 thousand feet below. But when you land in Bakustrade for a half hour wait to pick up an seriously consequential VVIP who’s just stubbed his foot on a blade of grass and has had to be taken to Intensive Metacarpal Care Unit.
Meaning you’re delayed by two more hours.
Meaning you have no choice but to wait inside because they won’t let you out due to security reasons. The first thing you notice after the first ten minutes is that it’s getting warm. Then warmer. Till you’re like sitting in a sauna. And no, they haven’t switched the ac off. In other words, what is it about an airliner’s ac that makes it work so trashily on the ground but perfectly in flight?
THROUGHPUT
(The problem was: a number people seated around a table. A plate of spaghetti starts at the head. The person takes some and passes it to his/her right or left. Thereafter each person does the same thing. Diners who have already received the plate can also simply pass it on. When all are done, it stops being passed.. What are the chances of being the last to be served, as a function of position?
I think this points to a counter intuitive conclusion that all diners, other than the head, have the same probability of being served last. It doesn’t matter how far a diner is from the head. This is because for a diner to be the last, the plate must come to the person at the right or left; then it must travel all the way back to the person at the other side of the diner.
The first is true for all non-head diners and the problem is 1. Given the first condition, the second one will happen as the movement doesn’t depend on where it starts. So, all non-head diners will have equal probability of 1/(n - 1). For 10 diners, the answer is 1/9. -- Saishankar Swaminathan, saishankar482@gmail.com
This is the same as the following well-known problem: You are the chairperson of a committee that has n members (including yourself). You want to hand over the chairpersonship to one of the other members, and you want to do so randomly in such a way that each of the other (n - 1) members are equally likely to be the next chair. Unfortunately, all you have is a single fair coin. So the committee sits around a round table. You flip the coin. If it comes up heads, you pass it to the person on your right, and if it comes up tails, you hand it to your left. The person who receives the coin repeats the procedure. This goes until till only one member has the coin. This person is then declared the new chairperson. In the present case, it is the person to receive the spaghetti dish last. -- Leena Jolie, jolieleena1949@gmail.com
(The second problem was about solving a friend’s password hint. It goes like this: “(6) Goals Marcos; (3) Goals Cahil; (2) Goals Cesar; (5) Goals Hazard; (3) Goals Willian; (8) Goals Jorginho; (1) Goal Charley; (4) Goals Barkley.”)
The password is SHERLOCK. There are eight clues for each, one for each letter. The number before the first clue, that is 6, denotes the position of the letter in the name (6th letter in Marcos is ‘S’); and so on. -- Saifuddin S F Khomosi, DubaiYour question is much, much, below your usual standard. (So are a majority of readers sometimes as you can make out from last week’s puzzle. -- MS.)
Out of the two words, let us ignore the first word for the time being, as it is common to all the 7 sets. (1) Take the 6th letter in the second word “Marcos”: S. (2) Take the 3rd letter in “Cahil”: H. And so on until (8) Take the 4th letter in “Barkley”: K. Grouping all of them,we get SHERLOCK. -- Seshagiri Row Karry, srkarry@yahoo.com
BUT GOOGLE THIS NOW
Firstly you have no idea whether your ceiling fan runs clockwise or anti, right? (Yes you can come back from the switch and carry on reading now.) The answer is, in India and in most countries that have warm summers the blade runs anti. Then comes winter and we don’t use the fan anymore. What you also don’t know is that most fan technicians can make it turn clockwise too. And that if you did that in chilly January at a slow speed it would actually feel comfortable. Why?
Sharma is a scriptwriter and former editor of Science Today magazine.(mukul.mindsport@gmail.com)