Note to recruiters

Note to recruiters: We are quite aware that recruiters, interviewers, VCs and other professionals generally perform a Google Search before they interview someone, take a pitch from someone, et cetera. Please keep in mind that not everything put on the Internet must align directly to one's future career and/or one's future product portfolio. Sometimes, people do put things on the Internet just because. Just because. It may be out of their personal interests, which may have nothing to do with their professional interests. Or it may be for some other reason. Recruiters seem to have this wrong-headed notion that if somebody is not signalling their interests in a certain area online, then that means that they are not interested in that area at all. It is worth pointing out that economics pretty much underlies the areas of marketing, strategy, operations and finance. And this blog is about economics. With metta, let us. by all means, be reflective about this whole business of business. Also, see our post on "The Multi-faceted Identity Problem".

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Solution to Column 2 (Inequality of the Means)

It is time to post the solutions to the puzzles in the second column. Here are the solutions.

(New Dice) The answer to the question is 'yes'. This problem was published by Martin Gardner in his Scientific American column "Mathematical Games". The solution to this problem is due to George Sicherman (and the dice are sometimes called Sicherman dice).

The renumbering of the dice is as follows :

1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 and  1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4.

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Please also see the following journal articles :

Gallian, J. A.; Rusin, D. J. (1979), "Cyclotomic polynomials and nonstandard dice", Discrete Mathematics 27 (3): 245–259

Broline, D. (1979), "Renumbering of the faces of dice", Mathematics Magazine (Mathematics Magazine, Vol. 52, No. 5) 52 (5): 312–315

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(Chandrayaan Engine Room) The answer to this puzzle is straight forward but it takes some thinking to get to. The solution is the following : Shut off the neutrino drive. Then, take the two wires A and B. Light wire A on both ends and simultaneously light wire B at one end. Wire A will take exactly half an hour to burn. At this point, 30 minutes worth of Wire B has been burned. So, now light Wire B at the other end. This will take exactly 15 minutes. When Wire B burns out, start the positron motor.