Question: Riddle No. 1 that you can count on to get a few groans: "What 5-letter word, if you take out the 1st, 3rd and last letters, still sounds the same?"Answer: Empty.
Riddle No. 2, from "The Booke of Merry Riddles," 16th century:
"Ten fish I caught without an eye.
And nine without a tail;
Six had no head, and half of eight
I weighed upon the scale;
Now who can tell me as I ask it,
How many fish were in my basket?"
Answer: Did you get the trick? 10 without an I, or 1, is 0; a 9 without a tail is 0; a 6 with no head is a 0; and half of 8 is 0. So the fish basket was "m-t."
Question:What do you do when you're studying spiders but they insist on web-spinning at the "ungodly hours" of 2-5 a.m.? Not what you had in mind as a researcher.
Answer: If you're German zoologist H. M. Peters in 1948, you turn to pharmacologist Peter Witt, who prescribed amphetamine, says Rainer Foelix in "Biology of Spiders."
Unfortunately, the drug did not have the desired effect.
"The spiders built at their usual hours. Yet surprisingly the web structure was definitely altered: the radial threads as well as the catching spiral were placed irregularly."
Then Witt tried mescaline, strychnine, caffeine and others. Low-dosed caffeinated spiders produced a smaller but wider web with a normal spiral but radii at oversize angles. At higher doses, like with the other drugs, web regularity got distorted. Only with low doses of the hallucinogen LSD-25 did the spiders spin webs of GREATER regularity.
Hopes were high the research would advance medicine, but these early studies didn't pan out, says Foelix. More recently pesticide effects on spiders have been tested. Science surely weaves some pretty weird webs.
Question: You may have counted calories before but not like these:
(1) How much quick-energy candy would it take to power you mountain-climbing 29,000 feet to the top of Everest?
(2) If your day's food intake were converted into energy to light a 100-watt bulb, how long would it shine?
(3) How many 40-inch lifts of a 175-pound weight would let you shed 1 pound of body fat?
(4) Alternatively, to shed the pound on the crazy ice diet, how much ice must you eat? (Don't try this!)
Answer: (1) Assuming you weigh 160 pounds, you'd need about 11 140-calorie fat-free granola bars for the climb; (2) about 24 hours of shining; (3) around 19,000 reps to burn off a 3,500-calorie pound; and (4) theoretically, you'd need to swallow an impossible 65 pounds out of the freezer, surrendering body heat to melt the ice. (From "Fundamentals of Physics, 4th Edition," by David Halliday, et al.)
Send STRANGE questions to brothers Bill and Rich at strangetrue@compuserve.com.