I say $16. All of what you have above, and including the $4 the shoemaker gets to keep from the original change for the bad bill.

Orange you glad he didn't say banana?

Oh, no!!! I love BANANAS!

Rachmaninoff.

Gesundheit

Haggis.

There was no loss to the boy.

Well the boy is up a pair of shoes and six bucks, but down a fake tenner.
The neighbour is par - gave change for a fake tenner, but got a real tenner later on.
The shoemaker is therefore down by the same amount the boy is up - one pair boots, six bucks.

Ima go w/V, $16.

next nut

Give me as much as I have?

what is this i don't even

The man has 8 3/4 cents.

8.75 plus 8.75 equals 17.5 ; 17.5 minus 10 equals 7.5

7.5 plus 7.5 equals 15 ; 15 minus 10 equals 5

5 plus 5 equals 10 ; 10 minus 10 equals 0

I assume it means he started with 8.75c and the first store owner gives him 8.75c. He then spends 10c, leaving him with 7.5c, and so on.

Edit: Woops! BigV beat me.

Beat you? Bah. You are my colleague--footfootfoot is the designated beater in this thread.

I see you also corrected the 2 with a 7. :)

Well the maths works, but how does he have 8.75 cents?

????

three cent nickels, quarter eagles, all these nuts are cracked. Where is your suspension of disbelief???

I'm starting to suspect the person who wrote this book was both mental AND nuts.

might not have happened in US currency. I found a link to a quarter-cent minted in ... Fiji? somewhere...Malaysia Straits.

Zen gets this one. I misread the answer earlier.

Big V is right. I have no idea about how one gets 8 3/4 cents, but no less unlikely than finding a merchant who will give you matching funds to spend at his store. Let's assume the transactions were credit transactions on paper.




Scores so far:

Mental Nuts:
Rhianne = 1
HLJ = 2
Zen = 1
BigV =1

Wait, you're keeping score?

[/perks up]

(not really)

get busy!

Today's nut:

Farm A is worth $4,800 and farm B is worth $1,200.

Shirley, you jest.

Mental Nuts:
Rhianne = 1
HLJ = 2
Zen = 1
BigV =1
Glatt = 1

It was easy. I was doubting myself as I was punching numbers into the calculator because it was too easy.

There is a trap in the question - that we might mistake "one-half mile square" for half a square mile, when of course a square half a mile on each side is a quarter of a square mile.

Glatt was way too smart for that. Pfft.

ETA, For this New Years Eve, I'd like to meet a girl as easy as this puzzle. :)

They try to get you all confused with the illustration. I didn't fall for it, nosirree.

;)

But that's only $7.50 per acre! Now I have to figure out how to go back to 1921 to buy some land.

Be sure to take 1,000 3/4 cent pieces with you. :right:

eta: usually, if you can find that button, it's pretty easy from there.

Do I have to give back my trophy?

You got a trophy? I'm still waiting for the free circus ticket I was told I'd receive for getting the first one right.

But Rhianne, y'are at the circus, y'are! It's called "The Cellar" :lol:

There's no shortage of clowns, that's for sure!

Send in me, there's got to be me [/judycollins]

Here is nut # 10 which is more of an origami thing. I suppose for some people this sort of thing is a challenge.

I am also putting up #11, a proper mental nut.

And Rhianne, I forgot to mention shipping and handling and a 2.5% ticketmaster surcharge is not included in that free ticket.

I'm not sure I get the question, but I'll guess the answer is 128.

If the answer can be a fraction, then it should be 4.766.

That may be the answer to #10, but not #11.

I think the question is asking if you had a cube made of cubic blocks (the size is irrelevant as long as they are all the same size cubes) and you surrounded the cube with more of the same sized blocks, so that the same number of blocks were in the large cube as in the surrounding square, how many cubic blocks would you have?

I was thinking what number has a square root and a cube root that are both whole numbers. That's where I came up with 128.

If the square has to be touching the cube, the answer would be 4.766.

If the square could be much larger than the cube, than there could be many answers.

Edit: I'm re-thinking this.

Well that's not the answer either and I can't really figure out how they got the answer they did.

Okay, the stuff about pumpkin seeds is distraction.

