National Inventors Month

Posted on May 8, 2013 by laura

May is National Inventors Month, when we celebrate all the gadgets and materials that make our lives better. Whether it’s the refrigerator, your light-up sneakers, or that one cool Lego piece that everyone fights over, our homes, backpacks and pockets are full of objects that at one time didn’t exist but now make our lives better (most of the time). What’s funny is a lot of inventions have been created totally by accident, including the microwave, potato chips, and our favorite dessert around here, the warm-center chocolate cake. If you get out there and make stuff, chances are you’ll eventually solve a key problem – maybe one you hadn’t even thought of.

Wee ones: Silly Putty was invented by a guy trying to make rubber, except the type he created was too bouncy. If a normal rubber ball bounced 3 feet but his new stuff bounced twice as high, how high did the Silly Putty stuff bounce?

Little kids: Warm-center chocolate cake – the kind that gushes yummy chocolate sauce when you cut it with your fork – was born when chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten undercooked a cake. If you need 8 tablespoons of chopped chocolate to make 4 cakes, how many teaspoons of chocolate is that? (There are 3 teaspoons in a tablespoon.) Bonus: If you need half as much sugar, how many teaspoons of sugar do you need?

Big kids: Fireworks were supposedly invented 2000 years ago when a cook mixed charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter, which, when packed in a tube and set on fire, exploded. If you mix 3 tablespoons of charcoal, twice as much sulfur, and twice as much saltpeter as sulfur, how many tablespoons of stuff do you pack in the tube? (Note: This isn’t the real recipe, but please do not try it!) Bonus: If each tablespoon of mixture turns into 12 sparkles in the sky, how many sparkles does your fireworks tube make?

Answers:
Wee ones: 6 feet high.

Little kids: 24 teaspoons. Bonus: 12 teaspoons. And see below for the original recipe…super-easy to make, and a total crowd-pleaser.

Big kids: 21 tablespoons: 3 charcoal, 6 sulfur, and 12 saltpeter. Bonus: 252 sparkles.

Recipe for Warm Soft Chocolate Cake
(from Chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, via Martha Stewart’s website)

8 T (1 stick) butter + more
2 t flour + more
4 oz bittersweet chocolate
2 large whole eggs
2 large egg yolks
1/4 cup sugar

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.
Butter and lightly flour four 4-oz molds. Tap out excess flour and set aside.
Put butter and chocolate in double boiler (or microwave on Low) and heat till chocolate is almost completely melted. Stir till blended.
Beat together eggs, yolks, and sugar until light and thick. Add the chocolate mixture and beat to combine. Quickly beat in flour until just combined.
Divide batter evenly among the molds.
Place filled molds on a baking sheet in the oven and bake until the sides have set but the centers remain soft – about 6-7 minutes for foil ramekins, 7 for ceramic ones.
Invert each mold onto a plate, and let rest 10 sec. Unmold by lifting up one corner of the mold; the cake will fall out onto the plate. Or, if serving from ceramic, leave cake in ramekin and let rest 10-15 minutes before serving.
Serve with vanilla or coffee ice cream.

“So Three Ducks Walk into a Hotel…”

Posted on May 7, 2013 by laura

It all started in the 1930′s, when Frank Schutt, the manager of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, decided to put three live ducks in the fountain in the hotel lobby for fun. Hotel guests thought it was hysterical, so the owners bumped the number up to five ducks. A few years later, a circus animal trainer trained the ducks to walk on their own up to the fountain every morning and back to their pen at night. To this day, the Peabody Ducks march to and from the fountain every day on a royal red carpet, posing for photos along the way. Hopefully they don’t have to carry a suitcase, too.

Wee ones: Apparently the Peabody Hotel fountain had turtles and alligators before the ducks showed up. If the fountain had 8 turtles but now has the 5 ducks, how many more turtles were there than ducks today?

Little kids: The ducks march to the fountain at 11 am every morning and back out at 5 pm every afternoon. How many hours do they spend swimming in the fountain each day? Bonus: How many hours each day do they spend outside the fountain? (Reminder: a day has 24 hours.)

Big kids: These probably aren’t the same 5 ducks from the 1930s. If all Peabody ducks live 8 years and can be trained when they’re 1 year old, what is the earliest year that the current ducks could have started marching? Bonus: If ducks started marching in 1935, what’s the fewest number of sets of ducks the hotel has had to train?

The sky’s the limit: The alligators that used to live in the fountain are long gone, fortunately for the ducks. But ducks would be safe with turtles. If we had 7 more ducks than turtles but 18 more turtle feet than duck feet, and the number of duck feet had the same two digits reversed, how many turtles and ducks would be swimming in the lobby fountain?

Answers:
Wee ones: 3 more turtles than ducks.

Little kids: 6 hours. Bonus: 18 hours.

Big kids: 2006 (7 years ago). Bonus: That was 77 years ago, so they have to have had 11 sets and are on at least their 12th set.

The sky’s the limit: There are 23 ducks and 16 turtles. If the two foot-count numbers are 18 apart and the digits are reversed, then the two digits themselves are 2 apart: so it’s 42, 53, something like that. But they have to be even numbers, so your only choices are 24/42, 46/64, and 68/86. 46/64 gives you animal counts that are 7 apart: 46 duck feet for 23 ducks, and 64 turtle feet for 16 turtles.

Happy Birthday, iTunes!

