Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

You left out the joke - "It was a simple series".

actually. If the etcetera is real, the bird and the cars will go up and down forever

Someone's got to come up with a way to make that "select between the X's" trick work with RSS. :)

Good point, Greg. I've put some spacers in.

I used my avian GIS 2.0 system to create a complex model of the bird in flight. After 45 minutes it collided with a 55 foot long haul truck... splat. So the answer is ".75 x 80 = 60km, then splat."

You know what's annoying? It didn't take long to realize that the cars meet after an hour. But it took until puzzling a bit then giving up to see the actual answer. The hard part isn't any math - it's connecting that the bird flies until the cars meet, and since you've got its speed, that's that. My brain refused to accept that that much flying-back-and-forth space could be encapsulated in so little time - the space between when the bird reaches the left car at 3 hours some-odd, and when the cars meet less than 45 minutes later. My brain insisted it needed to know when the bird meets the left car, before thinking farther ahead. This was useful though, because I've been thinking recently about the ways I think about math problems, and how usually I can know the answer if I allow it to be a simpler problem, but how hard that is to actually do.