I want to start by understanding the question. Here are some clear points for starters:

1. We take blocks of a regular size, 1x1x1.
2. We arrange some into a perfect cube.
3. We arrange others into a perfect square. *see post 105
4. The number of blocks used to make the cube must be equal to the number of blocks used to make the square.
5. Adding these numbers together is the final answer.
6. The cube must be able to fit inside the square.

Now for some less certain parts of the question:
7. There is exactly one correct answer.
8. This must be an integer.

Now for some assumptions which are not stipulated. The solution probably lies in challenging one or more of these:
9. The square must touch the cube at at least one point.
10. The square must abut the cube along all of the cube's faces.
11. The square is only one layer high.
12. The square is only one layer thick.
13. The square is on the same alignment as the cube.

Violating 10 makes it fairly easy. You could have a cube 4x4x4, having 64 blocks, and make a square 16 blocks each side around it, thus using 16x4 = 64 blocks, thus reaching HLJ's answer of 128. Or you could make the square double height, 8 blocks per side, and still use 64 blocks. *see post 105

This does not deliver a uniquely correct answer, since other combinatiosn work with this.
You could have a cube of 6x6x6 = 216 blocks, and a square 8 blocks per side and 6 blocks high (8x4)x6 =216 blocks.

Or a cube 100x100x100 = 1,000,000 and a square 250 long and 1,000 high (250x4)x1000 = 1,000,000.

If you reject 10 and 13 you can play around with Pythagorean triads, but I had a look and couldn't find anything promising.

What the hell kind of pumpkin has cubic seeds, anyway?

Perhaps this pumpkin math fact will help:

Do you know the ratio between a pumpkin's circumference and a pumpkin's radius?








PumpkinAttachment 36198

If we keep 10 but tinker with 3 and define a square as a line formed by one edge of a row of blocks, we get another option.

Think of a cube 4x4x4. Then wall this in with a ring 4 cubes on each side, i.e. leave the corners unfilled. Make the ring four blocks high. The square is the inside edge of the outer lines of blocks.

Attachment 36199

Then you think the total number of seeds is 16!?

Oh, no, 128, as you said earlier - that pic is a top view, the whole thing is 4 layers high. So there are 64 in the cube, 64 in the wall which defines the square.

I was just showing this could be made to work and still have the square touching the faces of the cube.

Yet FFF says this is not the answer. :eyebrow:

FFF, when people are done, please post the official answer and we can have another puzzle trying to figure out how they reached it.

I really should go do stuff. See all yall later.

Hmm, what if it were a square wall around it? i.e. a hollow cube?

For that matter does the cube have to be solid?

if the number were 16, you could make a cube by stacking 2x2x2 = 8, then a ring of 2,2,2,2 = 8

That's true, but that's not very many seeds for a prize-winning pumpkin.

yeah, well... The whole pumpkin with 1ft cubic seeds thing is a bit of a mind fuck anyway....

I mean.... Where the hell did they come up with that shit? They could have used hay bales or coal or...fuck...anything else.

My answer works, so I'm claiming victory for this one. Put me on the list of geniuses.

On second thoughts, yes.

Yeah, this.

The answer, mysteriously enough (they don't give an explanation) is 1024.

if 1024 is the answer,
then the answer is that the cube is 8x8x8 and the square around the cube is 8 layers deep on each side. And the corners are filled in. So each side ends up with 128 cubes.

I guess they wanted the sides to be as thick as the cube.

Today's nut without seminal obfuscation:

i wanna say 60 without doing any math or thinking about it at all.

It doesn't say the acres have to be square. So I assumed the fence is a circle, and was going to do the math with Area=pi*r(squared) and circumference=2*pi*r

But I decided to google it and found that HLJ is correct and they are talking about square plots.

I think we, the Cellar, have come up with several answers that meet the requirements as well as this.

A slightly simpler way to do the maths for this answer would be to imagine the 8x8x8 cube in the middle, then image 8 8x8 flat squares abuting each side and filling the corners. 8 sets of 64 = 512.

Hand back your genius card, sir!


The starting phrase "if one mile of fencing encloses 40 acres ... " fairly strongly implies square fields (although not necessarily).

Clear communication is not the strong point of our nut-setter.