Daily (Intermittent) Open-Ended Puzzle (DOEP): The triple negation of butter
We often buy “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” despite its awful name and soul-withering chemical composition. Even the product’s faux-entertaining site refers to it as a “nutritious blend of oils.”...
View ArticleDaily (intermittent) Open-Ended Puzzle: Crowd-sourcing bagels
When I was in Norway last week, in a shopping arcade in Kristiansand there was a bakery selling sandwich bagels. The bagels seemed to have categorized as such simply because they were tori made out of...
View ArticleDaily (Intermittent) Open-Ended Puzzle: Monty Python headlines
Monty Python has announced that it’s making all many of its works available for free on YouTube. Yay! What is the best Python-referencing headline for a post announcing this? “A hovercraft full of...
View ArticleDaily (intermittent) Open-End Puzzle (DOEP): Fattening yogurt
This is a “Let’s figure out how this statement might be true” puzzle. I have an answer in mind (which you probably won’t like), but I’m more interested in the ones y’all come up with: For the sort of...
View ArticleDaily (Intermittent) Open Ended Puzzle [DOEP]: Optimal speed
Thirty years ago, we were told that we should drive 55mph (or, in Europe, 42 euros per hectare) on the highway because that was the “optimal” highway speed when it came to squeezing miles out of...
View ArticleOrder of Magnitude Quiz: The cost of street lights
Facing a budget shortfall, the town of Andover, MA, has decided to turn off 600 streetlights, leaving 900 on. How much do you think that will save Andover per year, according to the article in the...
View ArticleOrder of Magnitude Quiz: Patents
How many patents do you think there are in the United States? (I believe that the number that I have, which comes from Beth Noveck’s excellent Wiki Government, refers to the number of patents in...
View Article[doep] Daily (Intermittent) Open-Ended Puzzle: Dig a hole…
The following is an Order of Magnitude puzzle: Guess within an order of magnitude of the answer and you win! You win nothing! If you were to start any spot on land on Earth and dig a hole through the...
View Article[doep] Daily (intermittent) Open-Ended Puzzle: Why do moths fly the way they do?
My understanding (possibly bogus) is that moths spiral into flames because evolution has designed them to fly in straight lines by noting celestial lights. When the light is nearby, keeping its...
View ArticleDaily [Intermittent] Open-Ended Puzzle: Camera shutters
Why do digital SLR (single lens reflex) cameras have shutters? In analog days, the shutter let light in for some determinant time. That caused the film to be exposed for that duration. But in the...
View ArticleWhat is it anyway?
I found this on Reddit. Can you tell what it is? Click on the black stripe to find out: The gear that drives a lawn sprinkler The post What is it anyway? appeared first on Joho the Blog.
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