Having a house in front of the post office is one of the more enjoyable features in my new living. Sitting down in the balcony early in the morning with a cup of tea, I can spend hours watching the postal folks get busy with their day.

As always, there are curious questions I have that I have found no answer. You may remember the one about all postal vehicles having rust on the front side of the roof on the non-driver’s side but nowhere else. Never figured out why.

In fact you can see that in all the vehicles lined up agains the wall in the picture!

Today, I noticed something else intriguing. Early morning a tow truck showed up with two postal vehicles. This is common for Mondays. I assume they had gone for maintenance over the weekend.

Look at which side the driver is sitting!!! It is the opposite side of postal vehicles (but in alignment with all other vehicles)!!

So when do postal vehicles have steering wheels on the “normal” side and when do they have on the “other” side?

A couple of days back, Matt, Sunjay, Hunt and myself were Slacking about Sunjay’s use of the punctuation mark “?!”. Which got me to read up on punctuation marks that are rarely used these days.

See how many of these you might now. First name the punctuation mark and see if you can guess when it is used.

The ninth one looks like slanted in my handwriting. I meant to draw a straight line. (You have it on your keyboard as “|” )

12 years back, on my way back home from DC, I used to post a puzzle almost every week. Doing the same today.

A little background… This week, in Chicago, Deval gave me a little gift. Apparently, she was in a store that sells calendars and came across a calendar that a math problem for each day. Somehow I came to her mind!!

And this is the first problem I saw on the cover page.

You remember mod right? It is the remainder remaining after you do a division. So 27 mod 6 would be 3.

The puzzle is:

15¹¹³ mod 113 = ?

I found this while reading some website.

As you see, there is a quadrant and within that there is a circle that touches one axis. The line that is parallel to that axis and is a tangent to the circle is 12 cm.

Question is what is the area that is shaded? (basically, the quadrant area sans the circle)

… but here is one if you want to try.

A and B are identical squares. C and D are squares too. The only measurement you are given is that the line going from where A&B meet to where C&D meet (the dotted line) – and that is 4 units. The question is what is sum of the areas of C and D (shaded areas).

From the picture you may be able to see that it is raining heavily. Sitting in my balcony, I can see the rain drops hit the parking lot surface in the light that is reflected there.

Here is a question that flashed thru my mind. How many raindrops does the earth get? Millions? Billions? Trillions?

To get started, let’s say it rained in Alpharetta (say 25 square miles) this morning for about 4 hours. How many raindrops did we get?

First take a guess. Just guess how many zeroes (or digits) will be there in that number.

Now, try to do the math. Make whatever assumptions you need to. (And they will differ from person to person). What number do you get? How many digits?

How close were you?

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?