Dead Man Blogging

Riddle courtesy of William Wu’s riddle archive.

There are 3 black hats and 2 white hats in a box. Three men (we will call them A, B, & C) each reach into the box and place one of the hats on his own head. They cannot see what color hat they have chosen.

The men are situated in a way that A can see the hats on B & C’s heads, B can only see the hat on C’s head and C cannot see any hats.

When A is asked if he knows the color of the hat he is wearing, he says no.
When B is asked if he knows the color of the hat he is wearing he says no.
When C is asked if he knows the color of the hat he is wearing he says yes and he is correct.

What color hat and how could he know?
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Riddle courtesy of William Wu’s riddle archive.

You are a prisoner in a foreign land. Your fate will be determined by a little game.

There are two jars, one with 50 white marbles, and one with 50 black marbles. You are allowed to redistribute the marbles however you wish (e.g. swap a black marble with a white marble, etc.): the only requirement is that after you are done with the redistribution, every marble must be in one of the two jars.

Afterwards, both jars will be shaken up, and you will be blindfolded and presented with one of the jars at random. Then you pick one marble out of the jar given to you. If the marble you pull out is white, you live; if black, you die.

How should you redistribute the marbles to maximize the probability that you live, and what is this maximum probability (roughly)?

I found this Riddle Archive via a link on Slashdot. I will be posting a few of them here.

Of three men, one man always tells the truth, one always tells lies, and one answers yes or no randomly. Each man knows which man is who. You may ask three yes/no question to determine who is who. If you ask the same question to more than one person you must count it as question used for each person whom you ask. What three questions should you ask?

Update: I was very embarrassed last night when I realized that my answer was incorrect. I’ll be sure to post an answer when I figure it out.

Yahoo! News - White Supremacist Author Dies

White supremacist leader William Pierce, whose book “The Turner Diaries” is believed to have inspired Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, died Tuesday. He was 68.

Good riddance to bad rubbish. I’m sure he’ll be quite surprised to find himself facing judgment by that mangy, mongrel Jew known as Jesus Christ.

Philipians 2:10-11
That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth;
And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

US planning to recruit one in 24 Americans as citizen spies

The Bush Administration aims to recruit millions of United States citizens as domestic informants in a program likely to alarm civil liberties groups.

The Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or TIPS, means the US will have a higher percentage of citizen informants than the former East Germany through the infamous Stasi secret police. The program would use a minimum of 4 per cent of Americans to report “suspicious activity”.

This is just surreal. It’s like I keep expecting to wake up and realize it was all a dream. Citizen spies? Asking the mailman and electric meter reader to report suspicious activity?

Anyway, here’s the link: http://www.citizencorps.gov/tips.html

Just keep repeating - if you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t need to worry.

I’d like to announce the birth of our second son, Jacob Samuel Williams. Jacob was born on Wednesday, July 10, 2002 at 8:01 am via Caesarean section. He weighed 9 lb, 4.8 oz and was 20 inches long.

This story from FoxNews.com: FBI: LAX Shooter Had Intent to Kill

“It appears he went there with the intention of killing. Why he did that is what we are still trying to determine,” FBI agent Richard Garcia said.

I’m glad we got that figured out. He had a 45, a 9mm, and a 6 inch knife. But it takes highly trained FBI agents to figure out “he went there with the intention of killing”.

As far as the motive: He’s an Egyptian national. He’s been in America for about 10 years. Last week, he sent his family back to Egypt. He has fake identification and sometimes uses an alias. On our Independence Day, he came relatively heavily armed into one of our airports, carrying no identification, walked up to the Jewish airline counter, and opened fire.

Do you think it could be terrorism?

Debka.com is reporting that this guy has deep ties to Islamic jihad groups; I can’t vouch for the accuracy of that site. But my bet is that he was a “sleeper cell” and he was not alone.

There are two things I find interesting.

First, the fact that the man was not carrying any identification is no longer being mentioned anywhere (that I can find) except at WashingtonPost.com.

Second, early reports mentioned at least one other man taken into custody by the FBI. At least some news stories mentioned people screaming “They‘re Arabs!” But I also can’t find any reference to that anymore.

I’m not saying there is some kind of cover-up conspiracy. I’m just saying it’s weird.

Georgia’s Merit-Based Scholarship Fund Draws Criticism

Georgia has a scholarship program where any student who maintains at least a “B” average in high school gets money to attend state college. More kids (black and white) are college-bound now.

Opponents are complaining that actually using academics instead of race as a basis for money and admissions is bad for blacks.

The implications of their argument are amazing. Are they actually claiming that black students can’t handle fair competition? Do they really think we’d be better off reducing the number of college applicants? Can they honestly believe that an academically less-qualified black student should be accepted over a more-qualified white student?

This is crazy. Shouldn’t we be color blind?