Movie Functions Quiz #2

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(C)Copyright 2023, C. Burke. "AnthroNumerics" is a trademark of Christopher J. Burke and (x, why?).

Kind(fun)

I was surprised that I did the first one of these in 2016, which was seven years ago. It got enough feedback that I knew I wanted to do it again. Not too soon, but not seven years later either. And the funny thing is that I found the original worksheet I had with enough movie titles for three or four comics.

Answers will be posted, if necessary. Probably won't be, given the internet. I checked, and there shouldn't be typos, which I was accused of last time. (In particular, I think it was "Bridge of Spies" that people were stumbling over, asking if it should've been s(b), for a different movie title, which, offhand, I forget what they thought the answer was.

Enjoy.

I also write Fiction! You can now order Devilish And Divine, edited by John L. French and Danielle Ackley-McPhail, which contains (among many, many others) three stories by me, Christopher J. Burke about those above us and from down below. Order the softcover or ebook at Amazon. Also, check out In A Flash 2020, by Christopher J. Burke for 20 great flash fiction stories, perfectly sized for your train rides. Available in softcover or ebook at Amazon. If you enjoy it, please consider leaving a rating or review on Amazon or on Good Reads.

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Happy Independence Day 2023

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(C)Copyright 2023, C. Burke. "AnthroNumerics" is a trademark of Christopher J. Burke and (x, why?).

You have the freedom to solve this or not to.

The answer is left as an excerise for whatever app you math students use to do your homework for you.

I also write Fiction! You can now order Devilish And Divine, edited by John L. French and Danielle Ackley-McPhail, which contains (among many, many others) three stories by me, Christopher J. Burke about those above us and from down below. Order the softcover or ebook at Amazon. Also, check out In A Flash 2020, by Christopher J. Burke for 20 great flash fiction stories, perfectly sized for your train rides. Available in softcover or ebook at Amazon. If you enjoy it, please consider leaving a rating or review on Amazon or on Good Reads.

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Number Substitution Puzzle

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(C)Copyright 2022, C. Burke. "AnthroNumerics" is a trademark of Christopher J. Burke and (x, why?).

Are you primed for homework?

As a simple substitution problem, there are only 9 letters in the puzzle and 10 digits to choose from. We know that 0 must be one of the numbers in play.

As explained in the comic, we know that three of the letters must represent 9, 1, and 0. That leaves a number of possibilities for D and N which must add up to 9.

This is where the "meta-puzzle" comes in. If we ignore the actual words, there are 8 possibilities that can be found using 7 & 2, 2 & 7, 3 & 6, and 6 & 3. If you use 4 & 5, then you will have to repeat a digit.

If, according to the meta-puzzle, ODD must be odd, then D must be 7 or 3. (Again, 5 won't work, but feel free to try it.)

These now have four solutions because "O" and "V" will be interchangeable. That is, there is nothing to prevent you from switching those two place values.

Of these four solutions, there will actually be only two distinct totals (because switching O and V doesn't affect its sum). Of those two, one will be a prime number and one will not. There will be an easy divisibility test to see which one is composite.

A big Thank You has to go to Rebecca Rappaport and her math-a-day calendar, where this puzzle came from. In that puzzle, you were asked for the sum of P + R + E, which is 1 + 0 + 9 = 10. This puzzle appeared yesterday on the tenth. I wrote the "official" solution, which didn't require a full solution, but I wanted to do one anyway. I didn't take the ODDness or EVENess or PRIMEness into account when I mentioned 8 solutions.

I also write Fiction! You can now preorder Devilish And Divine, edited by John L. French and Danielle Ackley-McPhail, which contains (among many, many others) three stories by me, Christopher J. Burke about those above us and from down below. Preorder the softcover or ebook at Amazon. Also, check out In A Flash 2020, by Christopher J. Burke for 20 great flash fiction stories, perfectly sized for your train rides. Available in softcover or ebook at Amazon. If you enjoy it, please consider leaving a rating or review on Amazon or on Good Reads.

Come back often for more funny math and geeky comics.

W. O. D. B. #2

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(C)Copyright 2018, C. Burke.

Like I was going to say someone doesn't belong!

Inspired by four young ladies, who don't fall into these categories this neatly. I was making mental notes while learning their names when I noticed similarities amongst this group of friends.

As for the puzzle, I wanted there to be a "preferred" answer, but I added things that only apply to two, not three, of the images deliberately. It's like when someone says "B is the only right triangle" when two others are acute and the last is the only obtuse triangle. It doesn't quite fit.

