Stoopid quiz of the day

Posted on by Cliff

What gets wetter as it dries?

I heard that one the other day. I dunno why but I’ve always liked brain teasers like that. I’ll post the answer sometime later if nobody guesses.

19 thoughts on “Stoopid quiz of the day”

  2. No, not specifically for galaxy hitchhikers, only hermits and closet dwellers who have nothing better to do but watch evening cartoons and write Fortran compilers in LISP while speaking with a lisp. By the way, you didn’t answer.

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  4. Yeah, you got it. A towel. and for your question I immediately knew the trick but couldn’t figure out the answer so I used Groovy:
    ('a'..'z').each { println "lo${it}nger" }

    The only thing that makes sense is lounger. Lounger is a 7 letter word that becomes longer when you remove the 3rd letter ‘u’.

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  5. I was tempted to connect the above script to dictionary.com to check each possible answer and print only the correct one but that would’ve been overkill especially for a simple teaser like yours.

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  8. Hey, as statically speaking* I’m probably the only Brit in this discussion, I’d like to point out that “I know where my towel is”.

    * I have prior knowledge. Neither Cliff nor Tiago are Brits. QED.

    PS Na, Tiago. Wie geht’s Ihnen? Doch kennen wir uns nicht. 😉

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  9. And I’d like to point out that while Arthur Dent may have been british, Ford Prefect was not. For that matter, no writer for the Guide was british, they all came from other planets.

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  10. Merlyn,

    Wer sagt Sie Notwendigkeit, den Mann zu kennen, um die Sprache zu sprechen?

    Also

    No entiendo lo que tiene que hacer una toalla perdida con la discusión.

    and furthermore…

    Почему нахожусь я отвечая в настолько много по-разному языков? Только один язык имеет значение. Шпунтово!

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  11. “No entiendo lo que tiene que hacer una toalla perdida con la discusión.”

    Come now. You haven’t read the best book in the Galaxy?

    The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the
    subject of towels.

    A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an
    interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value –
    you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons
    of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches
    of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it
    beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon;
    use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use
    in hand-tohand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes
    or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a
    mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t
    see you – daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in
    emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it
    if it still seems to be clean enough.

    More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some
    reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker
    has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in
    possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask,
    compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit
    etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker
    any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might
    accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who
    can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it,
    struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his
    towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

    Hence a phrase which has passed into hitch hiking slang, as in “Hey,
    you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where
    his towel is.” (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy:
    really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)

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  12. Speaking of the Guide, another wordpress blog I frequent: nirmal at the madcap laughs….
    Happened to make a post a few days prior to this one talking about how odd it is how often the number 42 comes up (which happens to be the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything).

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  15. Hey! in the forums it says that it’s sposed to take longer the smarter you are. I think he just called us dumb! Took me a couple of hours. After I read the Bill Gates story I figured it out right away though.

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  17. Lol!.. thats not true you know… i have no idea how they came up with such a conclusion. Im sure you ll understand once you solve it

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  18. They came up with it when they were trying to justify how it could take such a smart guy as Bill Gates so long to figure it out. The smarter you are, and expecially the way they have it set out, the more potential patterns you see. More things to test and then cross off the list if they fail. I don’t think it has anything to do with how fast you get the right answer so much as how long you’re willing to keep trying while getting the wrong answer. No one’s gonna keep trying if they don’t see any potential patterns (unless of course they’re insane – trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results).

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  19. i think the angle to bill gates unable of solving it does add a bit of glamor, however i can assure you, it would not require the kind of intelligence that bill supposedly possesses , to solve this. For example, when i gave this problem to my brother, who was 16 then and a math freak AND my cousin sis who was 6 then- of course only knew how to do the math on her fingers, she came out with the solution almost immediately.
    what i am getting at is that solving the problem would require you to look at it slightly differently- maybe like a 6 yr old girl!

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