This evening, Sharmila and I were walking around Avalon looking for a bar to sit down for a drink. She realized she needed to pick up something from the grocery store. So, we stepped into the Whole Foods.

I was inside a grocery store after a long time. So, as she shopped, I just ambulated thru the aisles – rather desultorily, if I may add – glancing thru all the different kinds of things they had stocked.

It is then that I came upon this board. I get “Water”, “Bottled Tea” and “Sodas”. But what is “Functional Beverages?”

Is it not really a beverage but just functionally so? Does that mean water, bottled tea and sodas are not functional?

Do you know?

Somebody explain this to me… This was in downtown Burlingame, CA. I was waiting for my friend to show up for dinner. While strolling up and down the street, I caught notice of something peculiar. The parking time restriction was 24 minutes! 24 minutes???

I looked up the internet. Sure enough, downtown Burlingame as parking restrictions of 24 minutes, 2 hours and 4 hours!

Why 24 minutes? Why not 20 or 30 and call it even?

Does anybody know?

Here is another question that has bewildered me (like that “Enter Only” sign that I wrote about before).

Every morning, before daybreak, I come out and sit in our balcony with my cup of tea. It is very calming to watch the early morning walkers and runners occasionally go by in the relative quietness of the dawn. And then, ever so often, a mail truck pulls up in the post office in front of our house and goes thru the exact same steps every day. It is fun to watch how the eighteen wheeler that shows up around 6:05 will go all around the parking lot after loading/unloading instead of exiting directly. And that is to give itself a lot of maneuvering space at the turn for exit.

On a Sunday like this, usually there is no activity in the post office. You can see many of the mail vans sitting idly in the lot. And that brings me to my question.

Check out the zoomed in picture of the vans. Do you notice how every single mail van has on the roof – what looks like a rusted out brown patch – on the right front (as you face the van)? The patterns are very similar too (the sizes vary a little). Now this being a mail van, this is the non-driver’s side.

For the life of me, I cannot surmise why does each and every mail van have that patch on the roof? Does anybody know?

Every time I go out to boat, this sign as we enter the parking lot confuses me. Do you see the problem? I am coming along the road (which is one way anyways) and then I see this sign as I enter the lot. What is the big point putting a sign “Enter only” on my side? What else can I do?

I understand that sign being on the other side to warn anybody attempting to come the other way that you cannot exit there – it is an entrance only point. But why for me?

Never quite figured that one out.

This morning, around quarter to ten, I was doing a quick check of the stock market when something caught my eye.

Note that the Dow graph shows that it has been going down since market opened. And yet, inexplicably, it was green in color. (should have been red). Even better, you can see that just above the graph, it shows that Dow has been up by over 300 points at that point of time.

I guess I should not complain as long as the market is doing well. But still, I can’t explain this.

Can you?

This puzzle also comes courtesy my eldest nephew.

There are 101 boxes. A girl marked them “1”, “2”, “3”…. all the way to “101”. She had two colored pens to mark the boxes with – red and blue. And she used both of them. Only one color was used for any one box. We know that the total number of blue boxes is the same as the highest numbered blue color marked box. And to that if you add twice the lowest numbered red color marked box, you will get the total number of boxes.

The question is, how many blue and red boxes were there?

This was given to me by my elder nephew. I was able to solve it but in the process I learnt a new concept in numbers called partition number. My nephew taught me a method of how to get to the partition number for a number. He claimed it is called the Chinese method.

Here is the puzzle:

In the following expression, once expanded, what is the coefficient of x^{9 ?}

(1+x)(1+x²)(1+x³)(1+x⁴)(1+x⁵)….(1+x¹⁰⁰)

If anybody is not familiar with interstate highway I-16 in Georgia, it connects Savannah to Macon and pretty much goes like a straight line east-west. There are virtually no towns or cities in between. As a result the 120 mile or so highway has a consistent speed limit of 70 mph.

Sharmila and I were coming back from Hilton Head on this highway. Somewhere in that highway, I noticed something interesting. The display on the rental car dashboard informed me that the speed limit was 40 mph. (see the top middle portion of the picture) I was not in a construction zone and the highway was totally clear.

It took me some time and experimentation to understand what was going on.

Can you guess why the car was giving me completely wrong info (suggesting 40mph in a clearly 70mph stretch)?

If you want a slight hint, check out the other displays on the dashboard in the picture.

How many countries are completely surrounded by water? The count completely surprised me.

Can you name most of them?