230-Lateral Thinking Puzzles

Futility Closet

Greg Ross

History

4.8 • 748 Ratings

🗓️ 24 December 2018

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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

The sources for this week's puzzles are below. 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 Phil Moore. Here are two corroborating links.

Puzzle #2 is from Jed's List of Situation Puzzles.

Puzzle #3 is adapted from Edward J. Harshman's 1996 book Fantastic Lateral Thinking Puzzles.

Puzzle #4 is from Greg. Here's a link.

Puzzle #5 was inspired by an item on the podcast No Such Thing as a Fish. Here are two links.

Puzzle #6 is from listener Dave Capozzi, who sent this link.

You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on Google Podcasts, on Apple Podcasts, or via the RSS feed at https://futilitycloset.libsyn.com/rss.

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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, here's another special episode of lateral thinking puzzles. These are puzzles
0:04.8	where one of us describes a strange sounding situation and the other has to work out what's going on
0:09.2	by asking yes or no question. And thanks so much to everyone who's been sending in puzzles for us to try.
0:15.1	We can always use more, so please do keep sending them to podcast at futilitycloset.com.
0:21.2	We're off next week, but we'll be back on January 7th with another dose of quirky history
0:25.8	and another lateral thinking puzzle.
0:28.9	This puzzle comes from Phil Moore, who wrote, Hello Cat and Humans, who I recently
0:33.6	discovered from the Patreon feed, our fellow University of Maryland alums. Go Terps! And Phil's puzzle is, on most days of the week, Heathrow, one of the
0:43.7	world's busiest airports, has commercial passenger flights arrive and depart without any
0:48.9	actual passengers. Why? Oh, that's interesting. I didn't know that. Yeah, and obviously this is true.
0:56.8	Commercial passenger flights arrive and depart without any actual passengers. Okay, just to nail that down,
1:02.6	that means a plane arrives at the gate with no one aboard except the crew. Yeah. And then departs
1:08.6	without passengers. Correct. Is it just that?
1:11.2	Is it the crew somehow just needs to get to the airport and switch planes or something?
1:15.0	No.
1:16.7	Is it that the plane needs mechanical service or something?
1:19.0	No.
1:20.5	Those were really good guesses, Greg.
1:21.8	Those were very good guesses, Greg.
1:23.6	Good job.
1:25.7	So it's not that the airline benefits in some way from this happening.
1:33.1	The airline benefits in some way from this happening.
	...

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