Of course, I nearly messed myself up with this when, despite having it all worked out in advance, I suddenly decided to give C bangs. It looked great. Except that it messed up the answer to D. Such is life when creating puzzles.

Finally, I wanted to make sure that there were answers should someone print this out on a black and white printer.

If you answered, "A" because it's the only vowel, or the only letter with straight lines, GO AWAY!!!




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W. O. D. B.

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(C)Copyright 2016, C. Burke.

(*) Which One Doesn't Belong?

Each of the four panels in the odd one out, but for different reasons. Unlike when Bob from Sesame Street sang that three of these things are kind of the same, there isn't just one answer. These puzzles are quite popular now, and there are webpages and books filled with them.




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Movie Functions Quiz

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(C)Copyright 2016, C. Burke.

I wanted to use this as a stumper "__(M + M) = 1939"

I easily had over 50 of these, but they were a bit repetitive after a while, which is why I added the years to the equations. If this is popular, then, as with all good movies and many bad ones, there will be a sequel.

The Answer Key will be up soon -- as soon as I find it. Yes, a couple of them are stumping me now and I wrote the thing!




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Answers to the Christmas Puzzle

Back on Christmas I posted this puzzle.

Given a list of words where the letters were variables with specific products, could you find the value of SANTA + CLAUS?

You had to find the individual letters first.

ACT=60 and CAST=120. The difference is a factor of S, so S = 120 / 60 = 2.

ACT=60 and TALC=540. By the same reasoning, L = 540 / 60 = 9.

Now that we know L and S, we can find A in LASS=108. If L=9 and S=2 then A = 108 / 36 = 3.

SALT=270 and S=2, A=3, L=9, so T = 270 / 54 = 5.

ACT=60 and A=3, T=5 then C = 60 / 15 = 4.

CLAN=864 and C=4, L=9, A=3, then N = 864 / 108 = 8.

TUNA=720 and T=5, N=8, A=3 then U = 720 / 120 = 6.

So SANTA + CLAUS = (2)(3)(8)(5)(3) + (4)(9)(3)(6)(2) = 720 + 1296 = 2016! Happy New Year!

That was the closest I could get to 2015 without sitting with a spreadsheet for an hour, so I decided to just wait a week to give the answer. Voila!

Thanks for playing. I had guesses here (not really), on Google Plus, on Facebook and on Instagram. I had retweets on Twitter, but no actual guesses.

Branching out into social media. Cool!

Merry Christmas 2015

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(C)Copyright 2015, C. Burke.

Merry Christmas! Answers on New Year's!

This was an interesting exercise for me, too. Besides finding good words to use, I originally had eight words, but then realized I only needed seven of them.

After that, I realized that I could have used even fewer if I employed ratios into the mix because the puzzle doesn't actually require you to find all the individual letters.

For example, if you knew the product of CL or CLU without knowing what, say, C was, you would be fine. But I didn't want to use the word CULT in a Christmas puzzle.

If anyone wants to submit a list of fewer than 7 words which can be used to solve this puzzle, I'd like to see it.

Merry Christmas!




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Code a Movie Quote #1 Answers

First of all, thank you for the tremendous response to my first Code a Movie Quote comic. I never expected it because this has become, far and away, my most popular strip, beating out Coffee Logic and almost topping my Irregular Webcomic tie-in strip (but that one was a bit of a flash in a pan from IWC readers).

This started as an exercise in logic, but I morphed it when a couple of coding ideas came to me. You can see that in the second Casablanca quote, which is basically meta-code of some type, not any real language.

As for the actual languages, I mixed it up a bit. I haven't experimented a lot with them since a few college classes on different languages. Most are basically the same, and I varied them because I didn't want anyone to get hung up on syntax. (Thus, the semicolons and the periods doing the same thing.)

Answer Key to #1

As noted twice now, I'm referring to this as #1 because I have 20,000 reasons to do it again. Maybe I'll wait a month or so, and post another ten. (What do you think?)

1. Field of Dreams. "If you build it, he will come."

2. Casablanca. "You played for her, you can play it for me!" (Bogey never actually said, "Play it again, Sam.", except maybe in an old Bugs Bunny cartoon.)

3. The Wizard of Oz. "There's no place like home."

4. Batman. "I'm Batman." Duh. (Seriously, I included one obvious thing for the humor value. I don't need 100 similar submissions!)

