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Post by Rob Allen on Jul 19, 2017 10:58:26 GMT -5
Yeah, this is a tough one. Take Ray's suggestion - imagine the digits written on four slips of paper, and play around with the papers.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Jul 19, 2017 13:36:38 GMT -5
7 squared equals 49 (you have to turn the 6 around).
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Post by berkley on Jul 19, 2017 19:37:28 GMT -5
Nice!
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Post by Rob Allen on Jul 20, 2017 0:54:48 GMT -5
RR has figured out how they think.
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Crimebuster
CCF Podcast Guru
Making comics!
Posts: 3,958 
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Post by Crimebuster on Jul 20, 2017 11:55:25 GMT -5
Hm, that kind of seems like cheating to me! I think this would work fine as a visual puzzle, but as a written puzzle, it feels... wrong.
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Post by Rob Allen on Jul 20, 2017 12:47:15 GMT -5
Well, what you read here is a transcript of a radio show. It was designed for your ears, not your eyes.
And their puzzles often involve "cheating"! Any solution that they don't explicitly eliminate is fair game.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Jul 21, 2017 6:59:42 GMT -5
And their puzzles often involve "cheating"! Any solution that they don't explicitly eliminate is fair game. I was annoyed at first, but once you accept they can cheat it just becomes par for course. It's like a crossword puzzle where a definition reads "At the end of a novel" (four letters) and the answer is "ovel". |
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Post by Rob Allen on Jul 26, 2017 16:59:32 GMT -5
Here's the official answer:
RAY: Here’s how you solve it. Let's say you moved the numbers around, and so instead of saying 76 equals 24, what if you changed it to read, 72 equals 46.
TOM: That doesn't work.
RAY: What if you turn the 6 upside down, so you have 72 equals 49?
TOM: That doesn't work, either.
RAY: But 72 equals 49 has promise because if you slide that two up, then you get seven squared, and seven squared equals 49.
TOM: Excellent.
And this week's Puzzler is an automotive one:
RAY: This was sent in by a fellow named Morris Maduro. Here it is:
My friend Bob used to drive a VW Beetle. It was an old one, from the '60s. One day when he came into work a few minutes late, I asked him what was going on. He said that his battery died. I asked, "So you got a lift in?"
He said, "No, I didn't."
"Well, did you get a boost from a friend?"
"Nope."
"Did you get a new battery?"
"Nope, the dead one is still in the car, under the seat." Which is where VW had placed the battery in the Bugs from that era.
"Did you at least lift the seat?" I asked.
He said, "That's the same question my girlfriend always asks me! No, I didn't lift the seat."
"Did you push start it?"
"No," he said. "You know I park the car in a garage at the bottom of a hill."
"Gee, Bob, it sounds like you willed it to start! Did you even pop the rear hood?"
"No, but I did open the front hood."
"Are you trying to trick me? I know the engine's in the back on a Beetle. "
The question is, what did Bob do?
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Post by Rob Allen on Aug 2, 2017 16:25:42 GMT -5
Here's what Bob did:
RAY: Here’s the answer. When Bob opened the hood, he found a pair of coveralls, a spare tire, and a jack. He got into the car, and turned the ignition key to the "on" position. There was no point to turn it to "crank," because the battery was what? Dead.
He pumped the gas a couple of times, like you would do in one of those old cars to prime the carburetor.
He then jacked up one of the rear wheels, which are the wheels that receive power from this engine. He put the transmission in gear; probably -- I'm guessing -- third gear. If you put it in fourth gear the engine would turn too slowly. If you put it in first, it would be too hard to turn the engine.
What he simply did was turn that tire that was elevated off the ground by hand with the transmission in gear.
He begins to turn the wheel really fast. Once it began to turn, the engine actually started up and ran and that wheel began to turn on its own.
The reason the other wheel didn't turn is because there's a differential, which will only send power to the wheel with the least amount of resistance.
Finally, of course, he would get into the car, take it out of gear, get out and lower the jack down, and if he was lucky he would drive to work without stalling.
And this week's Puzzler is one where it looks at first like there isn't enough information:
RAY: Tommy, Dougie and I are sitting around the office one day at Car Talk Plaza. We were noticing how dingy the place looked. We'd been there 15 years, and the place had never been painted. So, we decided to paint Car Talk Plaza.
We didn't know which team of us was going to do it, so we sat down and decided to do a little math. We determined that Tommy and I together could paint the entire Car Talk plaza in 10 days. After all, we had a lot of painting experience as kids, having painted Dad's car a couple of times with brushes.
Dougie and I could do it in 15 days. And, if Doug and Tom worked together, they could do it in 30 days.
The question is how long would it take each of us, painting by ourselves, to paint the whole of Car Talk Plaza?
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Post by berkley on Aug 3, 2017 17:42:06 GMT -5
This doesn't sound right to me but it seems that Ray can do it in 15 days by himself, Tom can do it in 30 days by himself, and Doug can't do anything at all and makes no contribution.
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Post by Dizzy D on Aug 7, 2017 1:22:50 GMT -5
This doesn't sound right to me but it seems that Ray can do it in 15 days by himself, Tom can do it in 30 days by himself, and Doug can't do anything at all and makes no contribution. I've written it out and I come to the same conclusion: These are the assumptions I made: The building is made of A(ll) walls, each wall is equally large and will take the same amount of time to paint. (No reason this has to be so, but it allows us to make everything into a nice formula) Ray paints R walls/day Tom paints T walls/day Doug paints D walls/day We can see that R>T>D from the times taken. I also assume that no matter how useless Doug is, he won't make matters worse for anybody he's working with, so D can't be negative. So 10days at R and 10 days at T is enough to paint all walls 10R+10T=A Likewise 15R+15D=A and 30T+30D=A So 10R+10T=30T+30D (30 days of Tom and Doug working is equal to 10 days of Ray and Tom working) 10R=20T+30D Simplifying it: R=2T+3D We also know that 15R+15D=30T+30D 15R=30T+15D Simplifying it: R=2T+D So 2T+3D=2T+D So 3D=D The only way this can be true if D is zero. If D is 0, then Ray works at 30 walls/day and Tom works at 15 walls/day 10 days of R and T gives 450 walls 15 days of R gives 450 walls 30 days of T gives 450 walls. |
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Post by Rob Allen on Aug 7, 2017 11:37:37 GMT -5
You're both right! Ray uses a different way to calculate it:
RAY: Dougie's not going to like this answer at all.
