#78 Farewell My Blubbery
鈥淭he most interesting thing about Milly Farlowe鈥檚 latest 鈥榚ffort鈥� in the detective fiction genre is the page numbering: it starts at 1 and goes up to some highest number, a number of itself quite modest, but far too high for a plot of such flimsy construction.鈥� Thus spake Zara Thrusta, the literary critic of the Daily Grind, dismissing her best friend鈥檚 new crime novel, Farewell My Blubbery.
Well, I had a look at the numbering and it was just as Thrusta had said. But I noticed something else. If you reverse the order of the digits of the three-digit number at the bottom of the last page of this book, you get exactly the same number as the total number of digits used in numbering its pages. 鈥淚s it a long book?鈥� I hear you ask. Well, you tell me: how many pages are there in Farewell My Blubbery?
Answer next week
#77 Sir Prancelot鈥檚 archers
Solution
The eight archers at the turret must alternate odd/even, so the napping archer must be an odd number. The four evens at the turret add to 20, so the four odds, which must also sum to 20, can only be 1+3+7+9, meaning the napping archer is number 5.
There are two possible arrangements of these eight archers around the turret: 12389476 and 12983476 (clockwise or anticlockwise).
Quick quiz #70
1 The first test of a UK atomic bomb took place in which country?
2 What is made using the Haber-Bosch process?
3 How many qubits did Google鈥檚 Sycamore computer use to achieve quantum supremacy in 2019?
4 Latvian mathematician Daina Taimina is best known for using crochet models to visualise what concept?
5 M茅ni猫re鈥檚 disease affects which part of the body?
Quick quiz #70
Answers
1 Australia. It was detonated in a lagoon of the Montebello Islands, an archipelago off the country鈥檚 west coast, on 3 October 1952
2 Ammonia
3 53. The chip鈥檚 54th qubit failed
4 Hyperbolic planes 鈥� surfaces where the space curves away from itself at every point
5 The ear