Sunday November 14, 2004 The Floating Hourglass Puzzle
|
|
In his Games column in the September 1992 edition of Omni, Scot Morris writes about The Floating Hourglass. At the end of the article he invites readers to send in their theories (100 words or less) on how it works; the best to be shown in a following month. Of course, this is the last edition of the Omni magazines I bought at the Palo Alto library book sale last month, so I didn't get to see what the winning entries were. So I thought I'd do some googling around. Oh boy, was this serendipitous. First, I found an article on this by Herb Weiner on the Marilyn is Wrong website. which is a collection of interesting errors from the Ask Marilyn ® column published weekly in Parade Magazine. |
I could have spent the rest of the day just browsing there, but no, I continued on and found another reference to this conundrum, as a paper entitled "Beautiful but Wrong, the Floating Hourglass Puzzle" by Scot Morris, in a book entitled Mathemagician and Pied Puzzler: A Collection in Tribute to Martin Gardner. Then I found that the book is online. Pages 130-138 of this PDF document give the solution, plus the best of the answers to the competition in the Omni article!
And now I've got another wonderful book to read.
( Nov 14 2004, 06:04:45 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink
![[ Registered ]](http://www.diarist.net/registry/button.gif ){kind=small}
