Food for thought // Ideas for eating
Another week, another riddler. This one comes from Barbra Yew: There are eight three-digit numbers — each belongs in a row of the table below, with one digit per cell. The products of the three digits of each number are shown in the rightmost column. Meanwhile, the products of the digits in the hundreds, tens, [ ]
Another week, another riddler. This one is from Austin Shapiro: From Austin Shapiro comes a story of stacking that may stump you: Mira has a toy with five rings of different diameters and a tapered column. Each ring has a “correct” position on the column, from the largest ring that fits snugly at the bottom [ ]
The Family Game of Visual Perception During quarantine I found myself playing a lot Set a card game where you try to find sets of three cards that fit certain constraints And example Set board A set is three cards where each individual feature (color, shape, number and shading) is either all the [ ]
Another week, another riddler. This one is from Dean Ballard: King Auric adored his most prized possession: a set of perfect spheres of solid gold. There was one of each size, with diameters of 1 centimeter, 2 centimeters, 3 centimeters, and so on. Their brilliant beauty brought joy to his heart. After many years, he [ ]
Another week, another riddler. This one came from Jim Crimmins: One Friday morning, suppose everyone in the U.S. (about 330 million people) joins a single Zoom meeting between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. — to discuss the latest Riddler column, of course. This being a virtual meeting, many people will join late and leave early. [ ]
A friend recently put out a call for help could anyone help her with her restless cat? It would mope about during the day but then at night it would want to play. Was there something to entertain it during the day so it followed human s sleep schedules? I saw this as a call [ ]
Another week, another riddler. This one is from Blue Taylor: You’re in a dark room and seated at a table with a deck of 52 cards on it, stacked into a single pile. You also happen to know that currently, within that stack of cards, exactly 13 of them are face up, while all the [ ]
Another week, another riddler. This one is from math professor Jim Propp: I told my kid (who’d asked about absolute value signs) “They’re just like parentheses so there’s never any ambiguity,” but then I realized that things are more complicated; for instance -1 -2 -3 could be 5 or -5. Has anyone encountered ambiguities like this in [ ]
Another week, another riddler. This one was from Zach Wissner-Gross: The New York Times recently launched some new word puzzles, one of which is Spelling Bee. In this game, seven letters are arranged in a honeycomb lattice, with one letter in the center. Here’s the lattice from December 24, 2019: The goal is to identify as [ ]
Another week, another riddler. This one was from Kathy Bischoping: I have 10 pairs of socks in a drawer. Each pair is distinct from another and consists of two matching socks. Alas, I’m negligent when it comes to folding my laundry, and so the socks are not folded into pairs. This morning, fumbling around in [ ]