Online Logic Challenge

due to public demand, we present to you a pure and brain-twisting logic challenge, and the best part- it's online. send your answers to eesa.crce@gmail.com....here we begin-

0. It's my birthday today and i got myself a square birthday cake. it measures 24 cm by 24 cm with a height of 12 cm. we have three people who want to eat the cake equally. but only equal parts won't suffice us.The cake has dark chocolate frosting on all sides except

the bottom and each of us wants to have the same amount of chocolate frosting as

well as the same amount of cake. also there is a mouse made of icing in the center

of the top of the cake, and i ( as i am the birthday boy ) wants the entire rose, no cut may pass

through or touch where the mouse is. so how will you divide the cake???

10. News flash: Martians have invaded earth and taken some of CRCE students as prisoners. The prisoners are put in circular cells which are suspended . The cylindrical wall of the martian cell has four push buttons placed symmetrically. the buttons have two

states ,"1" or "0". But the occupants would not come to know, by any means,

what state the button holds at that time. The CRCE students would be free if the push

buttons are all in the same state, i.e. all "1" or all "0". They are allowed

to press any button any number of times in a bid to get free. But the problem is

after every wrong attempt, the wall of the cell will spin for 30 seconds and therefore the students will have no way of telling which buttons they tried. an attempt consists of 1,2,3 or all four of the buttons being pushed simultaneously. When a button is pushed, its state changes, i.e. 1 becomes 0 and vice versa. Tell whether they will be able to get out of the cell within 5 minutes!!!

1110. There are n coyotes and a roadrunner in a room. All coyotes are free to eat the roadrunner if they are hungry. Now if the roadrunner is eaten by a coyote, that coyote turns sleepy and hence is prone to be eaten by another hungry coyote. A coyote which eats another coyote also gets drowsy. Assume that all coyotes are sane and logical. Can the roadrunner survive at all? Justify your answer.

3110. you have 12 coins with you. can you construct a square and place coins on the sides, such that there are 5 coins on each side.

132110. give me the next number in the series:

1, 18, 35, 66, 176, 190, 408, ?

_______. if you noticed the question numbers are somewhat weird in this quiz...give me the question number of this question !!!

7. dexter comes to a shop in bandra to buy a few items. He chooses 4 things to buy. The shopkeeper tells dexter that he has to pay 7 Rupees and 11 paise. but dexter has only Rs 10 note . Now the shopkeeper in his boredom wants to confuse dexter and test his IQ. He tells him he

multiplied the prices of the four items to get the amount dexter had to pay. It turns out that dexter did his basic math and agreed with the shopkeeper as to what had to be paid. What were the prices of the four items?

happy brain-racking!!

answers to the quiz

1.hindenberg-the zepplin.used by germans

2.assam

3.windows

4.fermet

5.sars

6.boston red sox

7.concorde

8.ins arihant

9.rod laver

10.spain

11.hannibal

12.sherlock holmes

13.gives the maximum milage

14.world war 1.the person in the third pic is bismarck.

15.ultrasonic song

16.fusion

17.laws of robotics.

18.largest female gathering

19. solar taxi

20.plane that was used in 9/11 attacks

online quiz for malhaar part 2.

this is the second part of the quiz. please see the previous post for the first 10 questions..

11. he is considered one of the greatest military tactician of all times. the second pic also shows one of his famous tactics...identify him( dedicated to all aoe and warcraft freaks)

12. name this famous persona( everyone has heard his name atleast once in their lifetime). the first picture is of the person while the second shows his belongings.

13. this one is dedicated to all car and bike freaks....

identify this famous bmw car and what is its prominence?

14.link all the pictures of a famous war and tell me the war.clarify on the second and the third picture for a bonus point.

15. what is special about the song " a very silent night"?( a pure give away)

16.tell me the word which means the following

Biology: A cellular phenomenon that usually occurs during differentiation of cells Chemistry: A name for a particular phase change Physics: A process that has been observed in stars, though no human enterprises have succeeded in replicating it in a controlled manner

17. the book in the picture has short stories which gives us some revolutionary set of concepts...tell me the concepts

18. what is attukal pongala and what is its record claim?

19. un secretary general ban ki-moon commuted to his office using a special taxi developed by louis palmer and sponsored by swizerland. what is special about it?