5. Apocalypse Now. "I love the smell of napalm in the morning."

6. M*A*S*H. "Suicide is painless. It brings on many changes. And I can take or leave them if I please." Lyric.
Note: Not having Google 40 years ago, I always thought (until just about the time I typed this) that the line was "I could take all evening if I please." Thank you to everyone for NOT pointing that out. No, seriously, I'm not alone in that misconception, but then those were other kids who misheard the same thing. Or just believed what someone else said were the words.
What kills me is that now that I do have search engines, I usually check that sort of thing!

7. Planet of the Apes (1968) "Damn you all to Hell". (Yes, the line is actually "God damn", but it works without taking my Lord's name in vain.)

8. Casablanca. "Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon" (and for the rest of your life). The entire quote was on Twitter, but I snipped it for the comic.
This was one of the earlier "meta" code examples, but I didn't want to lead off with it.

9. Forrest Gump. "Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get." So it's random.

10. A Few Good Men. "You can't handle the truth!" Okay, I thought that was a clever way of coding it.

11. EDIT: If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium. The quote is the title. I haven't seen this film, so I don't know if that's actually a line of dialogue from the film or just the movie's title. Thanks to William Ricker for posting it and allowing me to use it.

12. Annie. “The Sun will come out tomorrow." Lyric. Thanks to Evan Weinberg for posting it, and allowing me to use it.

13. Braveheart. “They may take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom!” (Originally, on Twitter, I didn't include the "may" because that seemed to be another "If" condition which wouldn't code in a way that made sense.)

14. Citizen Kane. "Rosebud." If you don't get this, I can't explain it without spoiling the movie. Well, that' not really true. It's the last word that Kane utters before dying. It's his end, so I thought that would be a good end to these quotes.

Code a Movie Quote

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UPDATE: The solutions (and a major correction) are posted here.

(C)Copyright 2015, C. Burke.

Every now and then I like to hash things out.

This started online from a couple suggestions which were more "logic" oriented. I can't find them now because it was a lot of tweets ago and they didn't have a hashtag. I suggested a few ... and then started coding. It didn't really catch on. There were only two entries that weren't mine, and when I stopped for the evening, everyone was thankfu-- I mean, when I stopped, the hashtag died.

I didn't start it the following morning, but I figured that they shouldn't go to waste.

Special thanks to William Ricker (‏@n1vux) and Evan Weinberg ‏(@emwdx) for participating and for allowing me to use their entries.

You can add yours in the Comments section, or on Twitter with #CodeAMovieQuote.




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An Introductory Exercise for Equations with Two Variables

I was planning to blog this Fourth of July something about Independent variables, given the nature of the day, but something else came up.

I was reading Twitter, which I do way more often than is probably healthy, and I saw another image posted (or reposted) by Jo Morgan (@mathsjem), which was a simple puzzle with 7 circles, arranged in 2 columns of three and an extra circle in the middle, such that there were three lines of numbers. The center circle was filled in with a number and you had to fill in the blank circles with certain numbers so that everything totaled a given amount.

With a little modification, I produced the following image. It's a first draft, and already I see one teaching mistake. If this is the first time we're approaching problems with two variables, then it isn't likely that I've discussed the concept of ordered pairs before, so that will likely change to just pairs.

The two takeaways I would want to see from this: first, that the students could create an equation with x and y and a constant equaling another constant (with Standard form being an extension); second, will they notice that as one number gets larger, the other, by necessity, must get smaller.

You can also keep asking for different possibilities until they "run out" or someone thinks to use a negative number or a fraction. (At that point, the jig is up! You can quit the exercise, unless you want to circle the room one full time to get an answer from everyone.

Here is the image I posted on twitter in response to the first one. Again, the instructions need to be updated/corrected, but I like the exercise itself.

What do you think? On the right track? Waste of time?

A Christmas Extra

From a suggestion from a Facebook friend, Paul Wesley Adams, our Xmas Xtra:

Day 24 of 30: Rubik Had a Cube Long Before the Borg Did

This is Day 24 of the 30-day blogging challenge. The finish line is in sight.

Rubik had a cube long before the Borg did. Oh, sure, the Borg Collective might be an ancient race, or perhaps just an extremely old one, but we didn't sight any of their cube until sometime in the 90s, and that was glancing three or four centuries into the future even with that. Rubik had a cube while I was in high school. According to what I've read today, Rubik's Cube is 40 years old. This is a little surprising, because that puts its invention in the early 70s (1974, obviously ... I know, I'm a math teacher!), but the cube as a phenomenon didn't occur until the early 80s, at least seven years later. I remember. I had them in high school. My brother even set me up in business once at a block party, solving them for a quarter a pop. Actually, I only made fifty cents because two of the cubes were unsolvable. And I had to prove it to them.

