Welcome to your weekly installment of V’s Riddle Corner. Each Friday evening I’ll provide you with a few riddles to earn you some Tanga Points, and perhaps even a few links to waste some time. The links will tend to be to interesting facts or fun videos, while the puzzles will frequently be based in logic or maths (gasp!). So, without further adieu…

Wastes of Time:

This is pretty neat

This is just impressive

Riddle 1: How many places are there on the earth that one could walk one mile south, then one mile west, then one mile north and end up in the same spot? To be precise, let’s assume the earth is a solid smooth sphere, so oceans and mountains and other such things do not exist. You can start at any point on the sphere. Also, the rotation of the earth has nothing to do with the solution; you can assume you’re walking on a static sphere if that makes the problem less complicated to you. Finally walking any direction other than south from the north pole (or conversely, any direction other than north from the south pole) is nonsensical.

There are 15 points up for grabs for this answer. I may decide to split up the prize if multiple people come up with different parts of the answer.

Riddle 2: Imagine three desks, with two drawers each. You are told that one desk contains a gold medal in each drawer, one contains a silver medal in each drawer, and one contains one of each. You don’t know which desk is which. If you open a drawer and discover a gold medal, what are the chances that the other drawer on that desk also contains gold? FTP5

That’s all for today, folks. See you next week!

-V