[quote]Originally posted by hot_pastrami
[b]
There are three light bulbs in a room with no windows, and a closed door. In front of you are three on-off switches. You know that each switch controls one of the light bulbs inside the room, but you don't know which switch matches which bulb, and they are not wired in any particular order.

Your job is to match each switch to it's bulb. You may only enter the room once, and you may not leave the door open. How do you accomplish your task?


Since the riddle doesn't say you're not inside the room, can't you just flip the switches one by one?

Did I say meteor?

I meant huge jass chunk of ice


:eek:

I'm late to this thread. So, firstly, lumberjim you bastard you poisoned the order of my thoughts. I was surprised by how difficult it was to discipline my mind to actually think that one through without going through it like the question did. That was cool.

PEMDAS: The P is for Parentheses, the E is for Exponents.

With the ping-pong ball question, my immediate first thought was: "water!". When I heard that the room had no resources, I resorted to urine. The practical uses of urine that I know are: when dragging sleds with metal skates (I can't remember the proper word here) through snow, pee on the skates. I believe that the goal is to form a regular coating of ice. Urine is also a sterilizer, so you can use it to clean clothes, assuming that you have something to cover the smell. The Romans used bay leaves for this purpose.

My cheating solution to the three light bulbs question would be to watch the light under the door; but that is probably eliminated by the question.

"I have two ends, I have two rings, and a nail through the middle" -- I've been trying to figure out what this one is for the past week, rather halfheartedly.

As for the guys in the cabin, one possibility is that the hole is the chimney. They entered the cabin during the snowstorm, started a fire, and that either poisoned them, burned the cabin, or they froze to death. A simple possibility is that during the snowstorm, the roof caved in. However, I like the airplane answer better.

Aware of the baleful weather predicted by forecasters, we decided the _____ would be the best place for our company picnic.

(A) roof
(B) cafeteria
(C) beach
(D) park
(E) lake

A double eight domino - the eight dots on each side are in in a circular pattern, and there is a spinner in the middle that is basically a nail with a rounded head.

The one thing that doesn't quite perfectly match is that the dots are in a square, but then again a boxing ring is square...

I'm guessing cafeteria... as far as I know, "baleful" means "ominously cloudy" when referring to weather...

There is a common English word that is nine letters long. Each time you remove a letter from it, it still remains an English word - from nine letters right down to a single letter. What is the original word, and what are the words that it becomes after removing one letter at a time?

I am the beginning of eternity
The end of time and space
The beginning of every end,
And the end of every place.


what am I?

Baleful means "gloomy" but if you didn't know that --

(this is an SAT question BTW)

(D) Park - Nicer than a roof, you don't have to deal with the sand of a beach, and forecasters are always wrong.

Answer is B

Explanation of why the question is culturally biased:

http://www.nationalreview.com/commen...0401210937.asp

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that HP is one of the smartest motherfuckers on here.
hey, alan, what'd you get on that emode iq test?

Whoa! Thank you mouse! I had thought it had something to do with your old project (you know, the one you one an award for).

Don't be fooled, I'm not as smart as I like people to think I am.

I hadn't seen any link to an emode IQ test, but a Google search brought me this, so I'm guessing that's the one. Cellar searches for "emode" and "iq test" didn't reveal the thread where the test must have popped up.

I should mention that I think IQ tests are worth their weight in dead slugs, if even that. They are a vain attempt to scientifically measure the scientifically unmeasurable (say THAT ten times fast (Hell, say it ONE time fast (Shit, I'm three levels deep in parenthetical staements!))).
That last bit is awfully goddamned cryptic.