How to Make Decisions
Issue 58

We welcome your letters, questions and desperate pleas for help in this uncaring world. As always, e-mail WBXylo at Gmail.com. Don’t fret about e-mailing me with puzzle problems; I won’t yell at you.

How to Make Slime
(Source: Weise, Jim Weird Science)

1. Place 1/2 teaspoon of borax into a jar.

2. Add one cup distilled water into that jar.

3. Stir until the borax dissolves.

4. In another jar mix 1 drop food coloring with 1 cup distilled water and 4ounces of Elmer’s glue.

5. Stir this mixture.

6. In an empty yogurt container mix half of the contents of each of the jars.

7. Stir this until gooey.

Congratulations! You have made a non-Newtonian fluid.

How to Skip to level 45 in Zombies Ate My Neighbors

Enter the password: VNYQ

Word of the Week

phthiriasis: infestation with lice.
(Source- There’s a Word for it by Charles Harrington Elster)

This Week’s Puzzle (Difficulty: alliaceous … wait, that doesn’t make sense as a difficulty.)

What connects the following words?

fish
fruit
board

Last Week’s Puzzle(Fifth grade group work)

Here is the problem:

Imagine you are at a school that still has student lockers. There are 1000 lockers, all shut and unlocked, and 1000 students.
1. Suppose the first student goes along the row and opens every locker.
2. The second student then goes along and shuts every other locker beginning with number 2.
3. The third student changes the state of every third locker beginning with number 3. (If the locker is open the student shuts it, and if the locker is closed the student opens it.)
4. The fourth student changes the state of every fourth locker beginning with number 4.
Imagine that this continues until the thousand students have followed the pattern with the thousand lockers. At the end, which lockers will be open and which will be closed? Why?

IP Renaissance man Eric Szulczewski offers the answer:
The only lockers that will remain open are those numbers which are perfect squares (1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, etc.). All other numbers will have an even number of state changes, thus closing the locker. The perfect squares will have an odd number of state changes.

Last 5 posts by ML Kennedy

• How to Make Decisions (72) - June 19th, 2007
• How to Make Decisions (71) - June 12th, 2007
• How To Make Decisions (70) - June 5th, 2007
• How to Make Decisions (69) - May 29th, 2007
• How to Make Decisions (68) - May 21st, 2007