Daily puzzles/problems.

[billl]

Oops, thanks.

Still, time well-spent.

[prendrelemick]

Mark has it.

I saw the clock partially through the carafe of water. I saw the 8 normally, but the 05 through the water bottle and it appeared as 50.

I was wearing my reading glasses and it was just a glance, I don't know if the 5 was the wrong way round, but it fooled me.

[billl]

Maybe the "1" in "8:10" got warped by the bulge in the center of the carafe, and therefore looked like a "5"? The "8" might go unaffected, but I'm thinking the "0" might end up looking like an "8" if it went through the same process of refraction, though...



EDIT: OK, Mark's solution makes sense -- but how come it didn't look like "508" ? Only half was covered/affected by the carafe, I guess...

[prendrelemick]

Yes thats what happened (Only half was affected) but I reckoned mark had broken the back of the problem. I shall be recreating the scenario in our kitchen in a mimute.

[kasie]

And just how did you explain to (the longsuffering) Mrs Mick why you were lying on the kitchen floor looking at the clock through a glass of water? Hmmm?? On a Sunday morning???

[MarkBastable]

Okay - I'll come up with something shortly.

[prendrelemick]

And just how did you explain to (the longsuffering) Mrs Mick why you were lying on the kitchen floor looking at the clock through a glass of water? Hmmm?? On a Sunday morning???

That's quite normal behavior isn'it?

From my research I think the 5 was the wrong way round, and the lining up of clock, glass and eye has to be exact.



Apologies to billl, I may have conceded the puzzle to mark a bit too soon, before all details were in.

[MarkBastable]

Major Edit at 15:30 BST - Apologies

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I went to a Direct Grant Grammar School which - for the non-Brits here - was a little backwater of the state education system in which bright and able working-class kids could be offered a classical academic education without having to cough up for it. It is because of this education that I have read enough Tolstoy to know that I can live without him.

Due to some political positioning that was beyond me even at the time, the right-wing party in the UK was in favour of grammar schools and the left-wing was against them. You'd think it'd've been the other way round. But this sympathy from the right meant that on two separate occasions the Tory education minister acted as patronising handshaker at our annual Prizegiving Day. Her name was Margaret Thatcher. So, as a teenager, I had plenty of opportunity to assassinate her, had I known what she was going to do to the country a few years later.

Towards the end of my school career, there was talk of raising money to buy some piece of equipment for the science lab. I dunno what - I was a Modern Languages specialist. But I know we had to raise five hundred pounds, and I also know that it was my mate Fizz - a physicist, chemist and entrepreneurial purveyor of hallucinogens synthesized in the lab during lunch - who came up with the idea of auctioning Mrs Thatcher's 'thank you for having me' letter. Our English teacher took the letter to be valued by auctioneers in Mayfair and, disappointingly, they reckoned it'd raise about £150, of which they'd be very happy to take ten per cent commission.

Stick with me. This is all going somewhere.

My brilliant idea was to organise a school sweepstake on how much the letter would sell for at auction. There were eight hundred boys in the school (yes, boys only. I didn't talk to an actual girl till I was about thirty.) so if we could get each of them to part with 25p (this was when 25p was 25p. And it was not long after it was five bob.) we'd add another two hundred quid to the total. We needed to offer a prize, and we didn't want to part with the takings, so we persuaded the headmaster that one Friday the winning boy could choose the music that was played over the PA as we walked into assembly. (Which, it turned out, was the first time that most people in my school - including the headmaster - ever heard Star***ker, by the Rolling Stones.)

On the day of the auction, our English teacher attended the saleroom in town. The idea was that he would call us after the auction and tell us what the letter went for. As there was so much interest around the school, we were going to put the realised sale price up on the digital display in the window of the main hall, that was usually used to show how many days the school had gone without any injury occuring. (Or a drug-bust happening. Something like that.)

However, that very morning some idiot first-former swinging from the stage curtains in imitation of Tarzan knocked over a scenery flat that toppled off the stage and took out the digital display completely.

"Great," I said, kicking the diminutive culprit up the steps to the lighting gantry. "Now what?"

"Coincidentally," Fizz said, nodding at the shattered bits of the digital display, "I made one of those last term. It's still in the physics lab."

"Well, go and get it!" I told him, punting the first-former over the railing and into Row B.

Fizz's contraption was a board about two feet by one, with wires all over the back of it. But it would work, and having punched in the right number on the keypad Fizz had cannibalised from a broken calculator, we could hang the board in the window where the 'official' one used to be.

Fizz was sitting with it on his lap as we waited for the English teacher to call in the auction sale price. He was fiddling. Suddenly, the phone rang. I leapt up.

"Uh-oh," Fizz said, looking at the board. "We have a problem."

"What?"

"Not all the lights work. Look."

As I picked up the phone, I glanced across at the board, into which Fizz had punched 888 - but it didn't say that.

As Fizz feared, some of the components were kaput. What I saw was this.



"It could take days to mend it," Fizz said.

"Hi, Sir," I said into the phone. "How did the sale go? I hope you had better luck than we're having. What did it sell for?"

It turned out that I was wrong about our luck - Fizz and I were very lucky indeed. The sale price of Margaret Thatcher's letter just happened to be the largest three-figure number we could display on Fizz's faulty read-out machine...

[prendrelemick]

792..

[billl]

Same guess.

The write-up was really fantastic, I guess you just couldn't wait for our highly-attuned digital clock puzzle instincts to dull a bit over time...

[MarkBastable]

Yeah. I knew it was too easy. I just felt like writing it during lunch.

What number does Fizz punch in?

And given that his real name was Paul Henry Isley, why did we call him Fizz?

[NikolaiI]

Hm I may be missing something but I don't see how you can get that number, even by turning it upside down. My bid is 261 - oh, to say it correctly, 261 is the number Fizz punched in..

[edit] because the first letter in each of his first name, followed by the first 2 of his last name, spell Phis, and you spelled it Fizz.

[MarkBastable]

Hm I may be missing something but I don't see how you can get that number, even by turning it upside down. My bid is 261 - oh, to say it correctly, 261 is the number Fizz punched in..

[edit] because the first letter in each of his first name, followed by the first 2 of his last name, spell Phis, and you spelled it Fizz.

Nope, on the number punched in.

Yes - first ever day of school he turned up with a satchel, on which his parents has stuck little gold letters above the clasp that read:

PHISLEY

[NikolaiI]

Oh, 241.

[prendrelemick]

264 is what NickoliI meant I think.