20 December 2015

Reflecting on our morning run…

Temperatures-a-dropping

Chalupa-herd-a-thinning

Sharmila and I were the only ones who started the run today. Later Samaresh caught up with us. The Chalupa group has started taking the familiar winter look 🙂 In their defense, though, we started the run at 28 degrees F (-2 C). It was cold.

image

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20 December 2015

Puzzle time! Of colored hats and blindfolded people…

It has been a long time since I posted a puzzle. This is a variation of those category of logic problems where blindfolded people regularly get colored hats put on them and they have to guess the color of the hat on their own head 🙂

This particular one goes this way – Twelve sailors get marooned in an island. The local tribe finds them out and takes them to their leader. Their leader, not knowing what to do with the prisoners, come up with a novel idea. He tells them that next day morning, he was going to line them up in a straight line and put a cap on their head while they are blindfolded. The only colors he has his hats in are black and white. (I do not have the faintest idea why on God’s green earth the tribal leader had black and white hats, but that is what he had 🙂 ) After that, he would remove everybody’s blindfold. Then, every sailor could see the color of the hats of all the people in front of himself but not his own or that of the ones behind.

The leader would start from the last person in the rear and ask him to name the color of the hat he was wearing. He could only say “Black” or “White”. Any other words spoken would result in everybody getting killed. If the person got the right answer, he would be spared, else he would be killed. Then the leader would move to the next person who was ahead of the last person and go thru the same procedure… till he was done with all twelve of them.

You can assume that everybody can hear the answer given by the person being asked. All the people who were spared would be given a boat and shown how to go back to their land.

Tonight, the sailors have to come up with a strategy to save as many of themselves as they can.

What would be the best strategy to maximize the number of people who can survive? How many can survive?

Category: Puzzles | 28 Comments on Puzzle time! Of colored hats and blindfolded people…
18 December 2015

The farsightedness of Donald Trump

New York times recently reported  that apparently, Mexico is in the process of legalizing marijuana. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/05/world/americas/mexico-supreme-court-marijuana-ruling.html?_r=0

One can safely surmise some of the future news articles from NYT:

2016 Aug: NYT reports that legalization of marijuana in Mexico has resulted in millions of Americans crossing the border every month to buy the drug.

2017 Jan: Mexico, frustrated with the huge influx from the north has started building a wall along the border.

2017 Jan: Victory speech by Donald Trump, the 45th President of the USA. With a smirk on his face, he starts… “What did I tell you? I will get them to pay for the wall…” 🙂

Category: Humor | 1 Comment on The farsightedness of Donald Trump
12 December 2015

Nikispeak – or rather Niki not speak

Niki, not exactly a morning person, eventually got herself out of bed late on this lazy Saturday morning and dragged herself to the kitchen table. For a few minutes, everything was quiet as both of us were focused on our respective drinks – coffee for me and chocolate milk for her. Finally, I looked up towards her and to force a conversation told her “Hey, I might have found a solution for your ever misplaced school binder problem”. (the core problem here is not the book binder but her room in complete disarray – but I figured that would be too sensitive a topic  to bring up that early in her day).

Predictably, there was no response from her.

Undaunted, I pressed on. “See I read about this product called Trackr or Tracker or something like that. It is a neat looking thing that you can attach to your keyring and then if you can’t find your keys, you can simply pull up the app on your iPhone and it will show you where it is”.

No response. She did not even lift her eyes from the chocolate milk glass.

“You do realize how you can use this for your book binders, right?”

Still no response. Other than the slurping noise of the chocolate milk rushing thru the straw.

“You can easily put it in one of the slots in your book binder and that’s it. Grab your iPhone and no more lost book binder!!”.

For a moment, she lifted her face and stared at me.

Not to be the one to back down, I asked her “Name me the thing you lose the most”.

She said “My iPhone” and turned her face away.

Both of us went deadly quiet as we resumed our respective drinking without any more interruptions 🙂

Category: Humor | 12 Comments on Nikispeak – or rather Niki not speak