At 08:22 AM 1/25/02 -0800, Tim May wrote: >On Thursday, January 24, 2002, at 09:06 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> I've concluded that you can't answer Tim's riddle >> without knowing the radius of the drill --but I may >> put myself open to ridicule for suggesting this. >> > >But if you were devious enough, you would realize that "can't answer >Tim's riddle without knowing the radius of the drill" allows for >offering the infinitesimal drill bit "trick" as a valid solution to the >problem.
In fact, I misremembered the problem as finding the volume of the original sphere, which isn't solvable with the givens ---elegantly proved by the anonymous annular proof that the cored-sphere's volume depends only on the height nicely supports :-) (Since the original spheres' volume depends on drill radius and height, but the volume of the ring depends only on height) Generally in a 'word problem/riddle' you suspect 1. a clever solution not using variables you might think you need (the case here) 2. a 'trick' question that has no solution (with my misremembered question, what I thought I had, when I checked the question later and found no drill size). Additionally one is suspect of extraneous distracting variables. Nice one.
