Yup. Knowing the answer in advance doesn't ruin the fun of solving the riddle, though, so anybody who hasn't tried to reason it out yet ought to. It's an interesting exercise in logic.

This riddle is often attributed to Einstein, which is most likely untrue, but I don't know for certain.

Exploding deck of cards?

Close enough. :) Should have mentioned a stab or bullet wound, hunh?

Close enough. Should have mentioned a stab or bullet wound, hunh?

Shows you how broken my brain is, huh? 52 is the number of cards in a deck! Bicycles are a brand of cards! How'd they get everywhere, though? Surely it must have exploded.

He cheated at cards, the table was upended, and he was killed.

You can speed it up by flipping switch one on and off for a few months, instead of leaving it on for years.

And I guess both solutions would be complicated if a bulb was bad to begin with.

Okay, here is one riddle I heard, I think it is from some card game called mindtrap or something like that.


You are locked in a room, only one exit. To get out there is a combination
lock.

There is a circular hole in the ground about two inches in diameter and about five inches deep. At the bottom of the hole is a ping pong ball, with the combination to the lock written on the side.

How do you get out of the room?



Some points of clarifications.

You can't manage to read the combination without getting the ping pong ball into your hands and looking at it real close.

You have no tools. Heck, let's even say you have no clothes either.

Your fingers can't reach in and pluck the ping pong ball out, it's too far in, and your whole hand doesn't fit in the hole.

The room has no resources for you to use. It's an empty bank vault or something equally inhospitable.

Can you pee in the hole to make the ball float up?

Okay, you answered that way too fast!

That's the answer.

I just know the answer because that exact scenario actually happened to me once... and I swore I'd never touch tequila again!

Something about the riddle's explanation made the answer obvious to me for some reason... first I thought maybe you'd put your mouth over the hole and suck it out, but that wouldn't work unless there was an air hole on the bottom, and you had the sucking power of a five-dollar hooker. Then I turned to the universal solution... urine!

Hopefully, the pee won't dissolve the ink :)

Here's one for you math folks.

Escherland has a really cool hotel - it has an infinite number of rooms!

A VIP guest arrives and asks for a room.

Sadly, there is a porn convention going on, and all the rooms are occupied. However, with some room shuffling, the manager does succede in making a room available to provide for the VIP. Oh, and noone was made to share rooms with anyone else either.


How did he do it?

I wonder if there ever was a real life situation where urine was used to accomplish something through its intrinsic properties - aside from writing in snow.

Then again, forget I asked that, that's a stupid question

Well, a hotel with infinite rooms can never be full... there will always be rooms available.

One jumps to mind... It's been used to cool hot mortar tubes in the absence of water.