Last week I had a conversation with Pete, a dog-owning friend of mine, and we started to create various mind experiments. Here was our favourite for dog and cat owners out there.
Imagine walking into a room and finding your beloved dog or cat, and a randomly selected two year old child that you have never seen before. You are presented with a simple choice. You have to press one of three buttons. One button will instantly kill your pet. The second button will instantly kill the child and the third button will instantly kill you. No-one will ever know which button you pressed and there will be no legal ramifications for your choice. Answer honestly – which button would you press?
Dog and cat owners please vote in the polls below, and feel free to comment. Everyone else, feel free to comment on what you expect the votes to show, and what they actually seem to show.
Looking forward to seeing everyone at the seance show tonight at the Last Tuesday Society.
On Friday I posted this devil-related puzzle.
Imagine running into the devil. He leans forward and hands you a cloth bag containing a marble, and explains that the marble inside the bag is either black or white. He then adds a white marble, shakes the bag, and take out a marble at random. It’s white. Then the devil says ‘What are the odds that the remaining marble is white? Oh, and if you get it wrong, I get your soul’.
What do you say?
If you haven’t tried to solve it, have a go now. For everyone else, answer after the break.
This week I have decided to make the puzzle devil-related. Imagine running into the devil.
He leans forward and hands you a cloth bag containing a marble, and explains that the marble inside the bag is either black or white. He then adds a white marble, shakes the bag, and take out a marble at random. It’s white.
Then the devil says ‘What are the odds that the remaining marble is white? Oh, and if you get it wrong, I get your soul’.
What do you say?
As ever, please do NOT post your answers, but feel free to say if you think you have solved it and how long it took. Solution on Monday.
It is turning into a week of devil worshiping and illusions! @vbloke sent me this great 3D illusion yesterday (you may need to click on it to get it to move)…..
Hope that you enjoy it. Is your money on the big ugly creature or the kid?
Well, the pact with the devil post seems to have generated quite a bit of interest! Great that so many people were happy to hand over their souls – if anyone makes a YouTube video reading out the pact, I will link to it.
Meanwhile, here is a lovely photo illusion that I hadn’t seen before (thank @TheWeeklyExtra)….
A good friend of mine is into the occult. Yesterday we were chatting and he suggested that despite their apparent doubt about the supernatural, skeptics, agnostics, humanists and atheists would be reluctant to make a pact with the devil. I immediately thought ‘blog post’!
Are you prepared to make a pact with the devil? If you are up for it, please cut and paste the following sentence into the comments box, and add your first name….
“I agree that upon my death the devil can have my soul for eternal damnation”
Then describe how you feel doing that. Alternatively, say why you are not prepared to make the pact.
So, you have a two equal sized buckets. One contains water and the other contains the same amount of wine. You transfer a cup of wine to the water bucket and mix it in. Next you transfer a cup of the mixture back to the wine bucket. Is there more wine in the water, or water in the wine?
If you haven’t tried to solve it yet, have a go. For everyone else, the answer is after the break. Read the rest of this entry »
So, you have a two equal sized buckets. One contains water and the other contains the same amount of wine. You transfer a cup of wine to the water bucket and mix it in. Next you transfer a cup of the mixture back to the wine bucket. Is there more wine in the water, or water in the wine?
As ever, please do NOT post your answers, but do feel free to say if you have solved it and how long it took. I will post the solution on Monday. Have a good weekend!
The Freakonomics Blog has just run this rather nice interview with my good self. I discuss 59 seconds and my new study, where I will be randomly assigning zoo animals to people.
I came across this yesterday and hadn’t seen it before. So simple but so lovely. The shape in the middle of the image is a perfect circle….
Yesterday I sent out a tweet saying that today I would turn the blog over to a guest, and asking for posts. My thanks to everyone who submitted their entries.
The winning entry came from Andrew J Speirs, with his great Ten Facts About Playing Cards. I have taken the liberty of editing them a bit, but here we go with ten things you probably didn’t know about playing cards…… Read the rest of this entry »
John and Jane are very much in love, but live a long way apart.
Jane wants to send John a box containing a lock of her hair, but in such a way that no-one can open the box en route.
Both John and Jane each buy a padlock that could secure the box. However, to avoid discovery, neither John nor Jane can have a key to the padlock that belongs to the other (so Jane cannot have John’s key, and John cannot have Jane’s key).
How can the two lovers create a scheme to ensure that John can open the box when he receives it?
If you have not tried to solve it, have a go now. For everyone else, the answer is after the break….
John and Jane are very much in love, but live a long way apart.
Jane wants to send John a box containing a lock of her hair, but in such a way that no-one can open the box en route.
Both John and Jane each buy a padlock that could secure the box. However, to avoid discovery, neither John nor Jane can have a key to the padlock that belongs to the other (so Jane cannot have John’s key, and John cannot have Jane’s key).
How can the two lovers create a scheme to ensure that John can open the box when he receives it?
As ever, please do NOT post your answer, but do feel free to say if you think you have solved it and how long it took. Solution on Monday!
Whilst in the US I appeared on CBS’s The Early Show. The interview seemed to go well. However, a few people have contacted me to suggest that the shirt i was wearing was not that great. I am well aware that it is easy to be irrationally swayed by a vocal minority and so, in the interests of scientific inquiry, thought I should seek the opinions of a larger number of people.
It would be great if everyone could take a look at the clip (sorry about the ads) and let me know what they think. Here is the clip…..
Feel free to write a comment and vote in the exciting poll…..
Last week I had a conversation with Pete, a dog-owning friend of mine, and we started to create various mind experiments. Here was our favourite for dog and cat owners out there.
