By the way, and a propos of nothing much, who knows the answer to this Lewis Carroll riddle?

A stick I found that weighed two pound;
I sawed it up one day
In pieces eight of equal weight!
How much did each piece weigh?

(Everybody says "a quarter of a pound", which is wrong.)

charmed by riddle
things that rhyme are intriguing
i do not know the answer

Would it be half a pound?

So each piece weighed eight ounces. In other words he actually cut it into 4 pieces each being eight of equal weight.

Ingenious, but wrong!

He was wrong!? What on earth kind of Beelzelbubian riddle is this man!!?!?!

the Prime Directive

Kirk has beamed to the surface of a planet resembling Sun Valley, Idaho in order to follow the Prime Directive and check out the local babes. As they stroll past a sheer rock wall, he and Spock notice a party of Klingons engaged in bungee-jumping. Spock observes that a Klingon hanging at rest in his harness causes the cord to stretch by 70 bryans. "Fascinating, Captain," declares the Vulcan half-breed, "we can predict his oscillation period at jump-time."



[PS at first I wasnt sure it was the sawdust but
if I understand Paul correctly it was after all,
so since I answered that riddle I am offering another. Don't look in the mock metric thread because that has the answer down around post #44.]

After subtracting the weight of the sawdust, each piece weighs slightly less than 4 ounces.

*Singapore red light district*

Kirk has gone to Singapore because one of the houses there is famous all over the universe. While visiting the house on previous occasions, Mozart's librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte invented an anti-gravity machine and installed it in one of the rooms. On entering this room, Kirk and Spock discover everyone floating upwards and jumping in slow bounds off the ceiling as if in very gentle upwards gravity, actually a product of the earth's rotation. What is the upwards acceleration produced by this false gravity?


*Spock computes the mass of the earth in dogs*

Kirk is visiting a famous house of entertainment in Singapore. Spock is waiting for him in a charmingly decorated parlor and, to pass the time, decides to calculate the mass of the earth. The universal gravitational constant is a millionth and the radius of the earth is 394 million bones. Real local gravity, he can tell, is 1.766 bone per square snicker (because apparent gravity is 1.76 and there is a correction of 0.006 due to the centrifugal effect of rotation.) What does he calculate for the earth's mass?

Lawrence of Arabia is riding his camel swiftly across the desert. At the moment he is being pursued by Turks who are angry because Lawrence has placed a charge of dynamite in the culvert beneath the tracks and damaged their locomotive.

With nothing to do except evade the Turks, Lawrence recalls the beautiful sight of a wheel from the locomotive sailing 100 bryans up into the blue desert sky and idly wonders the speed with which it emerged from the explosion.

(Answer to be calcualated in bones per snicker.)

The Baroness Blixen (who wrote her stories under the man's name of Isak Dinesen) had a farm in Kenya at the foot of the Ngong Hills ("The Equator runs through these hills, a hundred miles to the north," she says at the begining of her book.) In September at the time of the coffee harvest, the Baroness and her friend Denys Finch-Hatton used to watch the sun set.

Denys (played by Robert Redford) observed that the sun took 237 snickers to set from the first moment it touched the horizon till the last sliver of the orange disk disappeared. For him a hundred snickers was a "Taoist minute" (slightly shorter than a conventional minute but based on an universal interval of time), so that sunset took 2.37 minutes and, as he happened to know, the earth took 255 minutes to turn a radian. Finch-Hatton, who liked flying a wood-and-canvas biplane and going on camping trips, reasoned from this that our distance from the sun was 215 times the sun's radius.

One night the Baroness dreamed that she stood on a surface that shone 215^2 times more brightly than she had ever seen land illuminated even with the sun directly over head. She knew then that she was standing on the sun.

How did Finch-Hatton deduce the distance to the sun by timing a sunset?

Leonard: I can see where you're going with this problem, of course, but it's bad physics. The antigravity device must work by flattening the local space-time curvature within the room's frame of reference - wherever that curvature comes from. So everyone would be completely weightless.

Also, I think you mean 1000 snickers to the taoist minute. Another of those order of magnitude errors - and further evidence of why auxiliary units are best related by factors other than powers of ten. This is just a suggestion, mind, but perhaps you might want to make the taoist minute a mystical 1111 snickers, ("the fourfold unity"), which would make it almost exactly equal to a solar minute and even closer to a sidereal minute.

Another nitpick. The brightness of the Sun's surface (if indeed it had a surface whose burning bliss the dreaming Baroness could both stand and stand on) is more than 215x215 times that of even the equator at noon, because not all the sunlight is reflected off the land. The albedo is less than unity. A flat snowfield on the equator at noon would come close, but there aren't too many of those.

oh ye powers of ten! right,
I said hundred and meant thousand

as for Lorenzo da Ponte the inventor
of a machine that locally turns off the
earth's gravity so that you can feel the
centrifugal effect of its rotation, he
eventually emigrated to New York where for
a time he had a vegetable store. I do not
know what to do about him since relativity
allows the libretto of Don Giovanni to
exist while denying the possibility of
his invention.

still before 7 AM here. will try to reply
more clearly later

Finch-Hatton had a gold pocket-watch that measured time in kilosnickers (a thousand snickers, roughly one minute in duration) and one evening he found that the sun took 2.37 kilosnickers to set, from the first moment it touched the horizon till the last sliver of orange disk disappeared.

