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Richard Walker

The Calming Effect of String

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I swallowed some string. Now I have a sense of inner piece.

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Richard Walker

Favourite Food

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I love mange tout. I could eat them all up.
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Richard Walker

It's fur better

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Persian cats don't care about the past. They live for the hair and meow.

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Richard Walker

Mondegreen overheard tonight

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The government have just been following the sirens.

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Richard Walker

Travelling Mailman Problem Again

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Edited by Richard Walker, Tuesday, 28 July 2020, 21:13

A few days ago I described a problem my friend thought of. Suppose we have a street with 10 houses, each one the same distance from the adjacent houses.

A postman starts at No. 1 and in order to get plenty of exercise decides to visit each house exactly once and return to No. 1 at the end, in such a way that he walks the greatest possible distance. How can he do that, and what is the maxiumum distance?

There are 362800 possible routes he can take, and of those 2880 achieve the greatest possible distance, which is 50. If we divide the houses numbers into two groups, 1-5 and 6-10, then the longest path is any one that travels alternately back and forth between the first group and the second group, visiting each house just once and then returning to No. 1. For example

1, 6, 2, 7, 3, 8, 4, 9, 5, 10, 1

Rather surprisingly the distance is the same whatever order we visit the houses in each group.

The same scheme will give the longest path for any even number of houses. A similar scheme works for an odd number, although in this case we can't completely alternate between right and left; at some point the postman will have to go in the same direction twice running.

A version of this problem was published by Martin Gardner in Scientific American June 1965 and appeared before that in One hundred problems in elementary mathematics by Hugo Steinhaus.

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Richard Walker

Groaner (plumming the depths)

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Q. How would you measure greens?

A. With a greengage.

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Richard Walker

Groaner

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I found this goblet but sadly it leaks. Must be a holey grail.
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Richard Walker

One liner

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They said I hadn’t paid my porridge bill. I told them I’d just have to oat.

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Richard Walker

Vampire Precautions

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As a protection against vampires, try combining celery, grapes, apple, walnuts and mayonnaise. I call this "ward off" salad.

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Richard Walker

Philosophical

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A. Is this a silly question?

B. If it is, then this is a silly answer.



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Richard Walker

Mr. Smith

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Edited by Richard Walker, Thursday, 23 July 2020, 00:06

When I was 14 the oldest person I knew was Mr Smith. He lived in a tiny cottage, one room up and one down, with a scullery cum kitchen behind the ground floor. The cottage was on a sharp 80 degree angle between two streets, contributing to its miniscule size. Later it became a one-man barbershop, which shows how small it was.

I was assigned by my local community to visit Mr Smith. Our church, of which I was a reluctant member, had a scheme for sending volunteers to visit old people who might be lonely and Mr Smith was my assignment, to visit during the summer break from school. I don’t remember minding at all. They told me he was 93 and I was curious to meet him.

I was a bit scared when knocking on his door the first time but we instantly got on, in spite of the 79-year age gap. He was a good conversationalist and asked me about myself and what my ambitions were. I don’t know how well I answered.

This was in 1960 and he was then 93. So his birth date had been 1867.  The American Civil War had ended only two years before.

In our weekly talks Mr Brown told me he had been a merchant seaman at the end of First World War and been part of a convoy that sailed to the far northern Russian port of Archangel. It was a hazardous run, with over 40 British merchant ships being lost between 1914 and 1918.

People in Archangel had given him simple presents. He showed me Easter breads – little buns stamped with a cross – and decorated wooden spoons, whose varnish had hardly dried in almost 50 years. I held and saw the past in my hands.

Mr Smith had been 47 when the First World War started. Think of it. At that point he was already too old to fight, although not too old to go to Archangel with the convoy.

When the summer holidays ended and my duty rota ceased I had good intentions to go and see him, but I was young and life beckoned. So I missed his going and I was sorry.


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Richard Walker

Randomness

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Q. Why is the Arrow of Time like the prize awarded to a chicken at a country fair?

A. Both are entropies.

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Richard Walker

Olds

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This is something I've been thinking about recently. Why are there no oldspapers?

