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Awwwwww

Some people say anything….where have you been since the puzzle was posted in May…..working it out I guess…don’t know why….Hans did it over a cuppa the same week….. Merry Christmas one and all.

Where i’ve been since it was posted in May was Not Here – just signed up.

Couple of your questions do not have a single definitive answer:

10. Which way does water go down the drain, counter or clockwise? Not answerable; the area of the wirls its too small for coriolis force to have any real effect.

17 How many lug nuts are on a standard car wheel? Depends on year and manufacturer. Four, five or six are all possible correct answers.

Here’s one – which direction do lug nuts turn to tighten? (Sort of a trick question; again depends on manufacturer and year.) And, if they don’t all turn the same way – why not? (HINT: Has to do with racing equipment…)

As to it being attributed to Einstein, that’s hooey. And, i assure you, moe than 2% of the world’s populace can solve it. In fact, it’s such a common type of puzzle that puzzle fans have names for it – my own favourite is “The shortstop eats spaghetti.”

Many computer games are based on this sort of matrix puzzle – “Inspector Parker“, for instance, or the shareware game “Dinner with Moriarity”

To solve:

set up a twenty-five by twenty-five matrix; each column and each row represents one of the characteristics (five for nationality, five for colour, etc.) Make sure to enter them in the same order in the rows and columns..

Put a tick mark in each cell that represents a condition that the clues say exists: – that is, mark the intersection of “Brit” and “red”, for instance. (“The Brit lives in a red house.”)

Now you can mark all the cells that represent intersection of the Swede, the Norski, the German or the Dane and “red”.

Now mark off all other cells that represent a condition that the clues say does NOT obtain – that is, mark off “Norwegian” and “blue” (“The Norwegian lives next door to the blue house.”)

Keep this up and, eventually you will know who keeps fish.

(I built a matrix for this specific game, you can find it online here…)

SeaMonkey 2.0 has been released. This is a free all-in-one internet application suite combining a web browser, e-mail, newsgroup and feed client, IRC chat and HTML editing.

I use SeaMonkey’s HTML editing capability a bit, though i usually wind up doing tweaks by hand using EditPad Lite.

It seems to write clean minimal code that runs with no problems on Opera, Firefox and IE8 (well, minor issues with page positioning on IE, easily fixed by a quick hand-edit).

…I note your bad usage of “…i’ll log off quick…” in the quoted text. Please capitalise your I’s in future when using it in the form of the singular pronoun of the first person please.

I’ll tell you what – take that advice, fold it till it’s all corners, ans then stick it somewhere uncomfortable…

I’ve been using the cummings standard for more than thirty-five years (ever since i had to use an ancient IBM electric typer with wonky shifts), and it is now my standard format for anything i write that i’m not getting paid for.