Search Results for: new york

Why Is a Manhole Cover Round?

Actual questions asked in Microsoft job interviews:

  • How are M&Ms made?
  • Suppose you had eight billiard balls, and one of them was slightly heavier, but the only way to tell was by putting it on a scale against another. What’s the fewest number of times you’d have to use the scale to find the heavier ball?
  • Why do you want to work at Microsoft?
  • One train leaves Los Angeles at 15 mph heading for New York. Another train leaves from New York at 20 mph heading for Los Angeles on the same track. If a bird, flying at 25 mph, leaves from Los Angeles at the same time as the train and flies back and forth between the two trains until they collide, how far will the bird have traveled?
  • How many gas stations are there in the USA?
  • You’ve got someone working for you for seven days and a gold bar to pay them. The gold bar is segmented into seven connected pieces. You must give them a piece of gold at the end of every day. If you are only allowed to make two breaks in the gold bar, how do you pay your worker?
  • The interviewer hands you a black pen and says nothing but “This pen is red.”
  • Pairs of primes separated by a single number are called prime pairs. Examples are 17 and 19. Prove that the number between a prime pair is always divisible by 6 (assuming both numbers in the pair are greater than 6). Now prove that there are no “prime triples.”

At the end they ask, “What was the hardest question asked of you today?” My answer: “Why do you want to work at Microsoft?”

| Technology · Trivia

“Reports of My Death …”

Some premature obituaries:

  • An unidentified New York newspaper once carried the front-page headline POPE BENEDICT XV IS DEAD. A later edition announced POPE HAS REMARKABLE RECOVERY.
  • Melody Maker magazine once announced that Alice Cooper was dead. Cooper reassured his fans: “I’m alive, and drunk as usual.”
  • When a magazine reported that Rudyard Kipling had died, he wrote, “Don’t forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.”
  • English fiddle player Dave Swarbrick forgave the Daily Telegraph for reporting his death in April 1999: “It’s not the first time I have died in Coventry.”
  • In 1982 People magazine reported that Abe Vigoda had died. He posed for a photo sitting up in a coffin, holding the magazine.
  • After a heart attack, painter James McNeill Whistler wrote to a Dutch newspaper, saying that reading his own obituary had induced a “tender glow of health.”
| Death

Sand Castle

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sand_sculpture.jpg

One by one, the simple amusements of my youth are being co-opted by geeks and refined into punishing sciences.

Only purists, for example, still build sand castles with shovels and hand packing. The vanguard have recruited all the tools of modern engineering, including building forms and heavy machinery.

Guinness started recording the world’s longest sand sculptures in 1987, and that spawned even greater creativity — and competitiveness. In 1998 Dave Henderson built a 33-foot castle at the New York State Fairgrounds that weighed 412 tons. Not to be outdone, other artists started turning out likenesses of Einstein, life-size pickup trucks, and a rather creditable Eeyore.

Today, at a championship competition, you might find works inspired by Picasso and dream imagery.

Where will it end? With a giant bucket and enough water, we could build a giant ziggurat in the Sahara. And there’s no danger from high tide …

| Entertainment

Harry Stephen Keeler

http://staff.xu.edu/~polt/keeler/jackets/ducracksman.jpg

Harry Stephen Keeler (1890-1967) wrote mystery novels so bad they’ve been called “coincidence porn.” In The Ace of Spades Murder he introduces the guilty character on the third-to-last page; in X. Jones of Scotland Yard he explains on the last page that Napoleon Bonaparte is the culprit.

And his gifts extend beyond plotting. His characters are called Criorcan Mulqueeny and Screamo the Clown and Scientifico Greenlimb and Wolf Gladish and State Attorney Foxhart Cubycheck, and he writes titles like Finger, Finger!, The Yellow Zuri, The Amazing Web, Find the Clock, and The Face of the Man From Saturn.

Even at the level of simple prose, he’s entirely helpless. Here’s a typical passage from The Case of the 16 Beans:

The door now opened, revealing, as it did so, a strange figure — a half-man, no less, seated on a “rollerskate” cart! — framed against the bit of outer hallway. But no ordinary half-man this, for he was a Chinaman; quite legless, indeed, so far as the presence of even upper leg stumps went; but amply provided with locomotion, of the gliding kind, anyway, in the matter of the unusually generous rubber-tired wheels under the platform cart.

There’s even an appreciation society now, which is fortunate, because most of Keeler’s numerous works are now out of print. In 1942, the New York Times wrote, “We are drawn to the unescapable conclusion that Mr. Keeler writes his peculiar novels merely to satisfy his own undisciplined urge for creative joy.” Amen.

| Literature · Oddities

Memorable Headlines

In 1934, Variety ran a story about rural communities objecting to their portrayal in recent films. It was titled STIX NIX HICK PIX.

On May 31, 2000, the New York Daily News ran a story about Indiana Pacers fans denying courtside seats to New York fans. The headline was HICKS NIX KNICKS TIX.