Let T represent the amount of the place that Tommy can paint in a day, let R represent the amount I could paint in a day, and D will represent the amount Dougie could paint in a day.
So, we come up with the following little equation. T plus R equals one over ten. We'll change that one over ten to three over thirty. You'll find why in a second.
TOM: Where did you get T plus R equals one over ten?
RAY: That's the amount of work that you could do in one day plus the amount of work that I could do in one day. It equals one tenth, because we could together paint Car Talk Plaza in ten days. By the same token D plus R; that is, Dougie and I working together, could paint Car Talk Plaza in 15 days.
TOM: So D plus R equals one over 15.
RAY: Right. Now, take the second equation and change all the signs so it's minus D, minus R equals minus one fifteenth.
TOM: Then you add that to the first equation, right?
RAY: Right. And, you'll notice, when you do that, the R's fall out, and you get the following equation: T minus D equals one over thirty. But here's what's interesting. I said T plus D equals one thirtieth. We have a problem here.
TOM: It looks like D equals zero.
RAY: So Doug contributes nothing. What else is new?
And the new Puzzler:
This came from a fellow named Josh Kokendolfer, who says it's a true story.
It was a brisk December morning. A coworker and I had a simple job to do that day: clean out a job site and take the trash to the local landfill. And we had an F-350 pickup that was outfitted with a dump-truck bed. We filled it up and headed out. When we arrived at the landfill we pulled the truck onto the scale that weighed our vehicle and the woman in the office waved us through.
We unloaded and headed back out to the scale. Once again our truck was weighed. Before getting into the truck I noticed that one of the back tires was low. I decided to stop at one of the local gas stations to check it out and fill all the tires just in case.
After lunch we loaded the truck a second time at the site and headed back to the landfill.
Everything went just like the first time. After we were weighed on exiting, I went to pay the bill. My co-worker looked at the paperwork and noticed something strange.
The first time we left we weighed 6,480 lbs. And the second time we exited we weighed 6,440 lbs - a difference of 40 lbs. We were being charged for an extra 40 pounds of trash that we didn't have.
I immediately complained to the office manager. She said, "There's nothing wrong with our scales." Well, if that's the case, what happened?
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Post by Rob Allen on Aug 14, 2017 10:43:45 GMT -5
Turns out that the air in the tire was a red herring, or "obfuscation" as Ray calls it.
The official answer:
The reason the truck weighed 40 pounds less is that it had burned 40 pounds of gas, or about six gallons.
And the new Puzzler is about words, not cars.
RAY: Here's a list of words. What do they have in common?
"Deft," as in he made a deft move. "First," he came in first. "Calmness," he was overcome by calmness. "Canopy," a canopy covered the boat so he wouldn't get wet. "Laughing," it was no laughing matter. "Stupid," needs no further explanation. "Crab cake," as in, "My brother made me crab cakes for dinner and I ate a bottle of antacid when I got home." And "hijack," I was hoping that our producer's flight would be hijacked to Bora Bora.
The question is, what do these words have in common?
I see it; does anyone else?
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Post by Jeddak on Aug 14, 2017 16:55:41 GMT -5
And the new Puzzler is about words, not cars. RAY: Here's a list of words. What do they have in common? "Deft," as in he made a deft move. "First," he came in first. "Calmness," he was overcome by calmness. "Canopy," a canopy covered the boat so he wouldn't get wet. "Laughing," it was no laughing matter. "Stupid," needs no further explanation. "Crab cake," as in, "My brother made me crab cakes for dinner and I ate a bottle of antacid when I got home." And "hijack," I was hoping that our producer's flight would be hijacked to Bora Bora. The question is, what do these words have in common? I see it; does anyone else? They each have a group of three consecutive letters in alphabetical order. Deft - d e f. First - r s t. Calmness - l m n. And so on. |
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Post by Rob Allen on Aug 23, 2017 13:53:25 GMT -5
outsider wins this week!
RAY: Here's the answer. What all of these words (deft, first, calmness, canopy, laughing, stupid, crab cake, hijack) have in common is they all contain three consecutive letters of the alphabet.
TOM: Oh.
RAY: N-O-P in canopy. G-H-I in laughing. S-T-U in stupid. A-B-C in crab cake.
And the new Puzzler:
RAY: Potatoes are 99 percent water and one percent what? Potato. So say you take a bunch of potatoes, like 100 pounds of potatoes and you set them out on your back porch to dry out.
TOM: Yeah, when they are dry they should weigh about a pound.
RAY: Well, we’re not drying out completely. And as the potatoes dry out the water begins to evaporate. And after a while, enough water has evaporated so that they are now 98 percent water. If you were to weigh those potatoes at that moment...
TOM: They'd be lighter.
RAY: Yes, how much lighter? That's the question. Now you can solve this puzzler algebraically, and if you don't solve it algebraically, you are going to get the wrong answer.
TOM: Really?
RAY: Really.What's your answer, off the top of your head?
TOM: 99 pounds.
RAY: You are wrong.
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