Earlier today I set you the following puzzle: Aboriginal groups are divided into subgroups, called “skins.” Your skin is determined at birth, based on your parents’ skins, and it does not change in your lifetime. Your skin will determine certain social rules, such as who you are allowed to marry. The Warlpiri, who live northwest…
Hi guzzlers, Today I have a logic puzzle based on the complex kinship rules found in Australian Aboriginal society. Aboriginal groups are divided into subgroups, called “skins.” Your skin is determined at birth, based on your parents’ skins, and it does not change in your lifetime. Your skin will determine certain social rules, such as…
Credit: Cristie Guevara/public domain The Wizard of Oz, followed by Star Wars and Psycho, is identified as the most influential film of all time in a study published in the open access journal Applied Network Science. Researchers at the University of Turin, Italy, calculated an influence score for 47,000 films listed in IMDb (the internet…
Credit: CC0 Public Domain Chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes have been on the rise for decades. They’re the number one cause of death and disability in the U.S. today and one reason why health care costs are out of control. So identifying people at risk for chronic conditions before they get sick makes…
Earlier today I set you five puzzles from More Geometry Snacks. Here are the questions each followed by two methods of solution. Sometimes the simple action of drawing in a few extra lines reveals the solution clearly. 1. A point inside a square is connected to its four vertices. What fraction of the square is…
A new statistical test lets scientists figure out if two groups are similar to one another. Credit: paleontologist natural/shutterstock.com A paleontologist returns to her lab from a summer dig and sets up a study comparing tooth length in two dinosaur species. She and her team work meticulously to avoid biasing their results. They remain blind…
One line spreads the risk of slowdowns out over the whole group. Credit: James R. Martin/Shutterstock.com Warning: After reading this article, you will never again stand in a line without thinking about how to make your wait time shorter. And as an expert in operations management, I’m here to spread the word that sometimes a…
Hi guzzlers. Today’s puzzles are about the shade, by which I mean the shaded areas in the geometrical diagrams below. The images are to be studied and contemplated, until the pleasurable moment of insight arrives… (Background help: the area of a triangle is half the base times the height. And Pythagoras’s Theorem states that the…
Nine-year-olds across England will soon have to brush up on their times tables, as the government announced details of its compulsory multiplication check to be taken in primary schools. From June 2020, every state school pupil in year 4 will be quizzed on their times tables up to 12, answering 25 questions in an online…
Credit: Cornell Brand Communications Life can be tough for mobile app developers. After creating an app that helps users book a hotel room or redeem loyalty points, they need to figure out how well the app works—and how it stacks up against competitors. When a customer writes an indignant online review saying “I can’t scroll…