I live dangerously

I feel so guilty for being sick I've decided to give you another post after less than a week. I'm so thoughtful. This one is rife with danger and intrigue but no intrigue really. And SAT questions. +/-

First the danger. My glove has become increasing tattered. This week things got real bad.


Being ever so safety conscious I ordered some new gloves. But alas, I immediately cut that thumb.


It's deeper than it looks, but my toughness kind of cancels it out. Thankfully the gloves arrived a couple days later before I could manage to remove the entire finger.


The one on the right is roughly three times cheaper so I'm going to try it out and see if it's more than 1/3 as safe.

I've updated the coming attractions with two new projects.

As for the dragon I received some encouraging words from Judy, a rare commentator. Victor had to jump in and ruin the good vibes, though.

There were also two more SAT questions. Mike is now 3 for 3 on these. He's like a really smart high school student trapped in a 27 year old who was eaten by an ogre. Here's number one and here's number two.

Answers below.

Six Cards

Answer: 2/15

To add up to three the first card can be 3 or less. This means 4 out of the 6. Whatever the first card is, there's only one card that will work for the second one to make them add up to 3. 1 out of the 5 remaining. So the chance the cards up to 3 is 4/6 * 1/5 or 2/15 or 13.33..%.


Geese

Answer: 280

We can say there were originally x geese. If 1/5 of them leave, that means 4/5 are left, so ater 1 pm there are (4/5)x geese. Then 1/8 leave, so 7/8 of those remain. Now there are (7/8)(4/5)x geese or (7/10)x geese. At 3 pm three times as many leave as at 1pm, so (3/5)x leave meaning there are now (7/10)x - (3/5)x geese, or (1/10)x geese. (1/10)x must equal 28, so x must be 280.

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.

Back and better than some previous state but perhaps there was some previous state that was still better than the current state

I'm still feeling lazy, so this is going to be short. Florida was fun. See more in the new Florida New Year's photos. I've removed the Eric Visit from public view, but it's available through the link on the right to you, my faithful viewers. As an added bonus I've put the original Florida trip back up there as well. You know, in case you are really super bored and want to see those again.

Ohio State lost the Fiesta Bowl, which puts a damper on the Brutus the Buckeye thing, but I don't really care. I think mostly Eric cares. He was, however, kind/bored enough to ask a question about frogs and stones and love and betrayal, but I accidentally erased it. Oops. That's all I got for now. Like I said, still feeling lazy.