Question: You're in a room of 183 people — all strangers — when an odd thought hits: 183 is half of 366, the number of days in a (leap) year. If there were 366 people, every possible birthday could be represented. Therefore, adding a 367th person would guarantee at least one doubling up of birthdays, with two people sharing the same month and day. So with only the 183 people, wouldn't the chance of finding a matched pair of birthdays be about 50-50?
Answer: Surprise! In a random gathering, all it takes is 23 people to reach a 50-50 chance of finding birthday "twins," say Edward Burger and Michael Starbird in "The Heart of Mathematics." The 183 people is closer to what you would need for a 50-50 chance of someone matching YOUR birthday (or any other specific person) — actually it would take 253 people due to many birthday overlaps. "But in a room with 183 people, the chance of finding a pair of people with the same birthday is over 99.999999 percent!"
Question: Which of the following paintings would a baby likely find most stimulating?
(a) Andy Warhol's pop art "Campbell's Soup Can," with its vivid colors and sharply etched patterns (b) Monet's impressionistic "Water Lilies," endlessly textured and toned (c) da Vinci's classic "Mona Lisa"
Answer: Infants are born with relatively good vision, including color vision, which matures rapidly to adult-like levels of sharpness and depth perception by age 6 months, says Lawrence Tychsen, MD, professor of ophthalmology, pediatrics, anatomy and neurology at Washington University Medical Center. But the winner would be Mona Lisa, hands down, because it is a face, and an interesting one to boot. Babies are drawn innately to faces, especially their Mom's. "The Soup Can and the Water Lilies would place a distant second, and it would be a toss up between the two."
Question: Pet-owning polyglots, can you say from where these sounds are coming: "niaou," "miaau," "mjav," "miau," "miao," "myau," "mjau," "miauw," "miyau," "nyaa," "meo-meo," "ngeong," "mijau," "meu-meu," "miyauv, miyauv"?
Answer: A: They are the meowings of a household cat around the world, as said by speakers of Greek (niaou), Afrikaans, Danish, German or Polish or Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Norwegian, Dutch, Hebrew, Japanese, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Croatian, Bengali and Turkish, says Georgetown University linguist Catherine N. Ball, with the National Science Foundation.
Question: If all of a human female's ova could be matured, fertilized and brought to fruition, how many women would it take to populate a large city?
Answer: It could all begin with one healthy baby girl. Her ovaries have been estimated to contain a lifetime allotment of some 800,000 ova, though at the normal release rate of one per month from puberty to menopause, 400-500 all told, she would require thousands of lifetimes to fill the bill, says Jan Bondeson in "The Two-Headed Boy and Other Medical Marvels." The ova being present from birth is a likely reason for the increase in fetal abnormalities among older mothers, says Chris McGowan in "Diatoms to Dinosaurs," since unlike the reproductive situation for a male, a woman's lifetime supply of ova age right along with her.
Question: Oh, no, it's 6 o'clock Monday morning, electricity's out, and you can't see the jumbled socks in your drawer. You know there are 8 blacks and 24 blues. How many do you have to take with you downstairs to guarantee you've got at least one matched pair of blacks for dressing by flashlight?
Answer: Taking eight obviously won't do it, nor even will taking 24 — all COULD be blue. You need to grab 26 to make 2 blacks a certainty. But that's a lot of socks to carry. Still, you don't want to have to come back upstairs.
For a better than 50-50 chance of having two blacks, you'd need to carry down only seven socks; for a 75 percent chance, nine socks. For a 90 percent chance, 12 socks. How stairs-lazy are you?
Send STRANGE questions to brothers Bill and Rich at strangetrue@compuserve.com