20.

finally the last....it is a hard one

what is peculiar about this plane?

hint:think of news involving the airlines and a major event in world history

P.S. compliments and insults can be made to the quizmaster using the esteemed comments section

online quiz for malhaar

this is the famous(hopefully) and a pathbreaking(in crce) quiz which has to be solved online under a pretty long time limit and will full allowance to cheat.usage of google and books is encouraged. you have to send the solutions to the quiz by 30 july 2009 by 10 pm. incase of a tie breaker, the team providing explanation to specific problems will be considered. send the answers to ameyasgaonkar@gmail.com.

let the quiz begin....

1.name the historic airplane in picture ,whose explosion is still a mystery.which country used it?

2.here's an easy one...

which state of india shares its border with largest number of states?(kill yourself if you googled the answer)

3.identify x.

there are different types of x .they have codenames like chicago,memphis,whistler,longhorn during its development.

4.who am i talking about and what did he do?

he was called as an amateur mathematician.the theorem he gave was in 1637 but got proven in 1995.it was one of the greatest maths puzzles of all time and the person who proves it was assured of the prestigious field medal.it is also dubbed as his last theorem.

5.for which diesease did WHO issue a travel advisory about a specific region for the very first time?( this is not difficult...think a bit).

6.identify the sports team which has the following logo..

hint:they ended one of the longest championship drought in the history of the sport by winning in 2004 after winning the trophy last at 1918.

7.identify the recently decommisioned aircraft

8. name the submarine in the pic (hint:observe the pic and the newspapers)

9.identify the player who was nicknamed "rocket"?

10. the national anthem of which country has been without lyrics since 1978....

there are 10 more questions ....due to restriction on iamge uploading...they are posted in the next post..

no man is an island

so often, a prominent politician or social activist will take the stage and bemoan our dependence on some other party — whether they be another country, another ethnic group — for food, clothes, or any other necessity of life you can name. The rallying call for self-sufficiency is a resounding, clarion call; it is also an unfortunately deeply mistaken one.

In theory self-sufficiency sounds like a good, harmless idea: why shouldn’t we rely on ourselves, rather than having to go to someone else for the things we need? Prime Ministers have decried the necessity for Malays to buy clothes from Chinese textile manufacturers; social activists have opposed the privatisation of water companies lest they fall into foreign hands; politicians far and wide have suggested we should aim for self-sufficiency in rice. What’s wrong with self-sufficiency?

The problem with self-sufficiency is quite obvious when you wonder why more individuals aren’t self-sufficient. I can’t grow my own food, prepare my own stationery. I can’t type the words you’re reading on a laptop which I can’t build. It is insane to expect any human being to singlehandedly mine all the raw materials necessary and put them together to build his own notebook computer. Unless you want to do it as a hobby, being completely self-sufficient in almost any area of your life is impossible.

The reason for this is that every individual has their own particular talent. Mine happens to be writing, rather than farming or playing football. So I write, and use the money I earn from there to buy food and watch football. I could try to grow my own crops, but it would not be worth my time — and there’s the rub.

Being self-sufficient in most cases is simply not cost-effective: unless you are the most brilliant farmer the world has ever seen, and have an additional half dozen limbs, you almost certainly cannot feed yourself. Even real farmers specialise in a few crops and buy the rest they need. When every individual has a unique talent, it makes more sense to focus on what we do best rather than to try to do everything by ourselves.

So why should we expect a country to be completely self-reliant? To be self-sufficient as a country, you have to be bloody damn good at what you’re setting out to do. If you want all rice to be locally grown, you have to have extremely fertile land, the perfect climate and the right tools. This is not an easy task, considering we are still importing rice in spite of all the government’s efforts to promote local agriculture.

Why do we need to be self-sufficient in the first place? If we can earn more by setting up factories for microprocessors and Islamic financial institutions, why don’t we just take the money we earn from those businesses and buy the rice we need, rather than expending more unnecessary effort and unnecessarily sacrificing potential earnings for the sake of saying we do not need to import any rice? Except for some misplaced sense of “national pride”, there is really no good reason to waste money on self-sufficiency, in any sector.

