Monday, January 19, 2009

What? Oh, this thing. Right.

No, I didn't stop doing this thing. I was sick last week and also working a lot. As a result, I can come up with more excuses. I really was sick, though. But I'm back now!!! +/-

Also, there's not really much to report. Not anything interesting anyway. I'm working on the dragon. I'm feeling good about it. Like it might be really awesome. After some direction from Mike and response from me I think I have the design nailed down. Uh, give me a sec while I see if there was anything interesting since last time.

Ok, there were a couple riddlish puzzles and an SAT question. First riddle here. Eric cheated and used Excel, and I don't think anyone else tried it.

Here's the second one featuring everyone's favorite band, U2, and everone's favorite constructed tool, a bridge. Mike had a unique solution.

Finally, the first of six SAT questions I copied from real tests while sitting around for an hour after someone cancelled the other day.

So here's answers for those three.


Cows, Geese, and Chicken

The answer is 3 cows, 31 geese, and 56 chickens. There are probably a lot of ways to do this, but I just used a system of two equations.

cows + geese + chicken = 100
15*cows + 1*geese + .25*chicken = 100

Substituting and solving for cows gives

cows = (3/56) * chicken

Since it doesn't make sense to have fractional animals, and there can't be more than 100 of any animal, chicken must be 56, so cows must be 3 and geese must be 31.


U2 and the Bridge of DOOOOOOOM

Bono and Edge cross first, taking 2 minutes. Bono returns, taking 1 minute. He gives the flashlight to Adam and Larry, who then cross, taking 10 minutes. Edge takes the flashlight and goes back across, taking 2 minutes. He comes back with Bono, taking another 2 minutes for a total of 17. You can switch Bono and Edge throughout this and still do it in 17 minutes.


Triangle of DOOOOOOM

First consider a right triangle with the two legs being 6 and 7. This has area 21, so obviously 21 is an answer. Any other configuration results in a smaller area, so 24 is impossible, but 13 is obtainable.

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