How many people must be gathered together in a room, before you can be certain that there is a greater than 50/50 chance that at least two of them have the same birthday?
Pronounced as one letter,
And written with three,
Two letters there are,
And two only in me.
I am double, I am single,
I am black blue and grey,
I am read from both ends,
And the same either way.
This is a most unusual paragraph. How quickly can you find out what is so unusual about it? It looks so ordinary, you'd think nothing was wrong with it. Actually, nothing IS wrong with it. But it is not as ordinary as you might think. If you think about it for a bit, you will find out why it is truly so unusual. So what is it? What is so unordinary about this paragraph?
I am working in a bus company. The company recently went under expansion and therefore there was not enough room for all the buses. As a result, twelve buses had to be stored outside.
If the company decides to expand the garage space by forty percent, enough space to accommodate the current buses will be created leaving enough space for twelve more buses if the need arises in future.
Can you calculate the number of buses that the company owns at present?
If the number is divided by 3, it gives the remainder of 1;
If the number is divided by 4, it gives the remainder of 2;
If the number is divided by 5, it gives the remainder of 3;
If the number is divided by 6, it gives the remainder of 4.
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.
