i am looking at that site.
it first i thought it was a pity that there are clickable solutions, because no one can prove that they solved any puzzle there.
i will mention the first few questions.
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i got (Q1) which was easy. the possible solution i thought of was rather compelling, and when i clicked "solution" i found i guessed correctly. i can not prove it because anyone can click on the solution and pretend they "got it"
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Q2 : In the middle of the ocean is a yacht. Several corpses are floating in the water nearby.
the solution was: A group of people were on an ocean voyage in a yacht. One day, they decided to go swimming -- they put on their swimsuits and dove off the side. They discovered belatedly that they have forgotten to put a ladder down the side of the yacht and were unable to climb back in, so they drowned.
i do not think that was a well framed scenario. there was no information in the question which would give rise to "ladders" being involved.
i spent a while on the question (i do not click "solution" until i am finished trying to solve it).
i thought "corpses floating in the middle of the ocean" was odd.
when a person drowns by inhaling water, their buoyancy becomes too weak to keep them afloat and they sink. almost all freshly drowned bodies will sink. they come back to the surface after the decomposition process has produced some gasses that are trapped in the corpse that make the corpse buoyant enough to float.
but in the middle of the ocean, they would sink to 12,000 ft (on average) after drowning and then the process of decomposition is slowed at that depth. the main decomposition process at that depth is scavenging, but some internal bacteria are still able to feed on the nutrients of the corpse with no immunity (the immune system is dead).
i would not expect a corpse to rise back up 12,000 ft from the floor of the mid ocean (after gaseous bloating (which usually takes 3 days in warm shallow water)) and break the surface ever again.
even if they did, their yacht would be far away from them because they are not influenced by the same surface currents as the yacht while they are deep underwater.
so i imagined that they died by other means than drowning, because a dead body that did not inhale water will float (only just).
the question stated "several corpses" so i wondered whether they were all killed by box jellyfish (but they do not inhabit mid ocean regions). maybe the people were all poisoned by something that made them feel very hot and they wanted to jump in the water which did not save them. maybe they were all killed by pirates who threw them overboard after killing them and looted their yacht and left.
but the solution of ladders that were too short to climb back on the boat is ludicrous.
ladders on a boat are built into the boat and they always reach the waterline so i could not have imagined that this yacht had a deck that was too high to be scaled, and it also had a design flaw that it's ladders were too short.
i did not like question 2 and i got it "wrong"
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Q3: A man is lying dead in a room. There is a large pile of gold and jewels on the floor, a chandelier attached to the ceiling, and a large open window.
and the solution is reported to be : The room is the ballroom of an ocean liner which sank some time ago. The man ran out of air while diving in the wreck
that is not the only "solution" that a lateral mind could arrive at given only the words in the question.
i did not conceive of the official "solution" , and my reaction to the "solution" is:
ocean liners have V shaped keels and do not settle flat on the ocean floor. they always fall
to one side. any jewelry that was on the floor would have slid to the skirting board (still technically on the floor) abutting the downside wall.
is the only room with a chandelier in a cruise ship the "ball room"? the chandelier would most probably not be still affixed to the ceiling if the ship had been down for a long time.
if the ballroom was the place that people wore the most jewelry, and the ship went down, and their bodies decomposed so much that only their jewelry remained, then the ship would have had to have gone down more than 100 years ago and the chandelier would not still be attached to the ceiling.
as well, if there was much "misappropriated jewelry" in the ballroom, then it suggests that lots of people were in it at the time, so it was in the evening when the ship came to grief. it is less likely that any windows would be open (let alone a large one) at that time. whatever...........the list can go on but who cares anyway?.
my personal solution to this "puzzle" was that a thief who wanted to rob a safe in a room near to the ballroom (of a mansion not a ship) was not able to set foot on the floor because of pressure sensitive alarm mats. he decided to swing from the chandeliers in order to get to the safe room without touching the floor.
he made it and got the jewels and on his way out, he intended to swing from the chandeliers all the way out a window he opened that was large enough to accept a level of inaccuracy of trajectory on his final exit swing. but he lost his grip on the chandelier in one room and he fell to the floor and died and spilled his "booty" in the process (30 ft ceilings). really, there is no "anchor point" in the question for either vertical or lateral (horizontal) thinkers to build upon.
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Q4: A man and his wife raced through the streets. They stopped, and the husband got out of the car. When he came back, his wife was dead, and there was a stranger in the car.
my guess at the solution was that they were driving recklessly and they had had a severe accident and the husband was still conscious and the wife was not. the man did not have a cell phone and so he had to walk (run) to a payphone to get help. during that time many emergency workers became aware of the accident due to reports from citizens, and they arrived on the scene.
when the man got back from the pay phone, his wife was dead and there was an emergency worker in the car trying to extricate her from the wreckage.
the official solution is different and it is equally or more precarious in logic to mine given the data contained in the question.
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sheep say "bah bah bah"
i am one letter ahead of them and i say "blah" blah" blah".
that is why i am not satisfied talking to sheep.
the gate is closed i find now that i am at my boundary so i will say that that is all i have to say.
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21 Jul 2009, 5:24 am