The Baroness's friend knew that the earth took 255 minutes to turn a radian, and from this, Finch-Hatton, who liked flying a wood-and-canvas biplane and going on camping trips, reasoned from this that our distance from the sun was 215 times the sun's radius.

[[PARAGRAPH TO REPLACE: Denys (played by Robert Redford) observed that the sun took 237 snickers to set from the first moment it touched the horizon till the last sliver of the orange disk disappeared. For him a hundred snickers was a "Taoist minute" (slightly shorter than a conventional minute but based on an universal interval of time), so that sunset took 2.37 minutes and, as he happened to know, the earth took 255 minutes to turn a radian. Finch-Hatton, who liked flying a wood-and-canvas biplane and going on camping trips, reasoned from this that our distance from the sun was 215 times the sun's radius.]]

THIS GETS RID OF "Taoist minute" and the mention of Robert Redford and introduces the business-like term
"kilosnicker". Are we on the right track with this one?

having trouble waking up today, one careless
error after another

i want to say minute. 2.37 minutes to set and
255 minutes to turn a radian

but those minutes are 90% of ordinary ones
they are the thousand snicker kind. can't think
what to do.

the idea is to have two alternate systems to
compare with metric. one is pound-inch which
uses traditional base units (except for trice)
and makes freshman physics easier

the other is Bryan's semi-natural which has
a pretty nice list of fundamental constants
appear as powers of thousand

both systems are looking good except that i
bark my shins on the minute-sized time interval.
with 1/18.55 the ordinary minute is exactly 1113.
maybe I should just say that a minute is exactly
1113 snickers (making it the ordinary usual one) and
then use minutes.

then the data in this problem: 2.13 for sunset and 229 for radian turn. ratio is 107.5 and so gives 1/215 for
angular size of sun's radius.

Any chance of someone answering the original riddle?

Actually, the solution is quite lame (from my Lewis Carroll book) :

In Shylock's bargain for the flesh was found
No mention of the blood that flowed around:
So when the stick was sawed in eight,
The sawdust lost diminished from the weight.

Cheers,
Ralf

SteveH: The solution was given a couple of days ago.

Ralf: The solution isn't "lame". It's real. In sawing wood there truly is a significant loss of weight and length. Forget that and your carpentry won't fit. I had just such a problem once when I ordered glass shelves from a specialist company; they arrived undersized because the company had forgotten to take account of the glass ground off. I had to insert a strip of hardboard down the the side to make them fit and the company had to knock a tenner off the price.

I'm trully half asleep.

Ralf you say "in my Lewis Carroll book"
Where?

I have this "The complete collection of Lewis Carroll" book that has all stories in it (Alice in Wonderland, Sylvie and Bruno etc.) and also all riddles with their solutions.

The reason why I said the solution is kinda "lame" is that it depends on the implementation. Yes, of course you lose material when sawing, but so you do by merely touching it. It comes down to personal evaluation if you consider the effect negligible or not, which makes his solution arbitrary and in my view, "lame".

Ralf

You only think it lame because you prefer to live in a fantasy world in which everything is tidy. You refuse to face up to the messiness of measurement in real life, so continue to promote compulsory implementation of a system you like to believe is logical, but which actually is messy too. It MATTERS that sawing wood loses material. It MATTERS that no single measurement scheme is suited to all purposes.

Many other riddles and much additional Lewis Carroll material is available online at:
http://home.earthlink.net/~lfdean/carroll/tangled/

Thanks for your interesting assessment of my psychology, Paul.
I don't "refuse" anything, but I clearly separate the theoretical concept of a system of measurement from its real world application.

>It MATTERS that sawing wood loses material

Consider this "riddle":

"Somebody is throwing a ball at a 45 degree angle with a velocity of 14.142m/s. How far away is the ball hitting the ground again ? (everybody says 20.38m, but it's wrong)"

So, you dig out your shool physics, calculate and come up with : 20.38m ! And you think :"Wow, what wicked twist didn't I think of ?"

The solution: It's not 20.38m because there's always air friction.
How lame of a solution to the "riddle" is that ?

When you pose a riddle, you assume perfect conditions and not a "Well, you didn't take into account that the bus driver takes a 5 minute cigarette break".

Ralf
P.S.: I really value Lewis Carroll highly for his stories, his "riddles" I don't like at all though.

BTW, what kind of strange "specialist" company is it that doesn't take the width of their blade into account?
They will probably go out of business quite soon...

Ralf

I think you are just in a bad temper
because metric gets shown up as an
inconvenient system in the physics examples,
with its awkward-sized units and their
stilted pretentious-sounding names.

When we do comparisons using pound-inch or
the bryan units the working is easier and
there is less gigananomicromilli-business.
So I can see how you would get irritated.

