Speaking of fruits (which we weren’t I know but will be in a moment below) there’s this guy who buys 100 kgs of berries for 2.00 bucks per kg and expects to double his investment by selling them at 4.00 bucks per kg. Not bad, no? But alas and woe to him unbeknownst, he manages to vend off only 50 kgs of said fruit on the first day and the remainder goes on the next day. Yet . . . wait for it.
The fresh berries had a 99 percent water content but because he was operating in the middle of the Thar desert where he was planning on cashing his millions they dehydrated and thereafter had only 98 percent water. Like, what profit did he make ultimately?
THROUGHPUT
(The dicey problem was: “Think of a planet that’s 10 light years away and has a large mirror pointed at Earth. If you look at that mirror with a giant telescope could you see into the past?”)
If we put up a mirror right now in 2018 the light from Earth would take 10 years to reach it. It would take another 10 years for it to reach back to Earth. That’s 20 years. So one would be able to see the state of Earth at 2018 only 20 years after -- in 2038. -- Reuben Thomas, reubenmammensunil@gmail.com
Yes, theoretically, this is possible as the light reflected from Earth reaches the planet after ten years and it takes another ten years for the image to get transmitted to earth. So in effect, we would be seeing 20 years back into the past assuming there is no loss of signal. -- A V Ramana Rao, raoavr@gmail.com;
With that setup theoretically we must see into the past that is 20 light years back. But this needs the following: (1) A cladding like a giant cylinder between Earth and the planet to prevent diffusion and scattering of light like in fibre optic. Otherwise most of the light will be lost in travel. (2) No other light interference in between. Otherwise filtering the reflected light from mix of many light sources will be impossible. -- Raghavendra Rao Hebbani, rao.raghavendrah@gmail.com
However, because of the years that light takes to reach us, there is no way we can see anything from that mirror that happened less than ten years ago. In other words, what was reflected ten years ago is the latest “news” we can get from that mirror. Thus, in a way, the usage of the word “past” is rather relative. -- Balagopalan Nair K, balagopalannair@gmail.com
(The other one submitted by Dr P Gnanaseharan, gnanam.chithrabanu@gmail.com about the prices of fruits turned out to be ridiculously rubbishable. I’m so tired of looking at the number 18 so many times for so many days of yotta-second responses that I’m inclined to sue myself for assault and battery.)
First, assemble the stated clue as: (a + b)*(b + c) = 77. There are only two factors for 77, viz 7 and 11. Next, recast the question as: (a + b ) + (b + c) = ? So the answer is 18, regardless of the value of a, b, or c. (Why is it called an Oxford comma though?) – B ‘Nary’ Narayanaswamy, mail2nary@gmail.com (Hey B’N’N, I don’t know if you’ve been living under a stone or what but there’s this thing called a Wikipedia and it has a “Serial Comma” entry. -- MS)
(Among the first 10 trillion who also got it right are: Sushree Sulava, micky120795@gmail.com; Purushothaman Chandrathil, purushothamanchandrathil1969@gmail.com; Ramesh Kumar T, rameshkumarthayyil@gmail.com; Ravichan Ramadurai, raviramad@gmail.com; Rajagopalan K T, ktremail@gmail.com; Praveen Nayak, praveen16176@gmail.com; Hemalatha T, hemalatha1956@gmail.com; Aravind Suresh, aravind.suresh@hotmail.com; Saraswathy Venkatachalam, saraswathymaths@gmail.com; Damodar Shettigar, dshettigarsiddakatte@gmail.com and, yes, Shashi Shekher Thakur, shashishekher@yahoo.com, you too. In addition to blessing me. – MS)
BUT GOOGLE THIS NOW
(1) Methuselah : Balthazar :: 6 : ?
(2) A hundred coins are lying in front of you. Ten of them are heads, the rest are tails. You’re blind, deaf, tasteless, olfactorily challenged, without a sense of touch and even mute. Meaning, you don’t know Jack about the state of the coins. Maybe you have ESP but that’s all. Your problem is to split the coins into two piles so that there’s the same number of heads-up coins in each pile.
Sharma is a scriptwriter and former editor of Science Today magazine.
(mukul.mindsport@gmail.com)