Posts Tagged Riddles
Tags
Achieving Success Alternate Universes Angry Notes Apartment life Assassins Beets Cats Children Dr. Grammar Evil People Conventions First Lines For the Public Indifference Harry Potter Held to be Self-Evident hoarders It Turned Out to be Lies Jurassic Park Legos Lies Lizards Malls Music Peer Review People in Restaurants Piracy Poetry Political Thrillers Polydactyly Puns Purely Speculation Purple People Eaters Relationships Riddles Robots Self-esteem shower curtains Strongly Implying One is About to Do Something Unethical Studies Talk Like a New Englander The Underwater Railroad Tongue Twisters Turing Test Vandalism Weird old shows Words
Stasko arrived at the maintenance office thirty-seven minutes later. Wisric had no doubt arranged everything to give him a chance to chat with Corinda Blanch, though there was no guarantee she would be around. Since both Stasko and Wisric had been moved to temporary quarters in the agricultural wing, Blanch had coincidentally been in the area more often, usually for "strategic discussions" with Mot Jarvis, her counterpart and the man in charge of maintenance for the agricultural warrens.
Mot was a short, black-haired man who could be described using a number of adjectives that ended in -umpy. In general he had an ill temper. He had prominent muscles as a result of his fanatical weightlifting, a trait that had required a certain amount of adjustment in the years since he had lost his right arm during an ill-fated safari, as he put it: "Fighting a pair of alligators," which may not have been entirely true.
Nobody really knew the truth about his missing limb, and few entirely understood how he kept the agricultural warrens maintained so well with only one arm. But his resilience in the face of life's oddities had given him an occasional endearing quality, and Leonin visited him when he needed perspective.
Wisric, for reasons unknown to Stasko, seemed to cringe when Jarvis was around.
On this occasion, however, the commons around Mot's office was quiet; Mot wasn't waving his arm threateningly from the break table as he tended to do quite often, but his office door was open. A transmitter buried somewhere in the office was busily spitting out animated conversation.
In the doorway stood the hulking silhouette of Resfarl, one of the few who had managed the transition from Brush to Graevon. If there was one common thread among lunatics it was that they always seemed to prefer keeping the Atlas-types around.
Saunders slowed and took hold of a length of metal conduit near one of the terminals. “I’ll handle Resfarl; you guys go on ahead.”
Anya gave him an incredulous stare. “Have you lost your mind?”
Gregg paused in mid-step. He hadn’t expected an argument.
“Why in space would you want to split up at a time like this?” continued Rayleigh. “We have no idea what that Borius character might be planning.”
“Just go; don’t worry about Resfarl,” insisted Gregg.
“I’m not worried about Resfarl,” she stated flatly. “There is exactly one of him right now, and he doesn’t even have a gun.”
“I'll handle him! Find Graevon and stop him before he commits another act of genocide.” He made prolonged eye contact with her, trying to convey an inability to accept anything other than compliance.
It hardly made a difference.
“Skabs to that! What do you take me for?” She broke his gaze and gestured indignantly toward the other man. “Is this supposed to be some sort of idiotic macho act?”
He stepped back momentarily. “No,” he began, with marginally less certainty than before. “But this will give you time to--”
“Time to what?” she asked, clearly uninterested in any clarifying statements. “Worry about your misguided hide because you want to play the martyr while we're chasing down a madman? Fine.”
She fired two shots, one into each of Micco Resfarl’s knees. His legs gave way almost in unison, no longer coordinating their actions with the rest of his body, and with his weight unsupported he buckled over, clearly out of commission. “Have it your way. While you’re busy being irrational and clubbing him up with your new toy, the rest of us will be solving problems instead of creating them.”
Northern Lightning 
St. Ives from an Outsider’s Perspective
Posted by ooaverage in Ask Dr. Rocket Surgery, Through the Commentator's Glasses on July 27, 2014
I’m sure most, if not all of you have heard the St. Ives riddle. To those who are the exception:
As I was going to St. Ives,
I met a man with seven wives.
