RSS Quiz

The Royal Statistical Society’s Christmas Quiz runs through January 29 this year — 18 fiendish puzzles to mark the tradition’s 30th anniversary.

“Cracking the puzzles below will require a potent mix of general knowledge, logic, lateral thinking and searching skills — but, as usual, no specialist mathematical knowledge is needed.”

Entry is free and open to everyone. The top two entries will receive £100 and £50 in gift vouchers of their choice, and the quizmaster has pledged a donation of £900 to charities nominated by the top performers.

See the quiz web page for rules, entry instructions, and some tips for budding solvers.

| Puzzles

Turnabout

In 2011 I published a list of unusual American girls’ names collected by H.L. Mencken in his magisterial study The American Language. I should have gone back for the boys’ names:

  • Allmouth
  • Anvil
  • Arson
  • Centurlius
  • Cho-Wella
  • Clarmond
  • Cluke
  • Comma
  • Crellon
  • Cyclone
  • Doke
  • Elesten
  • Elgne
  • Elvcyd
  • Felmet
  • Florns
  • Habert
  • Harce
  • Human
  • Jat
  • Kark
  • Kleo Murl
  • Koith
  • Lig
  • Loarn
  • Mord
  • Murt
  • Quannah
  • Rephord
  • Terbert
  • Thrantham
  • Torl
  • Valourd
  • Virgle
  • Yick
  • Zelmer
  • Zurr

“In Connecticut, a generation or two ago, there was a politico surnamed Bill whose given-names were Kansas Nebraska. He had brothers named Lecompton Constitution and Emancipation Proclamation, and sisters named Louisiana Purchase and Missouri Compromise.”

(H.L. Mencken, The American Language, Supplement 2, 1948.)

| Language · Society

Time’s Up

A perplexing question by the Soviet science writer Yakov Perelman:

If a clock takes three seconds to strike three, how long does it take to strike seven?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Relative

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giovanni_Cariani_-_Portrait_of_Two_Young_Men_-_WGA4212.jpg

A problem from the October 1962 issue of Eureka, the journal of the Cambridge University Mathematical Society:

Tom is twice as old as Dick was when Tom was half as old as Dick will be when Tom is twice as old as Dick was when Tom was a year younger than Dick is now. Dick is twice as old as Tom was when Dick was half as old as Tom was when Dick was half as old as Tom was two years ago. How old are Dick and Tom?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

“Love Cools Quickly”

Irish proverbs:

  • Laziness is a load.
  • A good run is better than a long stand.
  • The tools are half of the trade.
  • Bribery can split a stone.
  • The pleasant humorous people are all in eternity.
  • A promise is a debt.
  • What cannot be had is just what suits.
  • It is better to be alone than in bad company.
  • It is easier to scatter than to gather.
  • The horses die while the grass is growing.
  • Be afraid and you’ll be safe.
  • The deed will praise itself.
  • Poverty is no shame.
  • It is better to be lucky than wise.
  • Tell me your company and I’ll tell who you are.
  • Time is a good historian.
  • Self-love is blind.
  • Avarice is the foundation of every evil.
  • Patience conquers destiny.
  • Nothing is preferable to reconciliation.

And “There is no forest without as much brushwood as will burn it.”

| Quotations · Society

Working Out

A problem by Polish mathematician Paul Vaderlind:

Each child in a school plays either tennis or soccer. One-ninth of the tennis players also play soccer, and one-seventh of the soccer players also play tennis. Do more than half the children play tennis?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Paperwork

Doubtless time travel will raise a host of legal difficulties, e.g., should a time traveler who punches his younger self (or vice versa) be charged with assault? Should the time traveler who murders someone and then flees into the past for sanctuary be tried in the past for his crime committed in the future? If he marries in the past can he be tried for bigamy even though his other wife will not be born for almost 5000 years? Etc., etc. I leave such questions for lawyers and writers of ethics textbooks to solve.

— Larry Dwyer, “Time Travel and Some Alleged Logical Asymmetries Between Past and Future,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 8:1 (March 1978), 15-38

| Crime · Oddities · Society

Deluge

Dry Falls, in central Washington, has a stunningly dramatic history: At the end of the last glaciation, when ice dams to the east gave way, torrents of water roared through the landscape from flooded Montana, pouring over a 400-foot rock face at 65 mph in a waterfall five times as wide as Niagara and carrying 10 times the flow of all the world’s rivers combined.

The scale of the cataclysm is hard to imagine, so geologist Nick Zentner of Central Washington University commissioned these animations from Newlands & Company of Portland to help to convey its magnitude.

| Science & Math