For the Time Being

A newly invented time machine is such that if a person steps into it, the machine takes his or her age in years and turns it upside-down.

E4

Time travel is tricky. For starters, think of clichés like: ‘what happens if you’re able to go back in time and murder your maternal grandfather?’ It would straightaway mean that your mother would not have been born and, therefore, neither would you. So who went back and did the murdering? Even more deafening is what happens if you can go back in time to a time when you were a baby and murder it? To shield us against just such nonsense the world famous physicist Stephen Hawking came up with what he called a “chronology protection conjecture” which says that the laws of physics are such as to prevent time travel on all but submicroscopic scales. But enough of the heavies. Let’s lighten up.

A newly invented time machine is such that if a person steps into it, the machine takes his or her age in years and turns it upside-down. If this upside-down age is still a realistic number, then the person will emerge from the machine with the new upside-down age. For example if you are 89 you would emerge as 68; if you are 96 you would come out at the same age of 96. However if you are some age like 47, the machine can do nothing. The scientist who invented it is 65 and wants to be a teenager again. How soon can he achieve his goal? (Assume that the machine can be used by a person only once a year.)

DEAR MS

(The question was: “Written in words ‘forty’ is the only number in an infinity of numbers which has a unique property. What is it?”— MS)

Alpha-Mail-Dept:

Hi, I am a grade 10 student and the unique property of “forty” is that it is the only number which has its letters arranged in alphabetical order.

• Chandraj Raju,chandrajraju@gmail.com

The unique property of the word “forty” is that each alphabet in the word comes in successive order according to the English alphabet.

• Abbasali Kasim, abbasali1069@gmail.com

(Nobody got all 12 of the word analogies correct, although five people got only one wrong. Most people tripped up on “Nerve is to Neuro as Kidney is to ?” by writing “Renal” which is an adjective and not a prefix like “Neuro”. Only one person got 11.5 correct. — MS)

Devil-May-Care-Dept:

(1) sailor : ship :: paramedic : ambulance; (2) leaves : deciduous :: branches : cladoptosic; (3) longitude : meridian :: latitude : parallel; (4) nerve : neuro :: kidney : nephro; (5) moon : planet :: planet : sun/star; (6) paper : origami :: flowers : ikebana; (7) garment : tailor :: candles : chandler; (8) mathematics : Dodgson :: wonderland : Carroll; (9) firm : flabby :: piquant : bland; (10) geometric forms : cubism :: dots of colours : pointillism; (11) swarm : bee :: murder : crow; (12) graveyard of planes : Bermuda :: graveyard of ships : dragon’s triangle (devil’s sea).

• Neethi Balagopal, neethibala@gmail.com

(Neethi got 11.5 correct because the correct answer to #12 is “Sargasso”. For instance the Wikipedia entry goes: “In several fictional depictions, the Sargasso Sea is detailed as a mythical floating ship graveyard in which ships get caught in the seaweeds and never get free again. Meanwhile the other puzzle was to figure the next word in: India, Victor, X-ray, Lima, Charlie, …?” — MS)

Roman-Entire-Dept:

String the first letter of each word and it reveals a sequence: I, V, X, L, C. These are the Roman numerals for the numbers 1, 5, 10, 50, 100. The next number in the series is 500, which is Delta.

• Ramesh S Mahalingam, ramesh@idealmc.com

 

ENDGAME(S)

1.   If a doughnut shaped piece of metal is heated, does the hole in the middle expand, contract or stay the same?

2.   A hen and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half. How many hens are needed to produce 12 eggs in six days? 

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

• Mindsport