Saw this in an outdoorsman book - never tried it myself. The author claimed that you can turn eyeglasses into a magnifying glass by filling in the near side with urine. And then use them to start a fire.

There was an infinite amount of people to each fill every of the infinite number of rooms.

or in mathspeak - there was a one to one relationship established between two infinite sets.

Maybe I'm not seeing the concept exactly, but math was never my thing. I know that infinity plus one is still infinity, so they are still a one-to-one ratio even if you add another person...

I guess the problem is that if the VIP customer were to say, try every door until he found the first unoccupied room, he'd be trying doors into infinity, never finding the vacant room. So you'd have to do something like tell all the other guest to move up one room, and the VIP could take the first room, since it's occupant just moved up one. Since there are infinite rooms, every guest would have a room to to move up to.

If that's not the answer, then I'll have to think about it a bit longer.

For someone that claims math is not his thing, you explained the answer very well.

We started off with...

ROOM 1 matching up with PERSON 1
ROOM 2 matching up with PERSON 2
ROOM N matching up with PERSON N
ROOM N+1 matching up with PERSON N+1

and we went to...

Room 2 matching up with person 1
Room 3 matching up with person 2
Room N matching up with person N+1
Room N+1 matching up with person N+2

which leaves us room 1 free for somebody else.

Okay, I'll quit with the math, regular riddles are usually more fun anyway.

the "do you pee in the shower" thread comes to mind:D

Apparently it's good for jellyfish stings, as well.

and athlete's foot.....but only if you're one of those who pee in the shower.

With the light switch problem, I thought of entering the room once and substituting the bulbs with coloured ones then observing the individual glows under the door but then again there was a strong point made about the door being shut so I guess nothing is meant to be seen with the door closed.
The real answer is much better anyway. Can't wait to test the folks at work with all these.

Wow ... newspeak!

(I think she's saying that what had been identified as an error is actually correct, needs to be re-added and routed to the quality service to-do list.)

There are three men dead in a cabin.

The cabin is surrounded by snow.

There is a hole in the roof of the cabin.

How did the men die?

they fell out of a plane and landed on the cabin?

I was thinking small meteor.

That would be meteorite... heheh. And I was thinking the same thing when I read it last night, but it doesn't seem like an interesting enough answer to be correct. Now, if the riddle said "The cabin is surrounded by snow which is unmarked with any bootprints besides those of the three men," then I'd be pretty confident on the meterite answer. As it is, I'm not sure.

Maybe an airplane crash? The "cabin" is the cabin of the plane, and it crashed in snowy mountains or something?

[quote]Originally posted by hot_pastrami
[b]
There are three light bulbs in a room with no windows, and a closed door. In front of you are three on-off switches. You know that each switch controls one of the light bulbs inside the room, but you don't know which switch matches which bulb, and they are not wired in any particular order.

Your job is to match each switch to it's bulb. You may only enter the room once, and you may not leave the door open. How do you accomplish your task?


Since the riddle doesn't say you're not inside the room, can't you just flip the switches one by one?

Did I say meteor?

I meant huge jass chunk of ice


:eek:

I'm late to this thread. So, firstly, lumberjim you bastard you poisoned the order of my thoughts. I was surprised by how difficult it was to discipline my mind to actually think that one through without going through it like the question did. That was cool.

PEMDAS: The P is for Parentheses, the E is for Exponents.

With the ping-pong ball question, my immediate first thought was: "water!". When I heard that the room had no resources, I resorted to urine. The practical uses of urine that I know are: when dragging sleds with metal skates (I can't remember the proper word here) through snow, pee on the skates. I believe that the goal is to form a regular coating of ice. Urine is also a sterilizer, so you can use it to clean clothes, assuming that you have something to cover the smell. The Romans used bay leaves for this purpose.

My cheating solution to the three light bulbs question would be to watch the light under the door; but that is probably eliminated by the question.

"I have two ends, I have two rings, and a nail through the middle" -- I've been trying to figure out what this one is for the past week, rather halfheartedly.

As for the guys in the cabin, one possibility is that the hole is the chimney. They entered the cabin during the snowstorm, started a fire, and that either poisoned them, burned the cabin, or they froze to death. A simple possibility is that during the snowstorm, the roof caved in. However, I like the airplane answer better.

Aware of the baleful weather predicted by forecasters, we decided the _____ would be the best place for our company picnic.

(A) roof
(B) cafeteria
(C) beach
(D) park
(E) lake

A double eight domino - the eight dots on each side are in in a circular pattern, and there is a spinner in the middle that is basically a nail with a rounded head.

The one thing that doesn't quite perfectly match is that the dots are in a square, but then again a boxing ring is square...

I'm guessing cafeteria... as far as I know, "baleful" means "ominously cloudy" when referring to weather...

There is a common English word that is nine letters long. Each time you remove a letter from it, it still remains an English word - from nine letters right down to a single letter. What is the original word, and what are the words that it becomes after removing one letter at a time?

I am the beginning of eternity
The end of time and space
The beginning of every end,
And the end of every place.


what am I?

Baleful means "gloomy" but if you didn't know that --

(this is an SAT question BTW)

(D) Park - Nicer than a roof, you don't have to deal with the sand of a beach, and forecasters are always wrong.

Answer is B

Explanation of why the question is culturally biased:

http://www.nationalreview.com/commen...0401210937.asp

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that HP is one of the smartest motherfuckers on here.
hey, alan, what'd you get on that emode iq test?

Whoa! Thank you mouse! I had thought it had something to do with your old project (you know, the one you one an award for).

Don't be fooled, I'm not as smart as I like people to think I am.