Ultimately, we have no choice but to depend on someone. Even if we try to be self-sufficient in rice, to support rice production of such magnitude we would have to buy machinery and expertise from overseas. Wherever you turn, we cannot run from reliance on someone else — that is how globalisation and interconnectedness work.

The only half-plausible excuse for self-sufficiency is “national defence” — but this is disingenuous, at best. If we have so many enemies who are out to get us, they will have better ways of getting at us than contaminating our water supply (as many anti-privatisation activists fear) or refusing to sell us food. What sort of crisis can you imagine where another country would completely embargo us?

Empowerment and capacity-building are of course desirable things, but it is one thing to set up an industry and another thing to target self-sufficiency in a particular area. Unless the stars align perfectly in our favour, the only way to ensure we will “buy local” is to distort the market by taxing foreign competition out of the picture and wastefully subsidising local products instead. If you want a peek into a future of self-sufficiency, look no further than our local cars — much maligned and overpriced. When we know our limits and when we trade, we can play to our unique advantages, which will serve us much better in the long run than the wild-goose chase of hunting for self-sufficiency.

ortiz peom

Before I start this poem, I'd like to ask you to join me
In a moment of silence
In honor of those who died in the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon last September 11th.
I would also like to ask you
To offer up a moment of silence
For all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned,
disappeared, tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes,
For the victims in both Afghanistan and the U.S.

And if I could just add one more thing...
A full day of silence
For the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died at the
hands of U.S.-backed Israeli
forces over decades of occupation.
Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people,
mostly children, who have died of
malnourishment or starvation as a result of an 11-year U.S.
embargo against the country.

Before I begin this poem,
Two months of silence for the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa,
Where homeland security made them aliens in their own country.
Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Where death rained down and peeled back every layer of
concrete, steel, earth and skin
And the survivors went on as if alive.
A year of silence for the millions of dead in Vietnam - a people,
not a war - for those who
know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their
relatives' bones buried in it, their babies born of it.
A year of silence for the dead in Cambodia and Laos, victims of
a secret war ... ssssshhhhh....
Say nothing ... we don't want them to learn that they are dead.
Two months of silence for the decades of dead in Colombia,
Whose names, like the corpses they once represented, have
piled up and slipped off our tongues.

Before I begin this poem.
An hour of silence for El Salvador ...
An afternoon of silence for Nicaragua ...
Two days of silence for the Guatemaltecos ...
None of whom ever knew a moment of peace in their living years.
45 seconds of silence for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas
25 years of silence for the hundred million Africans who found
their graves far deeper in the ocean than any building could
poke into the sky.
There will be no DNA testing or dental records to identify their remains.
And for those who were strung and swung from the heights of
sycamore trees in the south, the north, the east, and the west...

100 years of silence...
For the hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples from this half
of right here,
Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand
Creek,
Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears.
Names now reduced to innocuous magnetic poetry on the
refrigerator of our consciousness ...

So you want a moment of silence?
And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut
A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust.

Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be the same
And the rest of us hope to hell it won't be. Not like it always has
been.

Because this is not a 9/11 poem.
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem
This is a 1492 poem.

This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written.
And if this is a 9/11 poem, then:
This is a September 11th poem for Chile, 1971.
This is a September 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa,
1977.
This is a September 13th poem for the brothers at Attica Prison,
New York, 1971.
This is a September 14th poem for Somalia, 1992.
This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground in ashes
This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told
The 110 stories that history chose not to write in textbooks
The 110 stories that CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and
Newsweek ignored.
This is a poem for interrupting this program.

And still you want a moment of silence for your dead?
We could give you lifetimes of empty:
The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces of nameless children
Before I start this poem we could be silent forever
Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.

If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit.

If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window
of Taco Bell,
And pay the workers for wages lost.
Tear down the liquor stores,
The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the
Penthouses and the Playboys.

If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton's 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt fills the room where my beautiful
people have gathered.

You want a moment of silence
Then take it NOW,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand,
In the space between bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence.
Take it.
But take it all...Don't cut in line.
Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime. But we,
Tonight we will keep right on singing...For our dead.

j.r.r and lotr

These days, the writing of heroic fantasy has become a mass-production industry; scarcely a week goes by without an author inventing a brave new world and subsequently being acclaimed as "the true inheritor of Tolkien's mantle", or some such. Unfortunately, fantastic settings alone do not an epic make, and 90% of new fantasy writing is crap - the same generic swords and sorcery, thud and blunder, repeated ad nauseam.

