Mind Games

Here's a puzzle for you:

Suppose you are a secret agent and you have been captured by your crazy arch-villain nemesis. Your arch-rival, being overly dramatic and not quite thinking his plan through, locks you in room. There is only one way in or out of this room and it is sealed by a vault door. Your nemesis informs you that the only escape is to turn the door latch in exactly 9 minutes. Turning the latch any time before or after 9 minutes will result in poison gas being pumped into the room, killing you. The only items in the room are two old-fashioned hourglass type timers, with the larger one counting down 7 minutes, the smaller counting out 4 minutes.

How do you know when to turn the latch?





Adapted from Vincent Janoski's post on the Geekdad blog.

Scrabble Scribble

I was setting up to play Scrabble (you remember Scrabble, right?) the other day when something struck me. I noticed that when selecting the initial 7 letters the other players and I picked them from all around the container. This is only interesting when you consider that the letter squares have, supposedly, been well mixed and are randomly distributed across the box. We were trying to randomize our selection of already randomly arranged squares! Of course, if the squares are truly randomly distributed and it should not matter from where in the box you draw the letters. I should be able to pick 7 squares all adjacent to each other and get 7 random letters. Yet my brain tells met that I have to pick from all box to achieve the best selection of letters. There's a psychological term for this type of behavior but I can't recall it at the moment.

Am I the only one who thinks its intriguing how our brains work to influence our behavior?