“Troll, leave my two little brothers alone!” he said gruffly.
allo, you burned my goat, prepare to fry!
I was laughing to myself all afternoon while thinking of that problem. My coworkers must think I’m insane. (They might be right, but that’s beside the point.) And yes, I solved the problem.
The thing is, that’s a huge farm. 12 miles by 5 miles? A goat that burns for an hour? Since the original problem has been answered well, allow me to scale down the problem to something a bit more reasonable:
Instead of 5 miles and 12 miles, the distances are 500 feet and 1200 feet. The goat can survive for one minute (not one hour) before dying. Everything else stays the same; the running speeds are still 25 mph and 6 mph. How does the goat fare now?
Wow. That problem really got my goat.
The goat’s toast. It’s got one-sixtieth of the time it had before but the distances are 1/52.8 - in other words, it has proportionately less time than it had before, and since it didn’t have enough time in the original problem, it doesn’t have enough time now.
What if the goat is on a treadmill?
Wait, did we do that joke already?