You have eight brown gloves and six black gloves in a drawer. Reaching in blindly, how many gloves do you have to take out to be sure of having a matching pair? Answer: Three. If the first two don’t match, the third is bound to match one or the other.
Huh?
Thats what came up when I did a random dip into “math puzzles”. And there was no way to get at the author, short of hacking. Why in the name of all that is holy, and I am a correctness-worshipper, would anybody publish egregiously stupid stuff and not provide a way to correct it? Is it part of a plot to dumb down our youth?
Actually, I can’t see that there is any one right answer, though that one is certainly wrong. My first thought was eight gloves. Assuming that the gloves are actually pairs, then you might pick seven left gloves in a row, but then the eighth is bound to be a right. Or, if you can distinguish left from right by touch, pick five lefts and a right. The lefts can’t all be the wrong color. It’s a good question, really, but blandly providing one wrong answer is infuriating.
Ah, but this is a songwriting blog. And on Thursday evening I got to co-write with Rob Lopresti. He had a topic ready, a local sailing story from 1875, and it felt to me as if he had most of the song done but inaccessible somewhere in his head, because he came up with words, lines, and verses a lot quicker than I did. Still, it was fun, and I got to do my share of the melody. Then he put it up on Google Documents and shared it with me. Now that’s a great tool. Google claims we’re up to the eightieth revision at this point, but it seems to save a version every time somebody finishes a line. Probably the realistic figure would be about three revisions each. This is actually fun.
