This message was transmitted from Earth into outer space toward four stars each about 60 light-years away. If you start at the top and scan down slowly, you will recognize the pattern and be able to read it:
This message is almost entirely data, with the last line being the only information about us. What makes the last line so telling?
(Thanks to NASA and Yuvan Dutil & Stephane Dumas)
A woman walked up to a man behind a counter and handed him a book.
He looked at it and said, “That will be four dollars.”
She paid the man and then walked out without the book. He saw her leave without it but did not call her back.
How come?
You and your friend have been dropped off by helicopter at the southern end of an island in order to observe an endangered species of bird.
The island is very small. It’s only a hundred yards wide and a thousand yards long. It also has sheer cliffs hundreds of feet high all around it. But finding the rare bird will be difficult because the island is covered in thick brush that’s five feet tall.
Unfortunately, even before you’ve started your search things take a bad turn. You see smoke. As the helicopter took off over the northern end of the island, the pilot flicked out a cigarette butt and inadvertently started a fire that smoldered unobserved for a while and then flared up. It’s now being fanned by a strong wind heading in your direction, and you have no way of contacting the helicopter or calling for help.
The fire will reach you in half an hour. You don’t have any tools with you, so you try to dig a hole with your hands but the ground is too hard. You look over the edge of the cliffs and realize that even climbing down a few feet is impossible, and jumping would mean certain death.
Even from where you’re standing you can tell the heat of the fire is intense. Trying to run through it would be fatal.
So, in order to survive, what do you and your friend do?
Thanks to Everything He Hasn’t Told You Yet by Burton Silver & Martin O’Connor
True story: There’s a leak under my bathroom sink. I buy a new connector hose. There’s a tag on the middle of the hose that says “1/2 inch COMP to Valve – 1/2 inch FIP to Faucet”. Sure enough, it fits the valve, but it’s the wrong size for the faucet. The end that fits the valve, however, happens to also be the right size for the faucet.
I return to the hardware store looking for a hose that says “1/2 inch COMP to Faucet – 1/2 inch COMP to Valve”.
Unfortunately (or fortunately), they don’t make such a hose.
What was wrong with my reasoning?