Unsolvable cube Number One was completely finished except for two corners which were rotated out of place. They couldn't be rotated back into place. Rotating them involved a minimum of three corners. That's just the math. To move one thing, something else had to be moved. There was no way that those could be moved. Why? "This cube has been taken apart and put back together." I didn't say that they had done it or that it had been done on purpose. In fact, knockoff cubes fell apart fairly easily because they didn't spin well. If you didn't completely twist, say, the front face and then tried to turn the top face, a corner or two might fly off. Should this happen, someone would scoop up the loose piece and snap it back in. The problem is that you had a two of of three chance of snapping it in incorrectly. At this point, it would almost have been better just to have taken the entire cube apart and resemble it in the original state of six solid faces. But that was a daunting task. Snapping in one or two loose pieces didn't pose a big problem. Reassembling the entire cube could be problematic. I don't know anyone who ever tried it.

It took a while to explain, but they finally accepted my explanation of Unsolvability. In retrospect, I should've charged her the quarter anyway. I did solve it as far as it could be solved.

Unsolvable cube Number Two: another knockoff. It didn't have the "Rubik's" logo and it had the wrong color scheme. On a real cube, white was opposite blue, yellow opposite green, red opposite orange. (I wrote that from memory without checking ... hope I'm right!) Knockoff could have colors anywhere. This one did. To make matters worse, a couple of the center pieces had fallen off. The center of a face didn't really go anywhere. Yes, you could move them around, but they were essentially the plus and minus ends of the x-, y-, and z-axes. They determined what the other eight square around them should be.

Now this didn't pose a problem for me because I was a high school teenager and, therefore, a Super Genius. She had one side completely done, all yellow. However, they weren't in the correct places. You see, it's not enough that all the yellows are on one face, but the corners have to be in the correct positions as well as the edges so that they line up with the center pieces on the adjacent sides. I looked to see which colors yellow was touching so I could figure out which color was on the opposite side from yellow, by process of elimination. The opposite side wouldn't touch yellow. Except that they all did. He had peeled off the stickers and put the yellows on one side. Going around the top ring, yellow touched all five other colors, which is impossible. Thankfully, that didn't take much time or effort to figure out, so I didn't feel like I was cheated out of a quarter (not that he was going to pay me in advance -- he didn't believe I could do it even after I'd done two.)

My method wasn't one of the quick ones, and I never solved a cube in under two minutes. Forget about the 25-second methods. They weren't going to happen. I'd have to relearn. At that point, it was all about color recognition and fast reflexes. That wasn't going to happen. I was happy enough to know how to solve one. (And thanks to Bro. Steve for handing out the instructions in our Number Theory class.

One final note: I like to play a game called Fluxx produced by Looney Labs, founded by Andrew and Kristin Looney (no, really). I discovered online from one of her friends, that Kristin (not yet Looney) was a Regional Rubik's Cube champion on TV's That's Incredible years ago. Here's the link. Enjoy.

Logic Puzzle: Socrates and Euclid

I've used this with students in the past to see if they have a grasp of when certain historical events were in relation to each other or who lived first. (I'll admit, I was bad with that sort of thing back then.)

But here's the puzzle: without giving me any dates (so don't bother with wikipeida), just some kind of relationships to people and events, prove to me which of these great thinkers came first: Socrates or Euclid.

Sometimes they can work a simple chain of events that doesn't require footnotes and a bibliography.

Dog Days of Summer Puzzles

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


New Conversion: 1 Dog Day = 1 Week! Yes, I'm Sirius!

Edit: Here are hints to the answers. If you give up, you can rot13 them.
1. Guveq tenqr.
2. Uvtu fpubby.
3. Pynff vf bire sbe gbqnl.
4. V fgrccrq va vg ntnva.
(Lrnu, V ernyyl fgrccrq va vg ntnva.)

Hollywood Magic Squares

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


There aren't too many ways to "mathematize" Charo's name, which is actually
María Rosario Pilar Martínez Molina Gutiérrez de los Perales Santa Ana Romanguera y de la Hinojosa Rasten,
or so she says.

(x, why?) Number Puzzle #1.