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September 25, 2006
If you had to choose to give up one sense, which one would it be? But I’m really asking so I can ask Part 2: If you had to deprive all humans of one sense, which one would it be? Why? [Tags: puzzles]
September 24, 2006
This episode of DOEP is yet another excuse for me to be dumb in public. This time, it’s about rivers.
Why does the mighty Mississippi roar? I’m pretty sure it’s not because of that powerful north-to-south gravity that’s so obvious on globes. Well, at least on globes that, in a fit of blatant hemispheric jingoism, put the north on top. Let me generalize: Why do rivers have currents? And if it’s because they come from melted snow rushing down mountains, then why are there rivers in the summer? And how do you explain the Amazon? Or the Nile? Or the Konkapot? Where’s all that water coming from and why is it in such a hurry to get somewhere? Why doesn’t it stop to smell the flowers, Mr. Businessman?
So, to summarize: Why didn’t I take freshman geography?
[Tags: doep puzzle rivers geography]
September 13, 2006
In English, chopping a tree down is not the opposite of chopping it up. Throwing in the towel is not the opposite of throwing out the towel. Taking someone in is not the opposite of taking someone out. Throwing a sandwich down is not the opposite of throwing it up.
What are other examples of opposite prepositions used in non-opposite ways? [Tags: doep puzzle]
September 12, 2006
Sound is a wave moving through a medium, right? So, if air is the medium, if there’s a breeze, why doesn’t that totally fry the sound? How can we hear anything in a breeze except the breeze?
(Technically, this isn’t a puzzle so much as me being stupid in public. So, what else is new?) [Tags: doep puzzle quiz]
September 11, 2006
Name some things that can be seen and photographed from the front but that have no top down view and no view from the back.
For extra credit: Of the three available spatial dimensions (string theorists need not apply), how many would you say that thing occupies?
My suggested answers are in the comments. And yours? [Tags: doep puzzle quiz]
September 9, 2006
Imagine a cube 2 meters square on every side. Imagine all six inner surfaces are lined with high quality mirrors, with no seams. Imagine that in the center of the room there is a small light bulb of the 60W variety. There is a tiny light sensor that leads to a meter on the oustide. The light is on. Now flick it off.
What happens inside the cube?
a. It goes dark as quickly as when you turn off the light in a sealed closet.
b. It goes dark imperceptibly slower than in the sealed closet.
c. It stays lit surprisingly long.
d. If the mirrors were perfect and you took out the sensor and made the light source invisible, you’d have a perpetual source of light, except that it would be completely sealed and thus of less use than a whale oil lamp.
e. Something else happens. [Tags: quiz puzzle doep physics]
September 8, 2006
Say a city decides to put its public bus stops on the sides of the intersection immediately after the traffic lights rather than immediately before the lights. Will this:
a. Decrease the overall transit time from one side of the city to another
b. Increase the overall transit time
c. Have no consistent effect on overall transit time
d. Go away you boring git
(Note: I’m not claiming to have an answer to this.) [Tags: puzzle quiz doep]
June 4, 2006
Bruce Willis is set to make a fourth Die Hard movie, in which his character, John McCainMcClane comes out of retirement “to battle terrorists intent on using the internet to spread their attacks.” According to Entertainment iAfrica, the original script was titled Die Hard 4.0, but Willis nixed the pix’s title.
The previous Die Hards were titled: Die Hard, Die Hard 2: Die Harder, and Die Hard with a Vengeance. So, what would be a good title for the fourth Die Hard given that it has the Internet as its villain? For example:
Die Hard on the Internets
Die Hard 404
Die Hard: Packet Wars
Die Hard: Vista
And what tough guy line might McClane utter in a signature sort of way? E.g.,
Something tells me the Net’s no longer neutral.
Time to live? Ten seconds, you son of a bitch.
I’m going to tear you a new open source.
Markets are conversations…and I speak fluent Bullet.
Cathedral? Bazaar? It all makes the same beautiful, beautiful rubble.
[Tags: movies contest bruce_willis]
May 25, 2006
The print-only journal for crazed logophiles, WordWays, has a new issue out. In it are such delights as:
Jeff Grant updates the explanations of some of the words in his 10×10 word square, which includes the “word” “Alan Browne,” an American Bank consultant listed in the 1988-89 Who’s Who in America. Sorry, Jeff, it still seems like cheating to me.
Eric Chaikin finds a sentence in Entertainment Weekly that inadvertently contains all the letters of the alphabet in just 61 letters. Thank goodness for Joaquin Phoenix!
Anil invents anacrograms: “Take the initial letter of each word in a common phrase, saying or longer quote, rearrange them and form a word or phrase that summarises or relates to it.” He calculates the fequencies of first letters in Dickens, Melville, Twain and Ian Watson.
Mike Keith reports on the results of a program he wrote to arrange the 100 tiles in Scrabble into four 5×5 double word squares (i.e., different words going across and down), using only words accepted in Scrabble. In twenty hours, his computer found 121.
Rex Gooch invents and finds antidextrous words, i.e., a word whose first half contains letters only from the second half of the alphabet, and whose second half contains letters only from the first half. E.g., unsuppliable, unoutspeakable, pronunciable, and sunnyside egg. Examples of ambidextrous words include bladder-snout and ambidextrous itself.
Jeremy Morse analyzes the frequency with which letters are not included in the 25,000 crosswords run in the London Daily Telegraph since 1925.
A Ross Eckler, the editor, has a fun piece on books about words we need or words we don’t need. “Blurb” comes from a 1914 book on words we need. “Ucalegon” — “a neighbor whose house is on fire” — is a word from Webster’s Second Unabridged that we could probably replace with “Hey, get out of your freaking house! It’s on fire!”
WordWays so needs to be a blog! [Tags: wordways linguistics puzzles]
May 16, 2006
Undoubtedly because everything I brought with me, including the inside of a toothpaste tube, got soaked last night as I walked the few blocks from the train station to the Syndicate conference, I woke up this morning with a punny headline in my freshly-rinsed brain. Your job is to come up with a news item for which it would be appropriate:
As always, the prize consists of winning. [Tags: puzzles syndicate]
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