Hummings of a Happy Hurkle

All politicians have three reasons for doing anything.

1. A politically correct, official, on-message reason for public consumption.
2. A credible, honest-sounding, unofficial reason for off the record briefings.
3. The real reason.

The only way to work out the real reason is to ignore what they say and watch what they do.

Previous posts have given the rules for the puzzle and explained why traditional solutions fall down. The following is a complete solution. I suggest you don’t look until you have tried to solve the puzzle for yourself.
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There is a commonly given solution to this puzzle that depends on induction, but incorrectly in my view. Here’s why.

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The following logic puzzle is copied verbatim from a particular Web site. I haven’t given a link, and I suggest you give it a try before Googling.

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Philosophers have debated this question for centuries — you have to make your own choice as to what it means to you. There is no final or absolute answer to the question.

For me, free will is simply the ability to choose rationally among competing alternatives, coupled with the idea that you are then responsible for the results. It is of no consequence if your choices are limited sharply by circumstances, or if (being a rational person) you would always make the same or similar choices in similar circumstances.

I reject any form of predestination, and I am happy that there is enough randomness at lower (perhaps quantum) levels to ensure that no event can ever precisely duplicate itself. This ensures that even a computer program can yield different results at different times, and leaves the human mind with plenty of degrees of freedom.

We conduct our affairs as if there were free will; it works; enough said.

No, it’s not Coriolis forces or gyroscopic stability. It’s all down to the front wheel geometry. A ridable bicycle will have the front wheel contact point a short distance behind the point where the straight-line projection of the steering pivot meets the ground.

Such a bike can be pushed by hand, held only by the saddle. As the bike leans, the front wheel steers into the lean providing a stabilising torque.

Here are two good articles. The first is a classic, widely quoted.

http://www.phys.lsu.edu/faculty/gonzalez/Teaching/Phys7221/vol59no9p51_56.pdf

http://www.dclxvi.org/chunk/tech/trail/

Just in case you thought you knew what QM was about, it’s really about negative probabilities and how they vector sum. It says so right here.

http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html

I think there are two different paths by which people come to believe in things. I call them type E and type A beliefs.

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I’m not sure exactly what Intelligent Design is. I’ve read the material and listened to the arguments. it could be creationism or it could be religion, but as I’m not an expert on either I won’t speculate.

One thing is patently obvious, though. Intelligent Design is not science. I know science and it doesn’t look anything like this. So teach it if you must, but don’t even think about teaching it in science class.

A horrible disease has broken out in the Kingdom of Faroffia. There is a wonder cure, and you have a 1000 bottles of it which must be distributed today to save the kingdom. Unfortunately, you have just found out that one of the bottles is contaminated with a deadly poison. You have a supply of laboratory mice which can be used to test for the poison, but because it takes some time to have its effect, you only have time to conduct one test.

How many mice do you need in order to find out which is the poisoned bottle?

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