Posted on April 28, 2013 by laura

Today is the 10th birthday of iTunes, the online store that lets you buy songs, movies, apps for your smartphone, videos…all kinds of stuff that you can enjoy on your phone or computer. Before iTunes, the only way we old-timers could buy songs was on something you could hold in your hand, like a CD, a tape cassette or a vinyl record. Or you could get songs electronically from various illegal websites, which was exciting but felt icky. So the idea that you could get onto your computer, buy any song you wanted (legally), and get it within seconds was mindblowing. iTunes opened with just 200,000 songs on it, all priced at 99 cents, and within just one week they had 1 million song downloads. As of today, iTunes has sold over 15 billion song downloads from a collection of 26 million different songs. Let’s just say, it takes far more than one person to listen to it all.

Wee ones: The 1 millionth song was downloaded that first week in 2003, and the billionth song was downloaded in 2006. How many years later was that?

Little kids: If you download 24 songs and split them into 2 equal groups, called playlists, how many songs are in each group? Bonus: If it takes you 10 seconds to download a 2-minute song, how much longer does it take to play it than to buy it? (Reminder: a minute has 60 seconds.)

Big kids: If the 200,000 songs on iTunes that first week got downloaded a total of 1 million times, on average how many times did each song get downloaded? Bonus: It took only until September 8 that first year for the 10 millionth song download. How many days was that from April 28? (Reminder: April and June each have 30 days; May, July and August each have 31.)

Answers:
Wee ones: 3 years later.

Little kids: 12 songs in each. Bonus: 110 seconds longer.

Big kids: 5 times per song. Bonus: It took 133 days: 3 days until May 1, plus 31, 30, 31 and 31 to get to September 1, plus another 7 days.

Umbrellas for All

Posted on April 20, 2013 by laura

They say “April showers bring May flowers,” at least in some places, so keep your umbrella handy – and maybe a pet-sized one for your dog, too, as shown here. But are umbrellas supposed to shield you from the rain or the sun? Umbrellas first popped up — or popped open – thousands of years ago in Egypt and China, where the heat drove people to block the sunshine. In fact, another word for umbrella, parasol, means “against the sun.” But when the umbrella was brought to soggy England in the 1700′s, it was an instant hit because of the rain. Sure enough, the French word for umbrella, parapluie, means “against the rain.” So when your dog asks for an umbrella, say yes: he probably needs one no matter what the weather is.

Wee ones: If you and your 2 dogs go out for a walk and each of you has your own umbrella, how many umbrellas is that?

Little kids: If you have 2 umbrellas of the same circular width, but one is divided into 8 equal sections and the other has 10 equal sections, which umbrella has bigger sections? Bonus: If each rib of the 8-rib umbrella has 2 stick pieces hinged together plus a 3rd small stick supporting it, how many pieces in all does the umbrella frame have?

Big kids: If your umbrella catches 1/4 teaspoon of rain every second, how much rain does your umbrella catch in 1 minute? (Reminder: A minute has 60 seconds.) Bonus: If you want to tilt all that rain into a glass because you’re thirsty, how long would it take to fill a 10-ounce glass? (Another reminder: There are 3 teaspoons in a tablespoon, and 2 tablespoons in an ounce.)

Answers:
Wee ones: 3 umbrellas.

Little kids: The one with 8 sections. Bonus: 24 sticks.

Big kids: 15 teaspoons. Bonus: Your umbrella catches 5 tablespoons per minute, and your glass needs 20 tablespoons, so it will take you 4 minutes.

Stone-Faced

Posted on April 17, 2013 by laura

Mount Rushmore is one of the coolest sites in the U.S. It’s a giant sculpture of four great presidents from history – George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln – carved into the side of a South Dakota mountain. Mind you, these are 60-foot-tall heads in a mountain hundreds of feet tall, so chipping these faces out of rock was no easy task. Every day from 1927 to 1941, over 400 men and women worked as everything from drillers to carvers to cooks, with many swinging from steel cables to do their work. 90% of the sculpture was done by blasting rock away with dynamite, then the carving was finished by hand with tools (though unbelievably, no lives were lost). Thanks to money running out the sculpture was never finished, but we can still tell which guys are being honored.

Wee ones: If you know the names of 3 of the 4 presidents on Mount Rushmore, how many more presidents’ names do you need to learn?

Little kids: If you earned $8 per day working on Mount Rushmore, how much would you earn over a 2-day period? Bonus: Workers had to climb 700 stairs every morning to punch the clock. How many steps did they have to walk to go up and back? (Hint: think in hundreds).

Big kids: The whole face of the mountain is 500 feet tall, with the presidents’ heads reaching to the top. If their heads are 60 feet tall, how high off the ground are their chins? Bonus: People worked on the sculpture from October 1927 to October 1941! How many years did the project take?

The sky’s the limit: Tourists would often ask the workers if they could buy a chunk of granite (the type of rock being chipped off the mountain) as a souvenir. They’d offer $2 to start, but sometimes workers could get them up to $6. If a worker made $98 in one day selling small $2 rocks and big $6 rocks, and sold 4 times as many small rocks as big rocks, how many of each rock size did he sell?

Answers:
Wee ones: 1 more name.

Little kids: $16. Bonus: 1,400 (fourteen hundred) steps.

Big kids: 440 feet. Bonus: 14 years.

The sky’s the limit: He sold 7 big rocks and 28 small ones. A little algebra shows us why: if he sold s small rocks and b big rocks, we know that s=4b (4 times as many small rocks). As for how much money he made:
2s+6b=98
Substituting b for s, we get:
2(4b)+6b=98, or 14b=98
So b=7, giving us 7 big rocks and 28 small rocks.