For anyone who hasn't read The Mythical Man-Month, it is a timeless, compelling, relevant book on software engineering and project management. It is also accessible to non-technical audiences with lessons that apply across much of modern workforces.
Why couldn't 9 women deliver a baby in one month? That's perfectly reasonable. Put the baby in a vehicle. Drive. Maybe stop at some hotels or just sleep in the vehicle with all 9 women. Then eventually you reach your destination in 1 month. Deliver baby. Profit.
I feel like a lot of the puzzles in Professor Layton games are like this. Any time you find yourself starting some complex algebra or multiplication, you need to consider rereading the problem and seeing if you just need to pick a number that’s there.
For example: A bus can travel 100 miles on a full tank with its full passenger load of 80 people. If everyone gets off the bus, then how far can it travel?
The answer
0 miles. With everyone off, there’s no one to drive it.
Snopes says this is "undetermined" (also that CDs hold 74 minutes). Honesty pleasently surprised by how plausible it is from the given evidence though, I was expecting this to turn out to be definitively a myth.
I did orchestra as student, and there's so much you get out of watching the conductor, way more than the downbeat, and a good conductor, orchestra relationship can get to the point subtle nuances effect how you play, and I just imagine a guy trying to conduct and hold his cheeks closed, and the whole rushed performance sounding absurd with unintentional volume and speed changing abruptly all over the place.
Reminds me of an animator saying ''If a pregnant woman takes nine months to have a baby, can four women have a baby in two and a half months?''
The point is, somethings can't be done faster through simple numbers. Only as much as you can fit through the smallest bottleneck is going to happen until you invent a bigger bottle.
It is. The original worksheet it's cropped from says "beware, one of these is a trick question!", but obviously that was cropped out because someone really wanted to create an opportunity to feel superior to someone.
Most speedrunners know about the glitch in Beethoven's 9th where if you have the entire brass section make a quarter turn to the left at just the right moment of the open fifths the whole symphony freezes for a second and then drops you straight into the Ode to Joy.
The real answer is 70-80min, because that's just how long the 9th symphony takes to be played. And they better add a chorus as well, otherwise the 4th movement won't be as good as it normally is
Let’s say you put like 1000 violinists all in a big, long row. Then, have the first violinist play a note, then the second plays the very same note, then the third, and so on. Let’s say you could also time it so that at the very moment the sound wave from one violinist hits the next is when that one plays the note. Brrrrrrump! All the way across. Let’s also say you could time it perfectly so that the waves don’t cancel each other out. What would happen?
I think eventually you reach a point where previously played notes would lose all of their energy, meaning there's probably an upper limit on how loud it would get for an observer at the end. Something something Doppler effect.
Not the Doppler effect, as that only applies to moving objects, but instead the inverse square law, where the energy of the sound wave decreases by the square of the distance from the origin, since it spreads in a sphere with the energy being spread across the surface of the sphere, resulting in a very quick dropoff in the loudness.
As I was going to St. Ives I met a man with seven wives. Each wife had 7 sacks, each sack had 7 cats, each cat had 7 kits. Kits, cats, sacks, wives; how many were going to St. Ives?
The answer could be however many beats the longest note is at however many BPM you choose given that 60 is a large enough number to cover each pitch and quality of note in the piece. Having all the essential notes and durations covered, the rest is just inessential noodling left as an exercise for the reader.
Just put the orchestra on a spaceship approaching light speed, and you can take even less time (relatively experienced by an off-spaceship audience.) If you still want the shockwave, you can use an Alcubierre drive.