Answer to yesterday's puzzles

In lieu of writing my own post today I am simply going to repost my brother Mike's comment that he left in answer to yesterdays puzzles.

Mike's answers not only include the official correct answers, but also his reasoning and other possible answers he came up with.

I couldn't have written it better myself.

Puzzle #1

1. A young explorer called his expedition chief in great excitement to report that he had just found a golden coin marked 6 B.C. The expedition chief fired him. Why?

Mike's answer:

1. My first thought was that the expedition chief was a pinko liberal who did not want anyone working for him to refer to years by "Before Christ" (BC) and "Anno Domini" (AD), but instead by the terms "Before Common Era" (BCE) and "Common Era" (CE).

But after further reflection I think that in order to mark the coin 6 BC, the coin maker would have to reference an event in the future.

This has often proven hard to do.

I for instance, have a hard time even predicting what the dining facility will serve tomorrow night, much less the birth of my Lord and Savior.

(Though there were a number of prophets who predicted the birth of Christ, we are assuming that none of them minted coins based on this date).

Puzzle #2

2. You are in an airplane which is flying 500 miles an hour through the air. If you throw a ball above you and it spends five seconds in the air, how far behind you will it land?

Mike's answer:

2. This one has me really perplexed.

I've been in some big airplanes.

I've been in planes big enough to hold M2 Bradley fighting vehicles and M1A1 Abrams Main Battle Tanks.

Even in these huge planes I don't think you could get 5 seconds of hang time for a ball throwing it straight up.

So I'll have to make the assumption that the plane has an open cockpit, much like the biplanes of WWI.

With an open cockpit, if you were traveling at 500 mph per hour and threw the ball straight up, the air moving along the fuselage of the plane would instantly stop the upward movement of the ball and propel it toward the aft of the plane where it may or may not hit the tail fin further deflecting the ball and making this question even harder.

It would be virtually impossible to avoid this effect, no matter how hard you threw it up.

You could minimize the effect by launching it ultra fast, but then the ball would probably stay up in the air for longer than 5 seconds.

Then, even if you could throw it up and avoid all these dilemmas, you'd still have to know the elevation of the plane and even current barometric pressure and wind speed which could also affect the answer.

A swallow might even grab the ball why it was in the air. The swallow could grip it by the husk or skin of the ball.

On the other hand, if you created a plane designed tall enough to let you throw a ball up in the air for 5 seconds, the ball would just fall straight down into your hands so you could catch it.

You'll have to give me more data, to include how many swallows there are in the area and how good they are at gripping things by the husk before I can even try to figure this one out.

(Mike would probably also want to know if they were african swallows or european swallows, and I don't know, so we'll go with the simple answer that it would fall straight down).

Puzzle #3

3. These words follow a logical progression:

SUNKEN

MONASTICISM

TUESDAY

WEDGIES

THUMB-SUCKER

FRIVOLITY

.

Which of these could be next?

SQUANDER

SATIATE

MINE

TABLE

Mike's answer:

3. The pattern might be that the first four words have vowels as the second character.

The next four would have vowels as the third character, so the next word would have to be Squander, followed by a word like brother which also has a vowel as the third character.

Or it might be that the words all start with the first 3 letters of the days of the week.

In this case, the answer would be Satiate.

(Again Mike is right with the answer being that they all start with the same letters as days of the week).