There is a box in which distinct numbered balls have been kept. You have to pick two balls randomly from the lot.
If someone is offering you a 2 to 1 odds that the numbers will be relatively prime, for example
If the balls you picked had the numbers 6 and 13, you lose $1.
If the balls you picked had the numbers 5 and 25, you win $2.
A tree doubled in height each year until it reached its maximum height over the course of ten years. How many years did it take for the tree to reach half its maximum height?
A girl was sitting in her hotel room when she heard a knock on the door. She opened the door and found that a man was standing outside.
The man said, "Oh! I am really sorry, I thought this was my room."
He then walked through the corridor to the elevator. The girl did not know the man. She closed her door and called security asking them to apprehend the man.
What made her suspicious of that man? He might have been genuinely mistaken.
A boy was at a carnival and went to a booth where a man said to the boy, "If I write your exact weight on this piece of paper then you have to give me $50, but if I cannot, I will pay you $50." The boy looked around and saw no scale so he agrees, thinking no matter what the carny writes he'll just say he weighs more or less. In the end the boy ended up paying the man $50. How did the man win the bet?
In 2011, people playing Foldit, an online puzzle game about protein folding, resolved the structure of an enzyme that causes an Aids-like disease in monkeys. Researchers had been working on the problem for 13 years. The gamers solved it in three weeks.
