Another Golding Oldie

A time came when the boys had to light a fire but, of course, they were marooned and didn’t have or weren’t carrying matches with them. So the obvious solution was to use this particular boy’s glasses as a magnifying glass and get some flames going.

E4

Remember how we had seen famous science fiction writer HG Wells make a big fat scientific mistake in letting the protagonist of The Invisible Man be able to see when he should have been blind, since his retinas would have been see-through too?

Well, here’s another science mistake, made this time by a Nobel Prize-winning English author William Golding in yet another classic called Lord of the Flies, a dystopian novel about a group of children — survivors of a plane crash — stuck on a desert island, who try to govern themselves with disastrous results. Golding should have known better, considering he had studied science for two years, but what the heck, don’t we all in our chosen fields, too? Don’t answer that because here’s what the great author wrote and what my main question is.

One of the pre-adolescent kids on that uninhabited island (who shall not be named right now since you’ll immediately Wiki the mistake that was made) was myopic or shortsighted and wore powered spectacles.

Anyway, a time came when the boys had to light a fire but, of course, they were marooned and didn’t have or weren’t carrying matches with them. So the obvious solution was to use this particular boy’s glasses as a magnifying glass and get some flames going.

They soon managed to do this and thereafter did several times again, as if fire was going out of fashion. However there’s a profound problem with this scenario but, please, DON’T bury me in a snow of emails because you think the problem is so easy. Or should I now call it e-hail?

DEAR MS

(The problem was: “In a book with 100 pages, some pages are torn off. The sum of numbers on the remaining pages is 4,949. Which pages are torn off?” — MS)

Page-Turner-Dept:

Great question! Compliments to Sheikh Sintha Mathar. The total of all the page numbers in the book is 5,050 and so to get a total of 4,949, we need to tear off pages whose numbers add up to 101. When we tear a page of the book we are actually tearing the sheet off, which is two pages, back to back. The page numbers of any sheet torn off add up to an odd number. Hence, to arrive at a total of 101 we need to tear an odd number of sheets off. Several combinations of page numbers will give us the answer (all happen to be 3-sheet combinations): 1, 2, 23, 24, 25, 26 or 3, 4, 21, 22, 25, 26, etc, etc, up to 13, 14, 15, 16, 21, 22 and 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20.

•Ramesh S Mahalingam,ramesh@idealmc.com 

I have a counter-question: What are the maximum and minimum number of pages to be torn off from a book with page numbers from 1 to 100, so that the total of the remaining pages is 4,949? Which are those pages?

•K T Rajagopalan, ktremail@gmail.com

(The other problem was: “During rocket launches, why do they count backwards from 10 to zero and not the other way around from zero to 10?” — MS)

We-Have-Ignition-Dept:

Every rocket launch has a lift off time and counting down backwards to a specific launch time works like a timer. It also helps with unity in action. If they counted forwards they would have to remember a particular number they were counting up to which some people could forget. But 0 is a universal limit. Before the launch the time goes like T - 10 seconds, T - 9 seconds, etc. After launch it’s T + 1 second, T + 2 seconds etc.

•Navjot Singh Bains, &nbains100@gmail.com 

(The other problem was: “Famous French filmmaker François Truffaut once received a greeting card from Alfred Hitchcock with the following inscribed: “Wishing you a happy ABCDEFGHIJKMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ.” What do you think it meant?” — MS)

‘Tis-The-Season-Dept:

There is no L in the string of alphabets. No L becomes NOEL when written, which means Christmas in French.

•Saikrishna Swaminathan, saikrishna.s1998@gmail.com 

Alfred Hitchcock was wishing Merry Christmas: “Happy no L.”

•Gary Miller, &garyr_miller@hotmail.com 

ENDGAME

A long strip of paper is twisted several times over and over again and then its ends are joined. Can you find at least two methods of determining whether the number of twists is odd or even?

(To get in touch with Mukul, mail him at mukul.mindsport@gmail.com)

• Mindsport