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Post by Roquefort Raider on Jun 16, 2017 11:48:44 GMT -5
The Tesla. Oh, wait, he said it was a jalopy... So the Henney Kilowatt. (But I think Prince Hal is right... must be a British car). |
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Post by Rob Allen on Jun 23, 2017 15:17:48 GMT -5
Well, we were wrong.
Answer:
RAY: It wasn't his sleek black beauty because that was what? In the crusher.
It wasn't his MGTD because you need three arms to drive that.
It was his '63 Dodge Dart because it had a push button shifter located on the left side of the dashboard.
TOM: All you had to do was press a button, and you'd be in drive. Press another button, and you would be in either reverse or park, and that's all you needed. Matt was able to get to work, earn some money and stay out of the poor house.
Sure, we all remember the '63 Dart....
Anyway, this week's Puzzler:
RAY: I'm going to have winter tires put on my car. I bought four of them. I'm moving soon, and since I'll be taking the car to a different shop to have them changed back next spring, the tires have to be marked so they can be put back where they belong, i.e., where they came from. So the left front has to go the left front, the right front has to go there, and so on.
When I take them off, I'm going to ask the people at the gas station to mark them with letters.
The question is, what's the smallest number of letters needed to mark my tires to guarantee that all four of them can get correctly installed with no chance of error or ambiguity in the spring?
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Post by Rob Allen on Jun 27, 2017 13:14:49 GMT -5
And the answer is:
RAY: The answer is two. Two letters and each is used twice. The two letters are L and F.
Here's how the tires would be marked. By the way, you could do this different ways, and you could use different letters, but this works.
The left front tire would be marked LF. The other front tire would simply be marked F.
The left rear tire would just be marked L.
TOM: And the fourth tire, which is the right rear, wouldn't be marked at all.
And the new Puzzler:
RAY: Picture this scene: A family dinner with the extended Magliozzi clan. Lots of people, lots of food, and of course, lots of noise. Suddenly above the cacophony, my usually quiet wife made herself heard.
'Check this out!' she shouted. 'My knife and fork are stuck to each other, kind of like they are magnetized.' Well, sure enough the knife was indeed magnetized. In fact, it was such a strong magnet, she was able to pick up my entire set of keys with that knife. (She had dropped my keys into the soup, but that's another story altogether.)
Then one of the boys figured out that his knife was magnetized too, but the polarity was the reverse of hers. We all puzzled over this phenomenon for a while, until my niece offered an explanation. When we checked out her theory, we discovered that she was right. What was her theory?
Here's the hint: We stuck Tommy with the check that day!
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Post by berkley on Jun 27, 2017 18:44:18 GMT -5
I'm probably remembering this wrong, but I vaguely recall seeing it demonstrated somewhere that certain metals can be magnetised by repeatedly stroking them in one direction, which apparently moves the electrons so that they're all "facing" the same direction in each molecule, so that positive and negative magnetic poles are present. However it works, maybe this is what happened to the knife in the story.
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Post by Prince Hal on Jun 27, 2017 21:55:13 GMT -5
I'm probably remembering this wrong, but I vaguely recall seeing it demonstrated somewhere that certain metals can be magnetised by repeatedly stroking them in one direction, which apparently moves the electrons so that they're all "facing" the same direction in each molecule, so that positive and negative magnetic poles are present. However it works, maybe this is what happened to the knife in the story. Maybe this is where you heard about this? ;D  |
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Post by Rob Allen on Jul 3, 2017 14:36:22 GMT -5
The answer:
RAY: Remember the hint? We stuck Tommy with the check because... we were out to dinner.
TOM: Ah.
RAY: It wasn't a family dinner at home, we were at a restaurant. And restaurants have such large losses of silverware, that they throw into their trash receptacle an enormous magnet so that when silverware is mistakenly thrown into the trash can, the forks, spoons and knives all get stuck to this magnet, and if it's on there long enough it gets pretty magnetized.
TOM: Wow.
RAY: So that's how it happened. So the next time you're at a restaurant you can do a little parlor trick. Find a utensil that's magnetized, and you can pick up somebody's keys and drop their keys in their soup.
And the new Puzzler:
RAY: This is for the kids out on summer school vacation so they can keep their little brains sharp. I didn't want to make it too difficult because, after all, summer is a time to renew, regenerate, relax, relearn, relate and all those "re-" things. This came from Lou Gottlieb.
Everyone knows what an omelet is, right? An omelet is made with scrambled eggs that are only scrambled in the bowl and not scrambled in the pan. An omelet is folded over.
I was at a restaurant the other day, and there was a sign that said, "All of our omelets were made with three eggs." And I looked at the menu and realized that there was maybe a puzzler here.