Each wife had seven sacks.
Each sack had seven cats.
Each cat had seven kits.
Kits, cats, sacks, and wives,
how many were going to St. Ives?
I don’t have time to argue the math or the reasoning behind it, but it’s safe to say the answer is a number. I’d imagine it somehow relates the questioner, a man, seven women, and 49 bags filled with 343 adult cats and 2401 kittens total. (Evenly distributed into the sacks, of course.)
It bothers me that whoever is asking the question is so bloomin’ vague. The fact that you can argue seventeen different answers (YOU were going to St. Ives! 2800 wives, sacks, cats, and kittens were going to St. Ives! The St. Ives Bureau of Random Economic Statistics gives a figure of 48,439,000 incoming cat units for fiscal year 2007!) means the question itself needs work.
It seems to me the lack of specificity is a symptom of a much deeper problem, however. And it’s not as if the questioner can’t be specific. He or she is quite certain about the number of cats per bag. In fact, the certainty about the contents of these undoubtedly massive sacks seems to imply that there was a conversation with these mysterious cat transporters:
“Hello, travelers, what’s up?”
“My seven wives and I are making our biweekly cat delivery.”
“Oh! I can’t imagine any logistical or social problems arising in a career like that! I myself am a dentist; the one out of five who never agrees with the others for plot-driven reasons that are never completely explained. How many cats are in each bag?”
“These are sacks, my contentious dentist acquaintance. There are 7 cats and 49 kittens in each sack. How did you know the cats were in the sacks?”
“I must confess the hissing and shrieking as the sacks scraped along the ground gave your secret away. Also, it says ‘CATS’ on the side.”
It begs the question why this person was talking to the cat people in the first place. Do you have any idea how much feline biomass was packed into those containers? A reasonable weight for an adult cat is approximately 10 pounds. Given seven sacks per wife and 7 cats per bag, we have a total of 490 pounds of Adult Cat Weight alone.
Clearly, these women are not to be trifled with.
But we aren’t finished. Now for the kittens. While we aren’t given the exact location of St. Ives, (I suspect it’s Utah) in America they seem to suggest splitting cat families no earlier than ten weeks, an age that would give the kittens a weight of somewhere around two pounds each. Of course, the people we’re talking about don’t seem to be the type to follow reasonable suggestions, but I imagine any cat rancher would rather not spend more money on cat food than is necessary, and would likely sell the cats at this time. (If these people were ranching said cats and kittens to be used as food, it’s possible age isn’t a factor to them at all. I find this somewhat absurd, even by polygamist cat-rancher standards.)
343 kittens per woman at 2 pounds each gives us 686 pounds of Kitten Weight.
490 lbs. ACW
+ 686 lbs. KW= 1176 pounds of cats per wife.
To put that in perspective, these women are lugging around a third of a Buick over their shoulders, except instead of hauling harmless, relatively inert hunks of automobile, they’ve packed 56 cats into a cramped space, and they’ve done it seven times over. Each.
I have a hard time imagining two cats shoved into a bag together for any length of time. Shoot, even one cat.
Of course, it is nowhere stated that the cats are alive…
Take out one of the logistical problems and suddenly the riddle becomes ever so much more disturbing. Assuming the police are not eaten for sustenance by the Seven Strongest Women on Earth, I can see the headlines:
POLYGAMIST CAT-RANCHERS CAUGHT WITH 2744 DEAD CATS ON WAY
TO ST. IVES FROM ST. IVES CRAP I DON’T EVEN KNOWIf you meet this walking catastrophe on the way to town and your only concern is mathematics, your garden is most likely short a few vegetables.
…Kits, cats, sacks, and wives,
Don’t bother with math, just flee for your lives.
Cats, hoarders, Riddles, Words
Leave a comment