Its something that each of us devours,
Not just us but birds, beats, trees, and flowers,
Frets iron and nibbles steel,
Toil hard stones to meal,
Exterminates king, collapse town,
And blows the mountains down.
Birbal was jester, counsellor, and fool to the great Moghul emperor, Akbar.
The villagers loved to talk of Birbal's wisdom and cleverness,
and the emperor loved to try to outsmart him.
One day Akbar (emperor) drew a line across the floor.
"Birbal," he ordered, "you must make this line shorter, but you cannot erase any bit of it."
Everyone present thought the emperor had finally outsmarted Birbal.
It was clearly an impossible task.
Yet within moments the emperor and everyone else present had to agree that Birbal had made the line shorter without erasing any of it.
How could this be?
In a classic wine shop, the list of three most popular wines are:
- The cost of 1 French wine bottle: 500$
- The cost of 1 German wine bottle: 100$
- The cost of 20 Dutch wine bottles: 100$
John entered the wine shop and he needs to buy
- All three types of wine bottles.
- Needs to buy Dutch wine bottles in multiples of 20.
- Need to buy 100 wine bottles in total.
John has only 10000$. How many wine bottles of each type, John must buy?
1. Gianni was either in Italy or France in 1997.
2. If Gianni did not kill Versace, Hilton must have killed him.
3. If Versace died of suffocation, then either Gianni killed him or Versace committed suicide.
4. If Gianni was in Italy in 1997, then Gianni did not kill Versace.
5. Versace died of suffocation, but he did not kill himself.
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.
