200-Lateral Thinking Puzzles

Futility Closet

Greg Ross

History

4.8 • 748 Ratings

🗓️ 14 May 2018

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Here are five new lateral thinking puzzles -- play along with us as we try to untangle some perplexing situations using yes-or-no questions.

Here are the sources for this week's puzzles. In a few places we've included links to further information -- these contain spoilers, so don't click until you've listened to the episode:

Puzzle #1 was contributed by listener Mary McNally.

Puzzle #2 is from listeners Tay Moss and John Russell.

Puzzle #3 is from Paul Sloane and Des MacHale's 2014 book Remarkable Lateral Thinking Puzzles, plus this article.

Puzzle #4 was suggested by an item in Kevin McAleer's 2014 book Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-Siècle Germany.

Puzzle #5 was devised by Sharon. Here are three corroborating links.

You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Google Play Music or via the RSS feed at http://feedpress.me/futilitycloset.

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If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [email protected]. Thanks for listening!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, listeners, and welcome to our 200th episode. We're celebrating with another collection
0:04.5	of lateral thinking puzzles. These are puzzles where one of us describes a strange-sounding situation,
0:09.8	and the other has to work out what's going on asking only yes or no questions. And thanks so much
0:14.3	to everyone who's been sending in puzzles for us to try. We always need more. So please do keep sending
0:20.0	them to podcast at futilitycloset.com.
0:23.0	We'll be back next week with another dose of quirky history and another lateral thinking puzzle.
0:28.8	This puzzle comes from Mary McNally. A girl has an open wound. At first, the blood makes her nervous, then relieved. Why? Oh, God. A girl has an open wound.
0:42.5	Is the wound on her? Has she been in, would you say she's been injured? No.
0:49.2	All right. All right. She's got a wound, but she hasn't been injured. Correct.
0:55.1	And I'm sorry, the rest of it was she's bleeding, and at first that makes her...
0:57.4	At first, the blood makes her nervous, then relieved.
1:00.9	Okay.
1:03.6	Where do you start with something like that?
1:04.9	Is her identity important?
1:05.9	Nope.
1:06.3	Is her occupation?
1:07.3	Nope.
1:07.5	Her age?
1:08.2	Nope.
1:08.4	Did this really happen?
1:10.1	Let's say yes.
1:11.8	Okay.
	...

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