I am blue and gold and white and full of links. What am I?

October 14, 2003 9:33 AM

Riddles and more riddles - Easy Riddles and Ancient Riddles, Math Riddles and Traditional Riddles, Anglo-Saxon Riddles and Lawyer Riddles, Dirty Riddles and Logic Riddles, Medieval Riddles and Awful Riddles. Finally: Ambiguity, Classification and Change: The Function of Riddles.
posted by anastasiav (14 comments total)

(what Schoolblog said in his trackback post)

Is this the coolest "thank you", anastasiav, or what? ;) I started with the logic riddles, then went on to the math riddles and...realizing the time-trap I was falling into, just bookmarked the whole thread, for future fun - in small doses!
posted by MiguelCardoso at 10:27 AM on October 14, 2003

Funny, my brother presented us with the Two Ropes riddle (3rd down on the logic riddles link) the other night. When he gave the answer I had one of those "damn, I should have gotten that!" moments. The kind where you wish you could unhear the answer and attack the problem with a little more rigor. That might be the sign of a good riddle, I don't know.

(Oh, and FWIW, the 12 balls problem at the bottom of the same page completely kicked my ass.)
posted by crumbly at 11:08 AM on October 14, 2003

I believe I have the solution to the 12 balls riddle, but I'll hold off on writing it, in case you wanna keep thinking crumbly.

Talk about a time killing post though ;-> I love it!
posted by JaxJaggywires at 12:18 PM on October 14, 2003

The solution to "Daughter or son? " in the logical riddles page is wrong.
posted by signal at 12:26 PM on October 14, 2003

Great - thanks!
(And let me say that I am a huge fan of the Exeter Book - medieval Anglo-Saxon riddles, some dirty).
posted by plep at 12:31 PM on October 14, 2003

The solution to "Daughter or son? " in the logical riddles page is wrong.

Indeed. Wouldn't boy-girl and girl-boy be the same possibility, just said differently? Therefore, a 50% chance the second child is a girl.

Guess the riddle was so "medium difficulty" that they fooled themselves.
posted by JaxJaggywires at 12:37 PM on October 14, 2003

Thanks for the riddles, ana, but let us pause to honor the man who has done more for the cause of riddling than anyone else alive.

Oh, and I haven't made it through all the links yet, so I don't know if you included the riddle variant that has become the Holy Grail of Group Insulting: Light Bulb Jokes.

Sorry if I've degraded the quality of links on this thread, but, after all, I'm the guy who did the MetaPun Post.
posted by wendell at 1:28 PM on October 14, 2003

Petals Around a Rose is a great logic game to worry over for a bit of time. It had me crazy for about 15 or 20 minutes until I was able to work out the solution.
posted by willnot at 1:45 PM on October 14, 2003

damn you, willnot.
posted by signal at 4:22 PM on October 14, 2003

Double damn you, willnot. Without figuring out what the "petals" and the "rose" are, I used the homophone "rows" and figured it out. Gah, I've been staring at the problem for about 25 minutes.
posted by notsnot at 11:38 PM on October 14, 2003

Thanks a million, anastasiav! I love riddles!

willnot - I got it, but it took me about an hour. The "Petals Around a Rose" title turned out to be misleading for me, and I wasted a lot of time pursuing the wrong path. Anyway, once I actually copied down the numbers on the dice with the corresponding answer-numbers, it was pretty easy to resolve.
posted by taz at 11:53 PM on October 14, 2003

willnot: oh, that's a good one. I nearly tore my hair out running down a wrong path with notsnot's pun.

I love seeing how people solved Petals around the Rose. For me, I looked at how other people (in the story) solved the problem. And once I realized that a computer could not easily solve it where a human could, bammo. I could reliably get the answer. Loverly.

Thanks, anastasiav, for posting this.
posted by bison at 4:19 PM on October 15, 2003

I solved Petals...

Just took me 10 days.

Sigh.
posted by signal at 6:42 AM on October 24, 2003

Personally, I was very much misled by the "petals of a rose" idea because of the Greek name for a rose, which means, literally, 30 petals. I was wrongly distracted by the idea of "30" for a while. Now that I've figured it out, I guess I could go back to see wtf the puzzle has to do with a rose and it's petals... but, probably, naaah.
posted by taz at 7:34 AM on October 24, 2003