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?
Speaking of rivers, a man calls his dog from the opposite side of the river. The dog crosses the river without getting wet, and without using a bridge or boat. How?
In a rainy season, one day 3 huge ladies walked under a normal-sized umbrella.
The umbrella is not huge enough to accommodate all 3 ladies yet not a single lady got wet. Why?
It can't be seen, can't be felt, can't be heard, and can't be smelt.
It lies behind stars and under hills, And empty holes it fills.
It comes first and follows after, Ends life, and kills laughter.
What is it?
There was once a college that offered a class on probability applied to the real world. The class was relatively easy, but there was a catch. There were no homework assignments or tests, but there was a final exam that would have only one question on it. When everyone received the test paper it was a blank sheet of paper with a solitary question on it: 'What is the risk?'.Most students were able to pass, but only one student received 100% for the class! Even stranger was that he only wrote down one word!
What did he write?
A swan sits at the center of a perfectly circular lake. At an edge of the lake stands a ravenous monster waiting to devour the swan. The monster can not enter the water, but it will run around the circumference of the lake to try to catch the swan as soon as it reaches the shore. The monster moves at 4 times the speed of the swan, and it will always move in the direction along the shore that brings it closer to the swan the quickest. Both the swan and the the monster can change directions in an instant.
The swan knows that if it can reach the lake's shore without the monster right on top of it, it can instantly escape into the surrounding forest.
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.