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Richard Walker

Too Many Alerts

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I’ve got so many alerts set up on my devices. A minute or so back I had one that said:

Tomorrow

Starting at 00:00

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Richard Walker

The Travelling Mailman Problem

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Edited by Richard Walker, Monday, 20 July 2020, 23:45

A couple of days ago an associate and friend who likes intriguing puzzles sent me this different take on the notorious Travelling Salesman Problem.

The original question is: given a collection of cities and all the travel distances between each pair, how can a travelling saleman plan a circular tour that is as short as possible? This is a hard problem, in the sense that when there are any substantial number of cities finding the best solution will bring any computer to its knees.

Although my friend is not a mathematician but a developmental psychologist, he had a mathematician's idea, one that follows one of George PĂłlya's heuristics: can you solve a simpler version of the problem?

So my friend asked himself, what if the cities are all in a line?

Imagine the cities are not cities, but houses on a street, assumed to be equally spaced out, and a mailman wants to minimise their walking distance. The solution is just to walk along the numbers in sequence 1, 2, 3... up to the last house number. Pretty obvious, huh?

And then he asked another good mathematical question, what if we varied the problem? So he asked for the longest path the mailman could take. Imagine they have a yen for exercise and want to walk as far as possible.

If we have 10 houses each 1 unit apart, what is longest route they could take to visit each house exactly once, and return to the end of the street where they started?

And what if there are n houses; can you find a formula?


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Richard Walker

Not Hugh

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Knock-knock!

    Who’s there?

No it’s Jim.

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Richard Walker

Tom Swifty

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"I'm counting how many pots of tea you make", said Tom brutally.

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Richard Walker

Groaner

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My girlfriend’s a geologist but she says I take her for granite.

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Richard Walker

Tom Swifty

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"I adore the sound of church bells on a summer's evening", said Tom inspiringly.

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Richard Walker

Fire Alarm

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Edited by Richard Walker, Saturday, 18 July 2020, 01:30
numb
I could not feel the heat
eyeless
I could not see the flames
smell blind
I could not sense the smoke
deaf
I could not hear the flames
tasting fear
I was saved by that.
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Richard Walker

Nightmare

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Yesterday I had a bad dream. I was an old mongrel dog, and they put me in a cur home.

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Richard Walker

The History of the One Line Joke (1LJ)

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Edited by Richard Walker, Thursday, 16 July 2020, 00:57

To be honest I couldn’t find much out when I decided to research early one liners. It's true maxims - pithy sayings - have a long history but they aren't usually jokes. I managed to find this 1869 example from Mark Twain, and I think it squeaks in as a one-liner in the modern sense.

“I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week to make it up.”

A little modernisation and Tim Vine could adopt that.

Mark Twain was famous for witticisms. Here’s a rather misanthropic one I came across, but it made me laugh.

“To create man was a fine and original idea but to add the sheep was a tautology.”

He didn’t care for President Theodore Roosevelt (eponym of the Teddy Bear) either. Listen to this.

“Mr. Roosevelt is the most formidable disaster that has befallen the country since the Civil War – but the vast mass of the nation loves him, is frantically fond of him, even idolizes him. This is the simple truth. It sounds like a libel upon the intelligence of the human race, but it isn’t; there isn’t any way to libel the intelligence of the human race.” (September 13, 1907)”.

Ooh.






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Richard Walker

A Cautionary Tale

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A leader told such dreadful lies.

It made one gasp, and stretch ones eyes.

The original is from Hillaire Belloc

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cautionary_Tales_for_Children







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Richard Walker

Don’t Try This Experiment - Here’s Why

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I crossed ptarmigans with owls. The results were horrific: grouse hooting.

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Richard Walker

Tipping point

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You've probably seen those YouTube videos where someone texting in a shopping centre doesn't notice a fountain and falls in.

Something similar happened to me yesterday, except I was in a medieval theme park and it was a well.

Luckily just as I started my descent someone strong caught me by the ankles. Phew, I thought, lucky escape! But then they started talking. They went on and on. I tried to keep my end of the conversation up, in difficult circumstances, I have to say. But this went on for ages and ages - imagine it! -  and the person who had hold of my ankles was a crushing bore and wouldn't let me get a word in edgeways. Just when I was losing hope they uttered the words I welcomed but dreaded.

"Well, I'll let you go then".

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