Riddle me this, Batman, what is half of two plus two?
Most of you have already come up with one of two answers, both of which are defendable.
Punctuation matters. When I heard the question posed verbally, my answer was: do you mean, half of two, plus two —mathematically 1/2(2) + 2) — or half of: two plus two (mathematically 1/2(2 + 2)?
In the social media context where I saw this, the man being asked obviously interprets the grammar as the latter insisting the answer is two while the woman asking relentlessly mocks him for being wrong.
The comments were loads of fun... not really.
Speaking of fun, though, there is a big event going on in the world of sports right now. You might have heard about the Paris Summer Olympics.
Of course, the news about results is virtually unavoidable, but almost equally unavoidable is all the peripheral "content" that goes along with it.
I got a press release the other day outlining the most dangerous and least dangerous Olympic sports. The results were derived from the past four summer games since the Olympics started recording injuries in 2008.
I fully expected boxing to be number one as by its very nature the injury rate has got to be 100 per cent. Personally, I have never seen a boxing match in which both participants did not emerge from the ring without some kind of injury.
Apparently, boxing measures what constitutes an injury differently than the rest of us because it came in fifth on the list.
Football (soccer) was third. Given footballers' penchant for the dramatic, I have to wonder whether or not they are recording perceived injuries along with the actual ones.
Since I started with a riddle (OK, not really a riddle, more of an ambiguously worded math problem), I will leave you with a logic puzzle tangentially related to the safest summer Olympic sport (canoe slalom).
Four adventurers (Alex, Brook, Chris and Dusty) need to cross a river in a small canoe. The canoe can only carry 100kg. Alex weighs 90kg, Brook weighs 80kg, Chris weighs 60kg, Dusty weighs 40kg, and they have 20kg of supplies.
How do they get across?
