You have 68 coins with different weights. How can you find both the lightest and the heaviest coins with 100 scale weighings?
1. Compare the coins in pairs and separate the light ones in one group and the heavy ones in another. (34 weighings)
2. Find the lightest coin in the first group of 34 coins. (33 weighings)
3. Find the heaviest coin in the second group of 34 coins. (33 weighings)
Pinkbird is trying to get to Redbird across the river. Where should we place the bridge, so that the path between the two birds becomes as short as possible?
Remark: The bridge is exactly as long as the river is wide, and must be placed straight across it. Additionally, it has some positive width.
Notice that no matter how the bridge gets placed over the river, the shortest path would be to go to its top left corner, then traverse it diagonally, then go from its bottom right corner to Redbird. The second part of the way has fixed length, so we must minimize the first part plus the third part. In order to do that, imagine we place the bridge, so that its top left corner is at the current position of Pinkbird – point A. If the bottom right corner ends up at point C, then we must connect C with the position of Redbird – point B, and wherever the line intersects the bottom shore – point D, that will be the best place for the bottom right corner of the bridge.
You are sitting in a motionless car, which is tightly sealed, i.e. no open windows, holes in the car, etc. A helium balloon on a string is tied to the floor. If you start accelerating the car, is the balloon going to move back, forward, or stay in place?
The reason the balloon floats up in the air is that the helium has a lower density, so when gravity pulls the denser air around down, the balloon gets pushed up. Similarly, when the car accelerates, the air around gets drawn to the back of the car, which makes the helium balloon go forward.
Who says science jokes are not funny? Below you can see some of the best Philosophy jokes we know, along with short explanations to the more obscure of them.
Do you know any funny Philosophy jokes yourself? Let us know in the comment section below.
Descartes goes into a bar, sits down, and orders a beer. He finishes his beer, and the bartender says, “Descartes, would you like another?” Descartes responds, “I think not” and POOF! he disappears.
Explanation
The most famous quote of Descartes is “I think; therefore I am.”
“How did the solipsist break up with his girlfriend?”
“It’s not you, it’s me.”
Explanation
Every solipsist believes that they are the only one who is known to exist.
The dean asks the head of the physics department to see him.
“Why are you using so many resources? All those labs and experiments and whatnot; this is getting expensive! Why can’t you be more like mathematicians – they only need pens, paper, and a trash bin. Or philosophers – they only need pens and paper!”
“What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?”
Explanation
The sentence itself is a cross between a joke and a rhetorical question.
A Buddhist monk walks up to a hot dog vendor and says “Make me one with everything”.
The hot dog vendor hands over the sausage and bun with all the trimmings, and the Buddhist hands over a twenty. The vendor pockets it. The Buddhist asks “Where’s my change?” and the vendor replies “change must come from within”.
A gun then extends from the Buddhist’s chest and he asks again. The vendor says “Whoa, man, where did that come from?” The Buddhist replies “This is my inner piece”.
“What was Nietzsche’s day job?”
“Post-man…”
Two behaviorists are having sex. When they have finished, one turns to the other and says, “That was good for you. Was it good for me?”
“How did Kant manage to write The Critique of Pure Reason?”
“He made the time.”
Zeno walks halfway into a bar…
The masochist said to the sadist “hurt me”, but the sadist said “no”.
Can you cut Sam Loyd’s gingerbread dog into two identical pieces?
The solution is shown below.
Enter the maze from the bottom and exit through the top. Turn right at every right square, turn left at every blue square, and go straight through every yellow square.
The solution is shown below.
Ben has a wall clock in his room, but he didn’t wind it one day, so it stopped working. Later that day he left his house, walked to his best friend’s place, who has his own, always precise clock, stayed there for a while, then walked back home. When he arrived, he went to his wall clock and adjusted it to show the correct time. How did Ben do it, if he didn’t see any other clocks during the day, except for the one at his best friend’s place?
Before Ben left his place, he winded his clock. When he went to his friend’s place, he noted for how long he stayed there, say X, and at what time he left, say Y. After Ben got back home, he looked at his own wall clock and calculated the time he was outside, say Z. Then he concluded that the time he was walking was Z – X in total, and therefore it took him (Z – X)/2 time to get from his friend’s place to his own house. He added Y (the time he left his friend’s place) and got Y + (Z – X)/2, the correct time.
White to move and mate in 1.
Remark: There is only one correct answer.
The answer is Qa3#.
A princess is living in a palace which has 17 bedrooms, arranged in a line. There is a door between
You knock on doors:
2, 3,…, 15, 16, 16, 15,…, 3, 2.
This adds up to a total of 30 days exactly. If during the first 15 days you don’t find the princess, this means that every time you were knocking on an even door, she was in an odd room, and vice versa. Now it is easy to see that in the next 15 days you can’t miss her.
XKCD is one of the most successful comics online of all time. Marketed as a “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language”, it manages to poke fun at all of these in various highly creative ways. Due to its numerous STEM references, XKCD is appreciated especially by geek communities. You can see one of our favorite strips below, a clever joke about classic chess puzzles.
To get to the XKCD website, simply click the image below.
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