Lord Larehip

To help get the brain cells firing. No trick questions but they require a bit of thought.

Problem 1: A man saves his kingdom from disaster and is brought before the king to be rewarded. The king says, “Name your reward, my good man, and I shall grant it.” The man walks over to the king’s chessboard and places a single grain of rice on a corner square. He then says, “If you would, sire, double the amount on each succeeding square so that the second square shall have two grains and the third shall have four grains and the fourth shall have eight and so on until all the squares are filled in.” The king says, “Consider it done!”

Did the king make a wise decision? How much rice will the king require to fulfill the request?

Problem 2: Two witches are mixing a brew in a cauldron when the recipe calls for exactly 4 pints of yak sweat. They have a bucketful of yak sweat but no 4-pint measure. They have a pitcher that holds exactly 5 pints and a pot that holds exactly 3.

How can they use these to measure out the required 4 pints?

Problem 3: Millie and Geraldine are tending their flowers. One vase holds 5-petal primroses and 8-petal celandines. Millie counts all the petals and says, “Thirty-nine! Exactly my age!” Then she counts the flowers and says, “Exactly your age, Geraldine!”

How old is Geraldine?

Problem 4: Which 2-digit number is one more than a square and one less than a cube?

Problem 5: Which 3-digit number is made of consecutive digits and is two less than a cube but two more than a square?

Neapolitan

Senario 1
There is no correct answers. He never said that the rice had to stay on the previous square and continue to add more to the next, leaving out that stipulation the king could re-gift the rice for the next square. And he also never gave instructions to move up in file after the first rank was completed, so it could 256 or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616. If you think it should be the latter only a court gesture would would think it's feasible to fulfill such a capricious and ridiculous request. The king would be ill advice to make such a decision, that is like 35 quadrillion kg of rice.

Senario 2
Say if he does get to keep all the rice from the first square and then proceed to the second etc since he also didn't say in the attempt for fulfilling the request he also keeps all the excessive rice rolled off the chessboard. He is lucky to take home a few pounds of rice. He would never reach 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 grains of rice, at some point the chessboard would reach the maximum amount of rice that could be held and any addition rice would roll off the pile rice amassed atop the chessboard. When you even consider that last square to be filled you would know that it could no way support 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 grains of rice. And furthermore you very well know it is also impossible to carry home 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 grains of rice on a chessboard.

Senario 3
The king should ask the man to hold the chessboard as the king's courtesan fill it with rice, by until which time in the middle of fulfillment of said request he would be buried alive in a mountain of rice. The king having thus deposed of the menace would have enough to feed his entire kingdom for years to come. So yeah I think the king should take this guy on and show him a lesson on how not to be greedy.

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Frownland

Fill the pitcher and pot halfway. 1.5 in the pot plus 2.5 in the pitcher equals 4 pints.

6 years old. 3 5 petal flowers is fifteen plus 3 8 petal flowers (24 petals) amounts to 39 so there are 6 flowers.

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Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

Lord Larehip

1. Two fathers and two sons sat down to eat eggs for breakfast. They ate exactly three eggs, and yet each person had an egg. How?

2. How can you add eight 8's to get the number 1,000? (only use addition)

Lord Larehip

Four men--Mr. W, Mr. X, Mr. Y and Mr. Z--are stranded on a deserted island. They decide to each make a camp at the north, south, east and west sides of the island for greatest chance of sighting a ship. The eastern side of the island has a lagoon.

Mr. Z camps in the south. Mr. W's camp is adjacent to Mr. Y's camp. Mr. X is not camped by the lagoon but across from Mr. W. Which occupies the north, east and western sides of the island?

Lord Larehip

We take so many things for granted and never really think about them. Well, now we will. So WITHOUT consulting ANY outside sources--no books, websites, magazines, TV programs, etc.--explain the following:

1. Why is the sky blue?

2. Why can we see through a transparent piece of glass?

3. Water boils at 212 degrees F or 100 degrees C at sea level. If we continue to heat it, it will flash to steam but it won't get any hotter. So what happens to the heat?

4. How does an air conditioner cool your house?

Remember: No looking to ANY external sources for an answer. Think you know a lot? Prove it--to yourself.

Clue: 3 and 4 actually work on the same natural principle.

Burning Down

1) White light from the Sun is made up of every colour of the rainbow. As it travels through the air, air particles and moisture act as a prism, dividing the light. Light travels in wavelengths, and blue has the shortest wavelength. Therefore, it travels faster and as a result, spreads out more quickly.

2) Because glass is an amorphous solid and does not absorb the wavelengths that make up the visible light spectrum. It also has something to do with the way the atoms are arranged, but I'm not sure how to explain that.

3) Not sure.

4) Typical home air conditioners work the same way as a refrigerator. Freon or some other coolant gas is sucked into a compressor, and under high pressure it gets hot (ever wonder why the back of your fridge is hot? This is why). As the coolant moves through the compressor coils, it gets forced through tiny openings. Coolant gas evaporates at quite a low temperature, so when as it evaporates it absorbs the heat from the air being cycled into the unit. The heat dissipates through a heat sink and goes outside, while the cooled air is vented back into the room.

djchameleon

Mr. Y is North

Mr. W is east

Mr. X is west.

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Fame, fortune, power, titties. People say these are the most crucial things in life, but you can have a pocket full o' gold and it doesn't mean sh*t if you don't have someone to share that gold with. Seems simple. Yet it's an important lesson to learn. Even lone wolves run in packs sometimes.

Lord Larehip

At and near the zenith, the light from the sun encounters molecules of atmospheric gas--mostly nitrogen and oxygen. These interact with the higher frequency light of which blue is the only one that shows up enough to be seen. The particles absorb the blue light and begin to radiate it in all directions, scattering it about so we see the sky as blue. The blue light doesn't travel faster than the red, orange or yellow, they are all moving at the same speed but tiny particles of atmospheric gas don't interact with them.

The horizon is white even with the bluest sky because there is more air for the light to travel though. The blue light gets scattered and re-scattered many times and recombines with the other light of the prism to produce white again. The sun looks yellow but is really white but with all that blue being scattered around, we see it as yellow.

The sun is red at sunrise and sunset because the light has to pass through more atmosphere which scatter short frequencies too much to be seen but the red is longer and so gets though. Also there are more dust particles in the air nearer the earth's surface which scatters longer frequency light like red and orange.

All these beautiful colors we see in the sky--the blue, the yellow, the red--is all an optical illusion.

Lord Larehip

When we boil water at sea level, the temperature is 212F (100C) no matter how much heat energy (measured in BTUs) we may add. The water will flash to steam but the steam will remain 212F. We could put 9000 BTUs of heat in but the temp stays the same. But when we condense the steam, those BTUs will be released and we can and do measure it. This is called LHV or latent heat of vaporization.

Air conditioning works on the same principle. The refrigerant has a very low boiling point and flashes to gas during which it can absorb huge amounts of heat energy in the evaporator without heating up. It then travels to the compressor to be compressed into a high pressure gas so that when it moves to the condenser, it will immediately lose pressure and flash to a liquid state giving up all those BTUs. The blower fan will then blow this heat outside. The condensate will then travel to a thermal expansion valve to be metered back into the evaporator again to maintain the same temperature in the compartment that is being cooled.