I hadn't seen any link to an emode IQ test, but a Google search brought me this, so I'm guessing that's the one. Cellar searches for "emode" and "iq test" didn't reveal the thread where the test must have popped up.

I should mention that I think IQ tests are worth their weight in dead slugs, if even that. They are a vain attempt to scientifically measure the scientifically unmeasurable (say THAT ten times fast (Hell, say it ONE time fast (Shit, I'm three levels deep in parenthetical staements!))).
That last bit is awfully goddamned cryptic.

well you must be right, cuz i got a 135......and i'm also, coincidentally, worth my weight in dead slugs. ( that's a lot of slugs, btw)

and that might even be without considering the graphs which show the dramatic increase in average IQ scores over the past 100 years.

(edit: toned down... hehehe)

hey, gotta a link to those graphs? what's the explanatoin for it? better education? diet? information technology?

It's called the Flynn Effect.

I think that class and rising standards of living + education might be part of it; but I don't really know.

http://www.sciam.com/media/inline/00...EF21_arch3.gif

Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

Linked to in Wikipedia:
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/FLYNNEFF.html

SciAm article:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?art...mber=2&catID=2

An explanation attempt:
http://www.fairtest.org/examarts/Winter%2001-02/IQ.html

A humorous religious correlation:
http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/001527.html?entry=1527

What a fantastic coincidence that this is posted in a thread of Riddles!

this bit is interesting:
no wonder all my teachers were such idiots.

and i can look forward to dealing with a bunch of smart-ass kids.

HP rocks ... he got the cabin one ... "The plane crashed" is the answer.

No - but this should be discussed in a different thread.


I met my sister Jenny on London Bridge; I broke her neck and drank her blood and left her out to dry.

140:rolleyes:

I posed this question to my roommate.

His quick response was: "That'd be really easy! You rig up a servo and attach it to a computer and program it to turn the lights on one by one. It turns on one light at the beginning, at ten seconds it turns on a second light, and at twenty seconds it turns on the third light."

Riddle me this: what is his occupation?

Is Jenny a wierd name for a liquor?

I'm still trying to figure out the sister part, maybe its some silly British colloquialism or something.

wow. i think that makes you a genius.

I'm a "facts curator". Interestingly enough the score is lower than what I got in 6th grade when I was tested by a psychologist. Don't know if that's due to differences in the test, or me--not that I'll lie awake worrying about it. (I also am not very convinced of the value of such tests.)

Look forward to??? I don't know about you, but I'm already there! :cool:

I'm sticking to my 6th grade score because it indicated that I was a fucking genius and I would be really really saddened if a subsequent test told me that I was not.

That's the actual score, "fucking genius".

I have never found it to have any worth whatsoever in the real world. Most people value what you actually do, not what you're capable of, and rightly so. (If you can find someone who values you based on what you're capable of, hang onto them with both hands.)

I must have drank too much at some point. As a youth I scored a 181, but now it is 154.

I'm thinking Sister Jenny is a bottle of gin?

Once previously a link to an online IQ test was posted to a community I frequented, and like this one, it provided a score, but one had to pay to access the detailed score. Everyone posted their results, and I noticed an unlikely score trend... everyone, even the morons, were receiving above-average IQ scores. There was a spread of perhaps 10 points between the truly stupid and the certifiably genius.

I didn't have to strain my think-muscle too hard to realize that the test was intentionally flattering the testee (heheh... testee) to make them more likely to purchase the detailed results. Few people would care to purchase the details if they got a low score.

In that community, in carefully examining the scores compared to my knowledge of who received them, I concluded that either some people had been very skillfully concealing their intelligence, or the test's IQ measuring abilities were about as reliable as a 90 year old dick. There were a handful of people whom I was confident were smarter than I, and many got lower scores than I did. Also, there were some obvious cement-heads who did as well, or better, as I. Not that I'm belittling your score on this test Jimbo, I wouldn't be surprised if you really were smarter than I am.

In the end, even accurate IQ tests only measure one's ability to solve cute puzzles in a controlled environment, and a high score only proves that the one being tested thinks simlarly to those who created the test. Hence the wide variations of scores one can get on different IQ tests. IQ tests can't possibly test the truly valuable intelligence, such as practical problem-solving, because tests are inherently impractical.

Or maybe I'm just a moron. :D

no, you're obviously not a moron. and it wasn;t my intent to say i was smarter cuz i tested higher. i wsa saying you're prolly right about the innacuracy of the scores. Jinx also got a 133, and we go back and forth about who's smarter. We've decided that there are different types of intelligence. I am good with abstract, intuitive thinking, she has a damn near perfect memory etc....

none of it really matters, though, cuz tw is the only smart person in the cellar. just ask him.

Quite right.

I've been trying to figure out if that's what Bruce answered, but... I don't know.

An Arab sheikh is old and must will his fortune to one of his two sons. He makes a proposition. His two sons will ride their camels in a race, and whichever camel crosses the finish line last will win the fortune for its owner. During the race, the two brothers wander aimlessly for days, neither willing to cross the finish line. In desperation, they ask a wise man for advice. He tells them something; then the brothers leap onto the camels and charge toward the finish line. What did the wise man say?

"Swap camels."

"Split it."

Clearly, your post shows you're not. :)

My experience is, people value you by how comfortable you make them feel around you, how good you make them feel about themselves.

My life can be measured in hours
I serve by being devoured
thin I am quick
thick I am slow
wind is my foe

What am I?

fog?

A candle!
 

A candle!

Re: A candle!
 

/me gives monkey a banana

Whoever makes it doesn't use it,
whoever buys it doesn't want it,
and whoever uses it doesn't know they are using it.

What is it?

and apostrophies in the above quote go before the 'n' in all the above cases.

Ain't that not the truth?:)

A coffin.