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He was deaf (and thankful) and
lipreading. Or they were both deaf and lipreading.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, September 02, 2003 10:06
PM
Subject: Puzzler of the week
This week's puzzler:
I was driving
on an access road about to get on the freeway. There was a convertible up in
front of me, with the top down. It was a beautiful day. There was a couple in
the car who I could only imagine were husband and wife. The car was a small
sports car with a standard transmission -- a Miata, or something like
that.
We had about three stop lights to go until the on ramp to the
freeway, and at every stop light the couple would turn to each other and have
a conversation. When the light turned green the conversation would abruptly
stop until they came to the next red light.
The car was not excessively
loud. There was no loud background noise, and they did not have the radio
on.
Here's the puzzler. Why did they converse only at red
lights?
Last week's puzzler:
It was a dark and stormy
night at a secret airfield somewhere in England during WW II. The Royal Air
Force had summoned one of England's most noted mathematicians to help them
solve a problem. German anti-aircraft fire based on the ground was inflicting
heavy losses on the Brits. Their planes were being shot down right and left.
The RAF had to do something to diminish their losses.
Clearly, they
could put armor plating on the bottoms of the fuselages and the wings, but
there were several problems with that idea. Their range and their ability to
carry bombs would be considerably reduced because of the additional
weight.
A nameless mathematician crawled underneath the planes and
looked at where the bullet holes were on the underside. They were all over the
place as you might expect -- in the wings and the fuselage, and seemingly
distributed randomly on the undersides. He studied hundreds of planes, took
pictures, drew a number of sketches -- and then he made his
recommendation.
The question is, what armor plating, if any, did he
recommend putting on these planes -- and why?
Last week's puzzler
answer:
His recommendation very simply was to armor plate the unhit
areas that the returning planes had in common. When he surveyed the undersides
of these planes, he noticed that there were a few spots that all of them had
in common that had no bullet holes. And he had to assume that the ones that
hadn't returned had bullet holes in those locations. They were in the English
Channel someplace.
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