But that was a nice little riddle-poem and
the answer is simply "quarter pound less an'
eighth of the sawdust" whatever the size of
the blade is. The main thing is that the verse
is catch. One you can recall after one hearing!

A stick I found that weighed two pound
I sawed it up one day
In pieces eight of equal weight
How much did each piece weigh?

I didn't try to memorize it, it just stayed in
mind after I first saw it a few days ago.
No big deal but can anybody, Ralf or otherwise,
make up a rhyming riddle that simple and memorable
these days?

Can a disgruntled bedbug properly be said to have
a psychology present company excluded?

What kind of specialist company? Probably one that tried to convert to metric...

Your "riddle" is no riddle at all, but a dynamics problem, in which the suggestion that "everyone says 20.38m" is simply absurd. In posing or answering such a problem you should make clear what simplifying assumptions are being made, such as the absence of air resistance, a particular value for the acceleration due to gravity and the ball's being thrown up onto a plateau at the same level as its release.

But when one tries to solve a riddle or puzzle one should always be prepared to think laterally, taking into account ANYTHING that might affect the situation, from verbal tricks to unnoticed truths, whether deep or mundane, about the world. SELA.

>In posing or answering such a problem you should make
>clear what simplifying assumptions are being made

Well, I guess Mr. Carroll should have stated then that the width of the blade is not negligible...

>What kind of specialist company? Probably one that
>tried to convert to metric...

Wow, the metric system makes you forget your blade ?
I never realized the hallucigenic power of the metric system. If you'll excuse me, I'm off measuring things in metric...

Ralf

Can't you grasp the difference between a physics problem and a puzzle or riddle?

Yes, I do, but in this case it comes down to the same thing.

Ralf

No you don't because it doesn't.

Some people seem to have difficulty understanding the distinction, so for clarification here is one of each, all on a similar subject.

The Riddle:

He hurled a stone into the blue,
For three whole seconds did it climb,
Now tell me how, for it is true,
It failed to reach his hand in time.

The Puzzle:

Jim was very clever at throwing stones. He could throw further than anyone he knew and he never made a mistake. Bob timed how long Jim's stone stayed in the air and declared that he therefore knew just how far the stone had travelled. But he was wrong. How did Bob calculate the distance, and why was he wrong?

The Problem:

A man standing on level ground throws a stone into the air at an angle of 45º to the horizontal. The stone reaches the peak of its trajectory after one second. Assuming that he releases the stone at a height of 2m above the ground and neglecting air resistance, calculate the horizontal distance travelled by the stone before it hits the ground.

I think you don't want to understand what my point is.
It doesn't make a difference if it is a "riddle", a "puzzle" or a "problem", the reason why I didn't like the solution is because it is one of a myriad of possible solutions.
Once you start accounting for material loss due to the sawing, there is a wealth of other things that you could use as a solution, changing the game from "figuring out" to "guessing which one".

He could also have weighed the pieces at a different place than the whole piece, couldn't he ?(after all, pound is the equivalent of Newton, so that will change at different places)

Ralf

The solution to a riddle is what is clearly true once you understand the riddle. It would indeed be a "lame" answer if it relied upon a mere contingency that could as easily have been otherwise. Such as that it was raining to start with and the sun came out and dried the planks and also the barometric pressure went up so the weight decreased. Answers like that are ones that lateral thinking should bring up - but which should be rejected as THE answer because they are entirely contingent on matters not mentioned in the riddle. The fact that there is loss of weight on sawing is however NOT a mere contingency but an inevitability, and a significant one. So Carroll's answer is a good one.

I suspect that the reason you don't like Carroll's riddles and puzzles is that you still haven't grasped the point of them (which may indeed be more suited to the Anglo-Saxon than the Teutonic mind). Or perhaps they're just too difficult for you?

>you still haven't grasped the point of them (which
>may indeed be more suited to the Anglo-Saxon than the
>Teutonic mind). Or perhaps they're just too difficult
>for you?

Man, sorry to say that, but you're so full of it...

Ralf

Full of wisdom, you mean? You're absolutely right.

He hurled a stone into the blue,
For three whole seconds did it climb,
Now tell me how, for it is true,
It failed to reach his hand in time.


really clever actually: "the blue"
is an easy-to-miss reminder that he
hurled it up into the AIR
and when you throw things straight up in air the
resistance makes them take longer to come
down than to go up

so it took 3 seconds to reach the top of
trajectory but did not make it back
down (to be caught by him) in that same time

it is neat when a riddle contains an inconspicuous
hint or clue (like the air sky is blue and
if you assume no air the sky is black) which
you might only notice after you had guessed
the answer and then the clue serves to confirm
that the guess is right choice among competing
explanations.

does anyone else here do London Times cryptic crosswords
I do the Harpers which are similar

I would like more simple physics riddle rhymes
like that one. Thanks PB.

<Leonard: when you throw things straight up in air the
resistance makes them take longer to come
down than to go up>

Dick: This poster does not seem to be around any more. No one challenged his assertion. Is he correct? It does not make sense to me.