The first three omelets were:
Cheese omelets: 7-dollars-45-cents;
Bacon omelet: 7-dollars-70-cents;
Bacon and cheese omelet: 8-dollars-45-cents.
The question is: what's the plain omelet cost? (Just the eggs, no bacon, no cheese).
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Crimebuster
CCF Podcast Guru
Making comics!
Posts: 3,958 
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Post by Crimebuster on Jul 4, 2017 20:09:37 GMT -5
$6.70
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Jul 5, 2017 8:03:51 GMT -5
Mrs Grundy's way:
X + cheese = 7,45
X + bacon = 7,70
X + cheese + bacon = 8,45
(X + Cheese + bacon) - (X + bacon) = 8,45 - 7,70
(X + Cheese + bacon) - (X + bacon) = 0,75
If cheese is 75 cents, then the straight omelet is 7,45 - 0,75 or $6.70
Dilton's's way:
"One can arrive at the same result faster by considering that if it's a dollar more to add bacon to the cheese, then bacon is one dollar and the omelet must be one dollar less than $7.70, or $6.70".
Mr. Lodge's way :
"This is preposterous! There is obviously no sales tax involved!"
Jughead's way:
"Put it on my tab, Pop!"
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Post by Rob Allen on Jul 10, 2017 14:57:43 GMT -5
Ray chose the Dilton method:
RAY: Here's the answer to the delicious puzzler. You could write an equation and say X equals the eggs, and X plus B plus C equals $8.45. But just think about it for a second...
TOM: Oh, that was the missing piece, I had to think about it?!
RAY: If the cheese omelet is $7.45, and the bacon and cheese omelet is $8.45, then the bacon must cost a dollar.
TOM: Yeah.
RAY: So if the bacon omelet is $7.70 and we know that the bacon costs a dollar, then subtract $1 and you get $6.70 for an egg omelet.
TOM: See, if I had thought of it for a minute, I still wouldn't have figured it out!
And the new Puzzler:
RAY: "It took place in the early 1970's, during the first gas crunch, when there were long lines at gas stations, and Toyotas started looking really good to people who owned Detroit gas guzzlers. My friend Maryann lived in a rural neighborhood in upstate New York, and someone was sneaking around late at night in the inky shadows, siphoning gasoline, while the honest people were asleep. Maryann and the sheriff got together and hatched a plan to catch the thief. It involved using Maryann's car, and its full tank of gasoline as the bait.
Unlike many of her neighbors, Maryann did not own a locking gas cap, so her tank was very siphonable. The idea wasn't to catch the thief with a secret alarm, hidden cameras, or anything like that. They would catch the thief just by allowing him to siphon the gas and take it home for use in his own car.
The thief did strike and siphon her gas, and it was the end of the gas thefts.
The question is, what trap did they lay, and what was it about Maryann's car that made it easy to figure out who the gas thief was?
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Crimebuster
CCF Podcast Guru
Making comics!
Posts: 3,958
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Post by Crimebuster on Jul 10, 2017 16:03:45 GMT -5
Was her car diesel?
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Post by Rob Allen on Jul 10, 2017 16:29:19 GMT -5
No, but you're on the right track.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Jul 10, 2017 18:27:35 GMT -5
A Trabant with its two-stroke engine that required a half gas, half oil mix?
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Post by Rob Allen on Jul 10, 2017 18:33:36 GMT -5
Not a Trabant, but otherwise accurate.
(I remember this Puzzler from the last time they used it)
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Post by Rob Allen on Jul 18, 2017 11:43:37 GMT -5
The answer:
Mary Ann's car was a Saab. And from 1959, I think, to 1969, Saab made a two-stroke engine. When the gas thief put the mixture of gas and oil from that car into his Chevy or whatever he drove, the trail of smoke he left behind allowed the sheriff to follow him right home, and arrest him.
There are a lot more Saabs in the US than Trabants.
This week's Puzzler:
RAY: This puzzler is mathematical -- and it's also nice, easy and short. Get out a pencil and write down the following equation: 76 = 24. It's obviously incorrect.
Now, I want you to correct this equation so that it makes sense, by moving the four digits around. You got four digits here, 7, 6, 2, and 4, but you can't introduce any new signs -- plus sign, minus, division, so on. You got an equal sign and that's it. Imagine that the four digits are written on four slips of paper. Do what you want with them and make the equation make sense.
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Post by berkley on Jul 19, 2017 0:03:59 GMT -5
So far, all I can think of is that 7 times 6 is 42, if we're somehow allowed to write 6 <space> 7 to mean the product of those two numbers. I don't think I've ever seen that notation used, though. Of course you can write xy to mean the product of x and y, but I've never seen it with numbers, where you usually use some operator like X or a dot to indicate multiplication.
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