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see past emails below.
wow, I forgot about this. but i'm back! :)
some news:
I hope midterms went well for those of y'all who are in school. but in case they didnt, i thought i'd include some media that i've been really into lately in the hopes that they can make your day a little better :)
Music:
Shows:
okay, that's all. take care <3
~kenneth
Hi, I'm still alive. I've just been very busy procrastinating all the work I'd planned to do over the summer.
New stuff:
I have :a new puzzle, though be warned the solution is non-obvious! Let me know if you think you have a solution :)
You are standing in front of a line of 5 people, four of whom are "togglers", and one is a truth teller. The truth teller always tells the truth, but a toggler will always alternate telling the truth and telling the lie.
How do you determine who is the truth teller using only two questions?
Some stipulations and helpful info:
Helo everyone,
It seems like these past weeks have been QLKdklafdjhalfefja for a lot of people. Definitely was for me. Personally I think I'm 3 whole days behind on work and life is starting to feel like one of Norm Macdonald's never-ending jokes, it just goes on and on, challenging you at every twist and turn, making you feel out application after application, and it just never ends, like one of those Victor Hugo books where there's a capital letter on one page, and 2 pages later finally a period, and it just keeps going until it either ends in catastrophe, or nothing happens-
Anyway, here's some new stuff:
:This week's puzzle and the :solution to last week's.
Wine and water. Suppose you have a glass of wine and a glass of water, each filled half-way. Using a spoon you transfer a spoonful of wine from the wine glass to the water glass and mix it a bit. Then using the same spoon you take a spoonful of the liquid from the water glass into the wine glass. Is there more wine in the water glass, or more water in the wine glass?
Last week: :Tiling a chessboard
Imagine the chessboard checkered, then each domino must cover one of each color. With the diagonals removed, the colors of squares are uneven, so it's impossible to tile.
Hi everyone-
I hope you're all doing well this week. For some reason, it seems like it's been stressful for everyone. Even one of my professors, when I met with him yesterday, said he hadn't looked at any of our exams and was stressed because he hadn't done any work on his collaboration. So relatable...
By the way, there's a pretty exciting bit of news. The math people discovered a tiling that never repeats itself. The last person to have done something similar was Penrose, with Penrose tiles, but a tiling using only one shape wasn't discovered until yesterday. Today's puzzle is somewhat related to this!
This one has been sitting in my drafts folder for quite some time. Over the past week and a half, I kept having more thoughts to add to it and it's now quite long. As the subject line suggests, it's about impostor syndrome, which certainly deserves a long discussion. I hope you will read it and not relate at all, but in the more likely case that you do, I hope it can be of some comfort to you.
At first, I thought people were just being modest. But it soon became clear that people were reluctant to recognize in themselves the same traits that awed them in other people.
-The year to eradicate impostor syndrome
Anyway, here's the link to my blog: https://www.kennethsun.net/posts/impostor.
:This week's puzzle and the :solution to last week's.
You have an 8x8 chessboard with squares alternative black and white. You also have some 1x2 dominoes which you can lay down on the board to cover exactly 2 squares. If you can cover every square on the board with dominoes and ensure no pieces overlap or hang off the edge of the board, then the dominoes "tile" the board.
Now suppose you remove two diagonally opposite corner squares (i.e. a1-h8 or a8-h1), find an arrangement of dominoes that tiles the board or prove that it can't be done. There's a good argument that doesn't rely on exhausting all the cases.
Some additional explorations in the same vein, if you feel up for it:
I will provide the solution to last week's puzzle (:dividing brownies) below, but first a hint in case you forgot and want to try again: how do you cut a rectangle in half, at any angle?
Solution:
The solution surely exists by a variant of the Ham Sandwich theorem (creds to my friend Aidan who found this), which says that for 2 measurable objects in 2-D space, there is a line that divides each in half. The trick itself is to cut on the line through the center of both rectangles. This divides the remainder in half because a line through the center of a rectangle always splits it in half, so this cut evenly splits the remaining brownie + the portion that's missing.
Hi all—
It's been a week of decisions for me. Classes, internships, colleges... someone needs to write a chat bot that prompts me with questions and trims down the decision tree for me (DecideGPT?).
A short, newsletter-related update:
From now on I'm going to send a new :puzzle/brain-teaser/whatever each week in these emails, where the solution will be contained in the next email.
New content:
There is no new blog this week (it sitting in drafts though), but there are three new poems. All of them are sad.
These two poems both have something to do with impostor syndrome.
Chocolate Brownies: There is a delicious brownie baked in a rectangular pan, and someone cut out a piece of it and now you want to split the rest of the brownie in two halves. The problem is that the person was very evil and took their piece from somewhere in the interior (meaning not aligned with the edges). The cutout piece is also a rectangle, but with sides not necessarily parallel to the sides of the pan. How can you make one straight cut to divide the remaining brownie in half?
As I'm sure you're all aware, there was a fatal shooting at Michigan State University on Monday. It is not the most fun or insightful topic to write a blog about, I know, but there wasn't much else I'd rather have been doing.
After a few days of writing, I’ve finally managed to capture some of my thoughts and feelings with the best words I have right now. You can read it here: https://www.kennethsun.net/posts/msu