Tolkien is different. His imaginary homelands are not just names on the (by now obligatory) frontispiece map, they're countries, with rich histories and vibrant cultures; his invented tongues are not meaningless agglomerations of random syllables, they're carefully designed showcases of the linguist's art, with comprehensive lexica and detailed etymologies; his many invented beings are not cardboard cutout monsters, they're creatures who live and breathe and walk the pages of his books as convincingly as do his human heroes and heroines. The suspension of disbelief in Tolkien is total.

And then there's his verse. Tolkien's verse has genuine poetic merit, and it's not in the least bit self-conscious; when his characters break into song (which, mind you, occurs fairly often in his books), it always seems the perfectly natural thing to do. Today's poem is an excellent example: in "The Fellowship of the Ring" (the first volume of "The Lord of the Rings"), the eponymous fellowship are forced to detour through the dark and deserted Dwarven mines of Moria. One of the party asks why the Dwarves chose to live in such darksome holes; in reply, Gimli, the lone representative of that race in the Fellowship, half sings, half chants a poem describing the glory of the Dwarven kingdom in the Elder Days... at the end of the recital, the reader is left with the realization that the story of Moria couldn't have been told any other way: mere prose is simply too dry to communicate the wonder and the beauty that was Khazad-dum.

As always with Tolkien, the form reinforces the content to marvellous effect: the language is intentionally archaic, the alliteration pronounced (but never obtrusive), the sense of nostalgia and loss almost palpable. Notice how Gimli never explicitly states just what it was that caused Moria's abandonment: his reticence seems to imply that the events being recounted occurred at a great remove from the here and now; this in turn enhances the mystery, the vague undercurrent of dread that runs through the poem (and especially through the last stanza). This lack of particularity might be annoying in what is ostensibly a historical tale, but this is definitely one of those cases where less is more: a straightforward cataloguing of facts could never hope to capture the audience's attention the way Gimli's hypnotically beautiful couplets do.

And beautiful they certainly are: Tolkien's feel for the English language, for the music of words and the perfection of images, is flawless. It's a pity that his poetic output was (by and large) limited to within the confines of his invented universe (wide though they were); he could easily have been this century's successor to Kipling and Tennyson, so perfect is his verse, so effortless his prosody...

The World was Young, the Mountains Green

The world was young, the mountains green,
No stain yet on the Moon was seen,
No words were laid on stream or stone,
When Durin woke and walked alone.
He named the nameless hills and dells;
He drank from yet untasted wells;
He stooped and looked in Mirrormere,
And saw a crown of stars appear,
As gems upon a silver thread,
Above the shadow of his head.

The world was fair, the mountains tall,
In Elder Days before the fall
Of mighty kings in Nargothrond
And Gondolin, who now beyond
The Western Seas have passed away:
The world was fair in Durin's Day.

A king he was on carven throne
In many-pillared halls of stone
With golden roof and silver floor,
And runes of power upon the door.
The light of sun and star and moon
In shining lamps of crystal hewn
Undimmed by cloud or shade of night
There shone for ever fair and bright.

There hammer on the anvil smote,
There chisel clove, and graver wrote;
There forged was blade, and bound was hilt;
The delver mined, the mason built.
There beryl, pearl, and opal pale,
And metal wrought like fishes' mail,
Buckler and corslet, axe and sword,
And shining spears were laid in hoard.

Unwearied then were Durin's folk;
Beneath the mountains music woke:
The harpers harped, the minstrels sang,
And at the gates the trumpets rang.

The world is grey, the mountains old,
The forge's fire is ashen-cold;
No harp is wrung, no hammer falls:
The darkness dwells in Durin's halls;
The shadow lies upon his tomb
In Moria, in Khazad-dum.
But still the sunken stars appear
In dark and windless Mirrormere;
There lies his crown in water deep,
Till Durin wakes again from sleep.

-- J. R. R. Tolkien

P.S.: Some stuff in the initial funda isnt mine, thanks to Amit, a friend of mine.