Around 1900 the Lionel Company started out manufacturing electrical novelties and small appliances such as fans. Soon it introduced a toy train intended for use in Christmas storefront displays, the intent being that the public’s fascination with electricity and railroads would draw passersby into the stores.
It turned out that so many people were interested in buying the train itself that Lionel changed tack and started mass producing its soon to be renowned trains.
The fortunes of Lionel began to decline in the late 1950s, roughly tracking – hah! a little joke – the decline of passenger trains in North America. Yet, by 1976 the company still enjoyed such widespread name recognition that in the mystery spoof film Murder By Death, Truman Capote’s role was Lionel Twain.
My dad still has a bunch of these trains, still in boxes from a move in 1987. I wonder if they’re worth anything? (As I recall, they functioned, but we didn’t have a lot of track.)
My brother had a cool train set, and Dad built a platform out of a 4x8 sheet of plywood. We played with that thing for hours. The set was sold at Dad’s auction, but IIRC it didn’t bring much.
Today I learned that the RAF does not use call signs; so Ewen McGregor’s pilot brother is not ‘Obi-Two’. (In the Instagram video EM says they do have nicknames, but not call signs.)
Suppose the earth is a smooth ball. Now, wrap it with a rope at the equator. How much more rope would you have to add to lift the entire rope a foot above the surface? 500 feet? A mile’s worth?
6.28 feet.
Here’s the crazy part, suppose you wrapped a basketball in rope. How much rope would you have to add to that length to raise the rope a foot above the basketball?
Yeah, loved that one. My 11th grade calculus teacher loved starting classes with some simple math trivia, and that was one of my faves.
Another one: City A is 10,000 miles from City B. City A also 10,000 miles from City C. Is City B closer to a) City A b) City C or c) not enough information to tell. Most people answered c). Which was wrong
OK, you’re going to have to explain this to me. Seems to me that the relative positions of City B and City C would determine the distance between them. That distance could be as much as 20,000 miles or as little as a few miles. What am I missing?
Notably, this occurred on a predator-free, resource-rich island, supporting the theory that we simians will do pointless, often depraved things just for the Hell of it.
Simplifying by calling the circumference 25,000 miles, 12,500 takes you from City A to the point antipodally opposite. City B is somewhere on a circle of radius 2,500 miles centered on that antipodal point. City C is on that same circle, which puts City B and City C closer to one another than to City A.
In case it’s still not clear, no 2 cities can be more than 12,500 miles apart. I probably should have specified that these are cities on Earth, but fortunately everyone inferred this.
Even more insidious would be
City B is 12,500 miles from City A.
City C is 12,500 miles from City A in the opposite direction.
How far is City B from City C.
If one wanted to nitpick, one might answer that the question is ill-posed because the Earth’s circumference is between 24,860 and 24,901 miles, so it’s impossible for two cities to be 12,500 miles apart.