And the jump head on page 5 read HICKS’ KNICKS TIX TRICK.

| Language

The Great Moon Hoax

http://www.sxc.hu/index.phtml

Jayson Blair may not have been reaching high enough. The New York Times reporter was disgraced for faking quotes and interviews, but that’s kid stuff compared to the Great Moon Hoax of 1835, a series of articles (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) in which the New York Sun announced that life had been discovered on the moon.

“Reprinted” from the defunct Edinburgh Journal of Science, the six articles told of “an immense telescope of an entirely new principle” with which astronomer John Herschel supposedly discovered lunar bison, goats, pelicans, trees, beaches, and even bat-men who built temples of sapphire.

That last detail sent the Sun‘s circulation to 19,360, the world’s highest … and it stayed high even after Sun reporter Richard Adams Locke admitted that he’d invented the whole thing.

Strangely, most accounts report that the Sun‘s readers were amused at the joke. The real outrage came from rival newspapers that had reprinted the articles, claiming to be getting them from the original source. Now that’s embarrassing.

| Hoaxes

Mr. Versatile

Whose resume is this?

  • Received four write-in votes in the mayoral election in Boise, Idaho, 1985
  • Spokesperson, the American Cancer Society’s Great American Smokeout, 1987
  • Received the Presidential Sports Award from the President’s Council on Physical Fitness & Sports, 1992
  • Threw out first pitch at Wrigley Field, 2000
  • Named official ambassador for the Rhode Island State Tourism Board, 2000
  • Likeness rendered as 85-foot hot-air balloon, 2001
  • Rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, 2002

Answer: Mr. Potato Head.

| Trivia

Of Vice and Men

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Villainc.svg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

The Depravity Scale is an attempt to reach a scientific definition of evil. What makes a crime “heinous”? If “horrible” or “atrocious” crimes get longer sentences, what counts? The Supreme Court says that sentences must reflect societal attitudes, but right now there’s no legal definition of a “heinous, atrocious, or cruel” act; jurors have to rely on their emotions.

New York forensic psychiatrist Michael Welner put together a list of 26 things that might characterize an act as depraved. Does the criminal maximize the victim’s fear or pain? Does he boast about his act? So far, Welner has found more than 90 percent consensus that 16 of the items indicate depravity. Interestingly, the results seem consistent across states, but not between countries.

“We need consistency, and in particular consistency that reflects the best that forensics has to offer,” Welner says. “From my own vantage point of working within the cases, juries and judges don’t see near as much as they should be seeing when it comes to forensic evidence about what a person’s intent was, what a person actually did, and what a person’s attitude was about what he did. Even from a mental health standpoint, there’s far more effort devoted to the question of who a person is or why that person did something rather than just look at what the person did.”

And Welner has no problem with the concept of evil. “I have no problem with the word being used,” he says. “If you look in the literature, there’s a startling lack of effort to try to flesh out what evil is, and I think it’s our responsibility as behavioral scientists to try to understand it. This issue gets neglected because therapeutic professions like psychiatry inherently must focus on the good in order to be therapeutic. Another reason for this neglect is because to wade in and wrestle with it means to confront it in ourselves, and that’s a painful prospect even for the most stable of us. When I first began exploring this, I never enjoyed it, and I appreciated walking away from it. The more I studied it, the more it affected even my dreams. It’s an unpalatable exercise.”

| Crime · Society

Null and Loyd?

The stupendously brilliant Sam Loyd’s Cyclopedia of 5000 Puzzles, Tricks and Conundrums, with Answers, originally published in 1914, is now available online.

The riddles are pathetic (“What vine does beef grow on? The bo-vine”), but the rest is mostly terrific. One problem: Loyd withheld the solutions to some puzzles, offering a cash prize. He never followed up with the solutions, so they’ve become stumpers. Here’s one, called “The Trader’s Profit”:

A dealer sold a bicycle for $50, and then bought it back for $40, thereby clearly making $10, as he had the same bicycle back and $10 besides. Now having bought it for $40, he resold it for $45, and made $5 more, or $15 in all.

“But,” says a bookkeeper, “the man starts off with a wheel worth $50, and at the end of the second sale has just $55! How then could he make more than $5? You see the selling of the wheel at $50 is a mere exchange, which shows neither profit nor loss, but when he buys at $50 and sells at $45, he makes $5, and that is all there is to it.”

“I claim,” says an accountant, “that when he sells at $50 and buys back at $40, he has clearly and positively made $10, because he has the same wheel and $10, but when he now sells at $45 he makes that mere exchange referred to, which shows neither profit nor loss, and does not affect his first profit, and has made exactly $10.”

“It is a simple transaction, which any scholar in the primary class should be able to figure out mentally, and yet we are confronted by three different answers,” Loyd says. “The first shows a profit of $15, such as any bicycle dealer would; while the bookkeeper is clearly able to demonstrate that more than $5 could not be made, and yet the President of the New York Stock Exchange was bold enough to maintain over his own signature that the correct profit should be $10.”

I’m thinking the accountant’s right, but then I was a journalism major.

| Puzzles